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Wednesday, October 29, 2025

David Farrar: Structured literacy is working


Erica Stanford released the following data on new school entrants:
  • 58 per cent of students were at or above expectations, up from 36 per cent in Term 1.
  • 43 per cent of students exceeded expectations in Term 3, more than double the Term 1 rate.
  • Māori students performing at or above what’s expected have increased from 25 per cent to 43 per cent
  • In high equity (low-decile) schools, children meeting expected levels has gone up from 18 per cent to 35 per cent
  • Pacific students, from 27 per cent up to 43 per cent.
These are incredibly pleasing results, and so early on. We need to make sure Erica Stanford has another four years (at least) as Education Minister, so all this progress isn’t lost.

David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders

1 comment:

Gaynor said...

This is not a simple change in the syllabus for reading but a major revolution in education. Replacing progressive ideology of developmental constructivism to explicit instruction of phonics as we used to have way back pre 1950s. Mountains of research and historical evidence have demonstrated explicit phonics got better results in reading and comprehension but the destructive progressive ideology would have none of it . Dug their heels in and remained entrenched which has resulted in multi decades of failure in reading of multi millions of children world wide.
My concern is they now have the phonic readers but then after about a year or so they advance back to Whole Language which encourage , guess from pictures and context reading books. This is especially harmful for the less able, who should have more controlled vocabulary books where guessing is not readily resorted to because they are not meeting unknown words. It is the less able student who can quickly resort to guessing rather than sounding out the words.

Longitudinal results in education is what matters .

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