Will education gamble help students succeed?
Felicity Fahey had spent years helping children struggling to read using a style called balanced literacy, a type of teaching taken up widely across New Zealand schools for decades.
But she had doubts when the school’s reading statistics weren’t improving, and changed Kaiapoi North School’s curriculum to structured literacy. The move boosted student achievement – and over the past five years, the rate of students reaching their reading age or above has surged from 60% to 80%.
Now it appears that the emphasis on balanced literacy – an education style which has roots in the whole language instruction that emerged in the 1970s – may not have given a generation of children the tools they need.
Balanced literacy generally encourages teachers to teach reading in a way that meets each child’s needs and promotes a love of reading, as opposed to structured literacy – a more traditional style of teaching that helps children learn to read by pronouncing sounds which they blend together to make words.
Fahey said there was an “Ah-ha” moment for her when her students’ reading started to improve from using structured literacy.
“Kids love it. They are so engaged, they’re so proud when they can actually decode a sentence and not just guess and look at the picture,” Fahey explained. “It transforms your teaching.”
Education Minister Erica Stanford has given teachers until term one next year to overhaul their curriculum in favour of structured literacy, pledging $67 million towards it in Budget 2024.
The money will go towards structured literacy professional development for teachers, books and resources, new phonics checks to assess student progression, and additional support for students who need it.
She has promised that the new approach will improve achievement and set students up for success, pointing to recent data which showed that only 56% of year 8 students were at the expected level for reading, and just 35% for writing.
But it has sparked a ferocious debate over whether Stanford trusts teachers to use their own judgment about what is best for their students.
The New Zealand Educational Institute Te Riu Roa union has also said there is a lack of focus on what is happening in a child’s home, with more pupils coming to school hungry, pre-verbal and without toilet training.
NZEI president Mark Potter welcomed the extra funding and support, but said many teachers had already been using structured literacy, and Stanford should not be telling the profession what to do.
He made the point that what was happening at home for a young child had a strong effect on their attainment at school. There was a time when more pupils would know the alphabet before they started school, he said – now, many did not know how to hold a pencil.
“They talk about the falling of our achievement levels ... what it is, is that certain groups in our communities are finding it harder and harder to get the best out of education. Teachers are having to be social workers as well as teaching the curriculum.”