New Zealand ends reading recovery programme in schools
Education Minister Erica Stanford has not ruled out job losses as the Government moves to end New Zealand’s long-running reading recovery programme.
The programme, which helps struggling readers, is being dumped as part of a $67 million dollar shake-up of the way literacy is taught in state schools.
The Government is making it mandatory for schools to use a structured literacy approach to teach reaching from next year – which is based on phonics, decoding and word understanding.
The reading recovery programme uses a different “whole language” approach, which has been criticised for using pictures to help children guess words.
On Friday, Stanford confirmed the end of the programme.
