Newshub:

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.