Great news! As reported in 1News, the New Zealand government has recently announced it is to begin implementing a phonics check in the first year of school ‘to help teachers understand students’ reading progress’.

From Term 1 next year, ‘all Kiwi students will learn to read using the structured literacy approach’, by which they mean, I think, to implement phonics teaching in every Kiwi clasroom.

This is doubly fantastic news for New Zealand’s children: firstly, because it means Christopher Luxon’s government has finally decided to turn its back on Whole Language and Balanced Literacy approaches; secondly, because a check will help prevent many children falling through the cracks, as it does in England and in those states of Australia that are busy implementing various types of phonics screening checks.

As Erica Stanford, New Zealand’s education spokesperson says, the check will ‘help teachers understand how well a child can read words by sounding out letters [and] help teachers identify and arrange additional support for those who need it right at the start of the child’s education’.

The checks are to be carried out after 20 weeks of schooling and will be followed up after 40 weeks.

With an eye to the concerns of parents and caregivers, Stanford’s determination to get things right  is evident in her assertion that ‘[a]t the earliest opportunity, parents deserve to know how their kids are progressing at school and have confidence they are moving in the right direction’.

The Labour opposition spokesperson Jan Tinetti called the announcement ‘another backward step for education’, apparently completely oblivious of the huge success enjoyed by schools implementing across-the-board phonics teaching in England or of the gains being made by so many schools in Australia. Tinetti’s objections parrot exactly the claims made in England over a dozen years ago: ‘too far too fast, one size fits all, learning phonics won’t be enjoyable’, and so on.

When Tinetti claims that ‘sitting a test won’t help kids that are struggling’, she misses the point that it is precisely in the check that teachers can monitor children’s progress and locate the gaps, if any, to intervene at an early stage. The English experience has shown how high quality phonics teaching at an early age has made it so much easier to provide young children with the phoneme awareness skills, the code knowledge and an understanding of the alphabetic principle, none of which they are likely to get through Reading Recovery, Whole Language and Balanced Literacy programs.

The good news from all the way across the other side of the world must come as welcome tidings to Nick Gibb, who contributed so much to change the teaching of reading and writing in England and will be standing down as an MP.

Thanks to Joseph Song for the Kiwi illustration, published as Creative Commons in The Noun Project: 

https://thenounproject.com/icon/kiwi-6994363/