Felicity Fahey, of Kaiapoi North School in Kaiapoi, New Zealand, had been working to improve literacy at her primary school for years, first as a teacher and then as deputy principal.

Like most teachers in New Zealand, Fahey and her team were teaching children to read using whole-language-based “reading levels”.

But the school’s diverse population of elementary pupils - many arriving with significant gaps in oral language and pre-literacy skills - struggled to read, no matter how hard teachers worked.

Then in 2019, the Ministry of Education sent out a fleet of “resource teachers” (specialised teachers who work with small groups of pupils identified as needing additional support) to schools as part of a plan to reform how reading was being taught.

They’d been trained in a new way of teaching reading, a way that didn’t rely on the country’s ubiquitous reading level colour wheel or looking at pictures to help pupils guess at words.

Kaiapoi’s resource teacher arrived at the school saying she was going to show teachers how to teach reading not by cues or strategies but by using the “alphabetic code”.

Fahey remembers being shocked when she first learned about the decades of scientific evidence on how the brain learns to read that underpins this “structured literacy” approach, including a heavy emphasis on phonemic awareness (learning all the sounds that letters make) and phonics (attaching those sounds to letters).

“We thought we were working pretty jolly hard for our students,” Fahey said. “But really we had no idea. It was a whole other language that we didn’t know. How did we not know this?”

Literacy and the science of reading

Fahey’s experience is not uncommon. Over the past few years, New Zealand has been rapidly rolling out a series of reading reforms aimed at bringing the science of reading& - especially the teaching of phonics - to schools.

After decades of low reading achievement, reformers and parents have pushed the Ministry of Education to pay more attention to the kind of evidence-based reading practices sweeping across the US and the UK, and adapt them for the country’s half a million elementary school pupils.

Schools and teachers say that adopting “structured literacy” - the term for the five pillars of reading that are widely accepted as being backed by scientific evidence - is leading to some improvement in pupils’ reading. But advocates and experts say New Zealand has only scratched the surface in terms of rooting out reading practices not supported by evidence.

While the national government seems to promote evidence-based reading reforms - issuing curriculum suggestions and guidance on structured literacy - the nation’s schools are not required to follow this approach.

The result is that many schools are left trying to incorporate two competing reading methods, and in some cases trying to figure out a hodgepodge of approaches.

While some of the challenges look similar to those encountered in the UK and the US when they were rolling out structured literacy approaches, like slow teacher training and resistance from a variety of stakeholders, changing the way Kiwis are taught to read feels somehow more significant because of where they are coming from.

New Zealand was at the forefront of the whole-language reading movement of the 1970s and 80s, and the national government still funds interventions such as Reading Recovery - a practice for struggling readers created by New Zealand’s own Marie Clay - which many have criticised for its lack of evidence.

While there have always been “reading wars” between the two methods in other English-speaking countries, New Zealand stood alone in its widespread embrace of whole language and Reading Recovery.

“Whole language in New Zealand was a belief system, and Reading Recovery a religious movement,” says James Chapman, a professor of educational psychology at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, and an outspoken leader of the movement for evidence-based reading instruction.

“But now there’s a strong advocacy movement that includes parents and teachers. They’re all advocating for a structured literacy approach. Momentum is starting to build up.”

And what happens next could have implications for how reading is taught in classrooms around the world.

• Teaching literacy: How phonics became an education culture war
• Reading: Why there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to learning to read
• Phonics: Why I’m torn about using systematic synthetic phonics with my class

Most of New Zealand’s schools have been using the whole-language approach to teaching reading since the mid 1970s.

Both the whole-language and “balanced literacy” methods, ubiquitous across the English-speaking world for the past 50 years, are based on the idea that children don’t need to be able to sound out words in order to read; that they can instead “read” words by using a variety of clues and strategies, including looking at the first letter, choosing a word that makes sense in context or guessing a word based on a picture.

Though the method has been widely discredited, it’s still being vigorously defended in parts of the UK and the US. A recent American news investigation on the “three-cueing method” associated with balanced literacy linked decades of poor reading scores to these guessing methods.

But while “reading wars” were raging in the UK and the US between whole language/balanced literacy and structured literacy, New Zealand pretty much hung on to the former. Reading Recovery wasn’t necessarily a part of whole language and balanced literacy but it certainly drew from this philosophy of using multiple strategies to read instead of decoding words.

New Zealand’s reading scores continued to decline during this time. And about a decade ago, when New Zealand’s Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls) scores had fallen off the map, putting its children behind every other English-speaking nation, educators, cognitive scientists and parents began to sound the alarm.

“Our good students were getting worse,” says Allison Arrow, associate professor of the cognitive development of literacy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. The growing group of educators and parents began asking the Ministry of Education and their schools for reading instruction based on scientific evidence on how the brain learns to read.

Professors such as Chapman appeared on television and in op-eds making the case for the “science of reading” - the catch-all term for the research-based five pillars of literacy, comprising phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension - with a special emphasis on the foundational skills of phonemic awareness and phonics that allow children to sound out words instead of guess.

“Then, around 2014, everything started to change,” Arrow says.

‘Whole language in New Zealand was a belief system, and Reading Recovery a religious movement’

The shift looked different from similar movements that had already happened in countries such as the UK and the US, where reform tended to be a mixed bag of bottom-up philosophical change and state and federal mandates.

According to Arrow, unlike the contentious “reading wars” between the two methods in the UK and the US, New Zealand’s movement was more of a groundswell coming from teachers themselves, gathering in Facebook groups and other places, sharing knowledge and expertise about phonics and structured literacy.

Parents pushing for reform were also a big part of the equation; groups such as Lifting Literacy Aotearoa (Aotearoa being the Maori name for New Zealand) rallied parents distraught that their child couldn’t read. The movement was similar to that behind Decoding Dyslexia in the US.

Lifting Literacy steering group member Jennie Watts says that the all-volunteer group of parents, alongside teachers and reading experts, has spent the past few years trying every possible way to get out its core message: “Literacy is a human right, and that learners in this country deserve the best teaching.”

It has leveraged a sizeable online community, along with a steady stream of media appearances and ongoing communication with MPs and the Ministry of Education, to raise awareness.

Since schools have been free to adopt whatever reading instruction method they wanted, some have begun scraping together funding to bring in private providers trained in structured literacy to coach teachers on the new method.

Providers often arrived with information that was new to teachers, including a scope and sequence to teaching reading and decodable books shipped in from Australia and the US.

One of those private providers, Liz Kane, was once a disillusioned resource teacher trying to figure out why she couldn’t help some of her pupils to learn to read. After attending a structured literacy conference in Australia, she came back to New Zealand determined to show teachers a more effective way.

Now she’s one of the most in-demand trainers in the country, providing training and ongoing coaching for teachers, as well as publishing her own stable of teacher texts and decodable books that teach children the specific sound-letter combinations they are working on.

Kane has become a sort of hero to the movement and a symbol of the grassroots effort, building her teacher coaching business through word of mouth and on Facebook.

It’s important, she says, to let teachers know she’s one of them: she’s just “Liz from Feilding”, a teacher who learned how to teach phonemic awareness and phonics in a systematic, explicit way. If she can learn a new way to teach reading, she tells teachers, anyone can.

Getting teacher trainers on board

The movement has been a bit less successful at university colleges of education, where most teachers are trained. While there are a few university programmes training teachers in the science of reading, including at the University of Canterbury, many more haven’t adapted curriculum or changed requirements.

According to Arrow, the Teaching Council that oversees teacher requirements provides oversight but doesn’t get into specifying content that needs to be learned in literacy, which means many teachers are still being trained in whole language and balanced literacy.

“Universities can teach whatever they want, however they want to do it,” Arrow says. “There’s no requirement for hours of literacy or the content of it.”

She’s hopeful, though, that the movement that is transforming schools will soon reach the universities’ doors through their relationships with the schools where they send their student teachers.

“Universities want to have good relationships with [schools], and if the schools desire to implement structured literacy approaches then professors will have to change what they’re doing to align with them,” Arrow says.

After years of advocacy, the movement has now begun to reach the Ministry of Education. After a 2018 series of ministry-funded studies showed that pupils improved substantially after teachers were trained in the science of reading and provided with science-of-reading-supported materials, the department released a series of action plans aimed at aligning primary school literacy with the science of reading.

Much of this falls under the newly released Common Practice Model - national guidance on how to address achievement gaps, especially in the Maori language community - which makes specific references to explicit teaching in literacy and gives guidance on science-of-reading-aligned teacher practices.

For the first time, advocates note, the ministry makes reference to teaching decoding skills like phonics and phonemic awareness.

But the national plan takes a much bigger swing at reforming how reading is taught from the ground up, including directives to develop a national strategy to educate teachers in the science of reading, implement a scope and sequence, replace old materials with decodable texts and other materials aligned with the science of reading, and use reading assessments to better support students.

‘We thought we were working pretty jolly hard for our students. But really we had no idea’

According to Chapman, this all represents significant progress in the right direction, but more work still needs to be done. Teachers need more explicit training on how to teach reading, he says, and government support and funding for Reading Recovery to help struggling readers needs to end.

The ministry itself says that Reading Recovery has undergone important changes: according to general manager for curriculum Julia Novak, after an external evaluation completed in 2019, the programme has adopted changes from the structured literacy-based Better Start Literacy Approach.

“Yes, we are making changes to the way Reading Recovery is implemented in Aotearoa New Zealand,” says University of Auckland associate professor and Reading Recovery representative Rebecca Jesson (no one else from Reading Recovery or the government came back with further comments on the criticisms of the programme).

The ministry’s website lists a “structured approach to teaching reading”, recommending a test of basic decoding skills and the Ready to Read Phonics Book.

However, even with the changes, the New Zealand government’s support for two apparently contrasting methods has created a lot of confusion in schools - teachers using structured literacy for whole-class instruction then government-funded Reading Recovery for struggling readers.

There’s a “hodgepodge of understanding” on how to support pupils who need extra reading help, Arrow says.

Yet in schools like Kaiapoi North, teachers are seeing improvements since shifting to new methods. “We quickly bailed on Reading Recovery,” says Fahey.

She has invested in ongoing training for her teachers, dedicating a portion of weekly staff meetings to work on specific skills with teachers such as how to teach segmenting syllables, and encouraging teachers to show each other even small bits of knowledge on what’s working.

Ninety per cent of the school’s foundational group of structured literacy pupils, now in Year 5 (Year 4 in England), are meeting expectations - something that the school hasn’t seen in a while. More families are moving to the school zone, wanting their children to attend Kaiapoi North.

“Our data is improving. What I make clear is it’s not a silver bullet,” Fahey says, “but at least now we know exactly what we need to do.”

Holly Korbey is a journalist and the author of Building Better Citizens. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic, and she is a regular contributor on education for KQED MindShift and Edutopia. She tweets @hkorbey