Schools in literacy crisis, advocacy group warns

Schools have told advocacy group Lifting Literacy Aotearoa they are struggling with record numbers of students with poor literacy.

They say teens are wagging classes and schools are blowing their budgets on extra lessons because they are unable to cope with tough new NCEA reading and writing tests.

A snapshot of school experiences gathered by Lifting Literacy and shared with RNZ showed some students were so far behind in their learning their teachers did not know what to do with them.

Lifting Literacy said the situation was a crisis and the government needed to develop a five-year plan to help schools help teens learn to read and write.

Principals and teachers from 29 secondary schools responded to an informal Lifting Literacy survey.

Their comments revealed the introduction of high-stakes NCEA literacy and numeracy tests called "corequisites" had coincided with the worst-prepared cohort of teenagers some schools had ever seen - thanks to Covid.

"It's an enormous issue. We have an increasing number of students who are very limited in both reading and writing," wrote one respondent.

"Each year students who come to us at Year 9 are showing increasingly low literacy levels and increasingly high learning needs. The impact is huge," said another.

The respondents said teachers were struggling to teach classes that ranged from the barely literate to high-achievers and schools were "scrounging" for funding.

"Most high school teachers do not have qualifications to address this," said one respondent.

"Pressure has fallen on high schools with little or no support," said another.

"We are now operating in planned deficit budgets to fund the high level of need and high stakes for students due to NCEA changes," said one principal.

Several respondents said their schools bankrolled literacy catch-up classes and training from the Kahui Ako scheme that gave some teachers release time for specialist work with other teachers in their school or across groups of schools.

An English teacher from a large, low-decile school who RNZ agreed not to name, said that arrangement allowed her to work with four classes of Year 9 students who could not read.

She said the school would have to cover the cost itself next year because the government axed the scheme in its May Budget.

Despite the relatively high numbers of struggling Year 9s, the teacher said her school's current Year 11s had entered the school with the lowest level of education of any Year 9 cohort before or since.

"They're the ones that are really struggling with the corequisites because they're expected to pass but as they're failing their identity of their ability is dwindling," she said.

The teacher said teaching teenagers to read was often "quite a quick fix", with most requiring only three or four "structured literacy" lessons to learn how to decode words by learning which sounds went with each letter.

"Teaching kids how to read and read longer words, which seems to be the biggest problem, that's quite a quick fix," she said.

"Teaching younger kids takes a longer time, teaching these older kids, even kids who really struggle and some of them who are dyslexic, once they're shown a certain way some of them are off within three or four lessons, they're gone," she said.

"Some might take a lot longer, but the majority of them in high school there's nothing wrong with them other than they haven't been taught that A-U is an "or" sound or O-U-G-H can have 6-7 different sounds, or how to split up longer words," she said.

She said the government could achieve great results if it funded similar programmes across the country.

Another teacher who worked with others across a major city said secondary schools had been left in the lurch.

She said teachers were having to figure out themselves how to help their students.

"We have a cluster of people who are all working in the literacy space and we're working together and sharing our ideas and sharing with each other because we've got no support from the ministry and no guidance," she said.

Janice Langford provided structured literacy training for primary schools, but recently started working with secondary teachers because of the need.

She told RNZ English teachers were being asked to do the work of specialist literacy teachers and they were not trained for it.

Lifting Literacy Aoteroa chair Jennie Watts said in five or 10 years, improvements the government was making in primary schools would flow through to secondary.

But in the meantime, students were not getting a fair deal.

"There's an urgent gap. We can't let those kids, the kids who are struggling right now and the ones who are about to hit secondary school, we can't just let them fall through the cracks.

She said secondary schools needed a five-year strategy including training and funding to improve teens' literacy.

It should introduce a new optional literacy subject separate to English, and remove the co-requisite numeracy and literacy requirement for NCEA.

Watts said the government should also provide funding for literacy lead teachers, targeted intervention for the students who needed them, and resources aimed at teenagers.

Students passing tests in greater numbers - Stanford

Education Minister Erica Stanford said the government had already introduced structured literacy and tutoring in mathematics among other measures to support students.

She told Morning Report students were passing the tests in greater numbers and "the more tries they have, the more likely it is that they pass".

"Last round, in May, we had a huge surge in those children passing, especially when they were sitting it for the first time."

She said there would be an announcement on NCEA in the next weeks, after the Education Review Office report the previous government's rollout of NCEA level 1.

"Because we do not want to repeat the mistakes of the past and we know we need good implementation time frames, good professional learning development and great resources

"We are very focused on making sure that those things happen."

Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.