A Wānaka primary school has a waiting list of educators wanting to peer inside its classrooms. Four years ago, Holy Family Catholic School principal Jo McKay made a radical change and scrapped the traditional way of teaching reading, writing and spelling to embrace structured literacy for all age groups.
This term, McKay and her team will show five groups of teachers, principals and resource teachers from around the country how structured literacy works day to day.
The curious visitors will see teachers in action with new entrants and students right up to year eight. They will see spelling-instruction lessons and instructional reading with the use of decodable text, all of which, McKay says, looks very different from “a traditional reading or spelling session”.
There’s a waiting list to visit because the school is considered a standard bearer for structured literacy in New Zealand.
McKay was motivated to make the change after seeing students continue to struggle with reading despite such intervention as reading recovery and rainbow reading.
“We’ve always had really good student achievement data for reading, writing and maths but we continued to have a small tail of underachievement.
“We would look at the data and say, ‘Well, we have a number of children here that A, present as neurodiverse and B, we actually do not know what is really going on for them and we are struggling to shift them.’”
As school leader, McKay felt she should look for other ways of ensuring every child had the opportunity to be a successful learner. She started with students who had been diagnosed as neurodiverse or who were “raising red flags”.
She knew the balanced-literacy approach wasn’t working for dyslexic students, who were being left behind.
Under that approach, used by most New Zealand schools, students are encouraged to fill in the blanks by using clues such as pictures on a page or by reading to the end of a sentence to figure out what words would make sense. Phonics are sometimes taught to help the young readers to decode words, but if they’re unable to decipher a word or a sentence, they are encouraged to go back to guessing and to use cues on the page.
Structured-literacy advocates will tell you that approach fails dyslexic students because it is not aligned with the science of reading and doesn’t focus on systematic decoding skills that children with the learning difference need in order to become successful readers.
“We were leaving them to chance, hoping they would learn to read, and that was scary. We were waiting for lots of children to fail and that’s not okay,” says McKay.
“In my own tertiary training I had no education around neurodiversity. I didn’t even really know how to teach a dyslexic child. That is the same for a huge number of educators and it’s no fault of their own,” she says.
The realisation that she might have to overhaul her school’s entire teaching practice occurred while listening to a talk by Cara McNeil, founder and managing director of Learning Matters in Queenstown.
Based on her personal experience as a school principal and the parent of a dyslexic son, McNeil was addressing other parents of dyslexic children. Her audience heard that there was no “silver bullet” but that there was a teaching approach that could help their children.
McKay went along as a principal, not as a parent, because she wanted to know what the parents, some of whom could be from her community, were being told schools should be doing to help their dyslexic students.
So much to do
“I was sitting there with this massive sense of guilt and grief for these kids. I thought, ‘Jeepers, we have so much we need to be doing,’” says McKay.
She left the meeting inspired, and not long after she and her deputy principal arranged to meet McNeil. They grilled her for a couple of hours about the structured-literacy approach and what she could do to help their struggling readers, writers and spellers.
McNeil worked with all the school’s teaching team, including learning assistants, spending three years upskilling them about how to teach structured literacy.
Holy Family Catholic School has since built on and developed its own structured-literacy approach.
Once students reach the end of the school’s sequence of learning, they have the choice of learning a second language or doing more in-depth English-language study. Now the approach has been refined, top students are completing it in years five or six, two years earlier than when the school began its structured-literacy journey.
Structured literacy is not only beneficial for neurodiverse children, it’s good for all students, says McKay. Children are taught using a six-step process to decode words in an explicit, systematic and diagnostic way.
It is an umbrella term for a number of approaches or methods that include six components: phonology, sound-symbol association, syllables, morphology, syntax and semantics. Structured literacy also has a strong oral language component.
When a child is diagnosed with dyslexia, it typically won’t be long before their parents become acquainted with the science of reading, a body of work of more than 100 research papers spanning five decades about how the human brain learns to read, including studies from education, linguistics, neurology and psychology.
McKay says one key to her school’s success with structured literacy is that it started at a strategic level. “As a school we decided first that we needed to put funding into growing our professional capability and capacity.”
She doesn’t sugar-coat the ease of the transition.
“I had four reading recovery teachers in our school and so I knew what I was taking on was big. You go right into the pit when you are doing something new and it was hard.”
Those most resistant to change in the beginning are now the biggest champions of the school’s structured-literacy approach, says McKay.
It’s been a game-changer and students who previously struggled to engage in class are making significant progress, she says.
“We are seeing these children having success. The approach is not going to fix them overnight but it makes a significant difference to their confidence and their ability to access text. And they will learn to read and write, but it’s going to take time,” says McKay.
All children are screened when they start at the school and if anything is picked up the school speaks to the parents and puts support in place. Staff continue to monitor progress and then adapt lessons to suit the individual student. For children who need it, they do extra lessons in small groups.
“They work four times harder and do four times as much as any other child in the classroom. And they do find it really tough. So we have to make sure that they get success,” says McKay.
Whole-school approach
Lumsden and Heddon Bush are among a group of Southland schools that have adopted a whole-school structured-literacy approach.
Lumsden School principal Danelle Smallridge says a board decision this year to adopt the approach sold her the leadership role at the northern Southland school.
She had been on a decade and a half long search for a way to help dyslexic students. She received a Royal Society Te Apārangi teaching fellowship to study dyslexia, working with a researcher at the University of Otago and a resource teacher.
“My interest dates back to seeing children in my classroom who had been working super hard and I was doing everything I could to help them and not seeing progress,” says Smallridge.
Smallridge says if a dyslexic student is unable to learn the fundamentals, when the next layer of learning is applied “it just gets too hard and the wheels fall off”. Behavioural and emotional problems can follow, she says.
During her study it both fascinated and depressed her that prisons are full of dyslexic learners. UK research suggests between 30 and 50 percent of prisoners are dyslexic and a small New Zealand study of 120 prisoners found nearly half had the learning difference.
It is crucial that children and adults with dyslexia have a strength identified and developed, says Smallridge.
“Whatever it is, that’s the crucial thing that saves children. You think you’re thick so it’s important for young people to know that they’re not and to see they have other things where they can shine and get self-esteem.
“Dyslexic students must not be taken out of class at that special time. If they’re an artist, never take them out for extra literacy when they’re doing their art. If they’re an athlete, don’t let them ever miss a sports thing because they need extra help,” says Smallridge.
Lumsden School board member Trish Gill was instrumental in the school making the switch to a structured-literacy approach. Concern about underachievement in writing for a cohort of boys was an impetus for change.
She spent hours researching what could be done and, when she presented her findings to the board, structured-literacy got the green light this year. It was fortunate the school could afford it.
Less than a year into it the once-reluctant writers are making progress.
Right decision
Heddon Bush principal Esther Hamilton, like Smallridge, turned to study to improve as a teacher.
“I did postgraduate study about 10 years ago in literacy through Massey University because I knew that the way I was teaching literacy wasn’t quite right and I felt there was more to learn in order to improve my teaching.”
That introduced her to the science of reading and she subsequently set out to adapt her teaching practice. However, she found there was no method for putting her new-found knowledge to work.
Then she heard about the Learning Matters’ iDeaL (individualised diagnostic explicit approach to learning) platform and in 2020 her small rural school 15 minutes from Winton adopted the structured-literacy approach.
“We are still at the early stages but it’s encouraging to see students who may have struggled previously experiencing success and progressing,” says Hamilton.
If other schools are toiling with changing to a structured-literacy approach, she says “it’s definitely the right decision as it benefits all students”.
Learning Matters has been advocating for years that New Zealand teachers have one clear teaching approach for literacy based on the science of reading. McNeil is one of a group of structured-literacy innovators that is helping the movement gain momentum in New Zealand.
She is aware that New Zealand is at a critical juncture in how children are taught literacy, and like many families of dyslexic students spoken to be Newsroom, she is impatient for change.
“I feel there is enough evidence to be moving in this direction with a little bit more speed and rigour,” she says.
The government is under pressure to tackle literacy rates that have been sliding for decades. In August, the Ministry of Education unveiled its Literacy & Communication and Maths Strategy action plans that will include the introduction of a standard teaching model or a common practice model to ensure the teaching of literacy and maths is consistent and the system’s inequalities are addressed.
Associate Education Minister Jan Tinetti says the new model will be based on the most up-to-date evidence, and she has made strong hints in the media that the new practice model for literacy is likely to be a structured-literacy approach.
Learning Matters, Massey University and the University of Canterbury are part of a Ministry of Education-funded structured-literacy intervention trial for year 2 to 8 students that is happening in schools throughout New Zealand. The trials are due to be completed in December with a final evaluation report due to the Ministry by next March.
Tinetti says the role and functions of resource teachers of literacy will be reviewed and strengthened as part of the implementation of the strategy action plans.
Canterbury’s Better Start Literacy Approach programme, that follows a phonics scope and sequence, has already been rolled out in new-entrant and year 1 classrooms.
Tinetti and McNeil may have different ideas about the pace at which change should be happening but they have things in common. As former principals and teachers, they have been at the coalface and understand what underachievement looks and feels like in a school setting. And both are passionate about a more equitable system.
Tinetti acknowledges the education system needs to be more inclusive and that more attention needs to go into learners who “aren’t currently getting a fair go” in the education system, including neurodiverse students.
Join the queue
McNeil and her team are working with 280 schools and have a waiting list of other schools wanting to implement Learning Matters’ structured-literacy approach.
She admits it is costly, running to $120,000 for an avarage-sized school for three years. She says she is not in it for the money but is driven by something more personal.
She was a primary-school principal in the North Island when she discovered her son was dyslexic. Unable to help him through traditional schooling methods, she researched and developed her own way of teaching, which she admits was rudimentary.
Word got around about how she was helping dyslexic children succeed in the classroom and parents started sending their children with the learning difference to her school.
Seeing the need to help other students, she founded Learning Matters, a consultancy that works with teachers and specialist educators to build knowledge and guide practice with evidence-based structured literacy.
Her business provides private tutoring and schools and home-schooling parents can buy her iDeaL platform.
McNeil says she is driven to do the right thing by struggling children and the work consumes her from the moment she wakes to the end of each day.
“That’s my choice, but I will never not answer a phone call. I will never not respond to an email, because I’ve been there as a parent and as a principal.”
Awareness-raising in the south
Learning Differences Aotearoa Trust adviser Chris Cole stands in front of a group of parents and educators on a brisk August night in the library of a Southland secondary school.
With a backdrop of library books, she details her experience of discovering as an adult that she was dyslexic. It caused her to struggle to pronounce long names or decipher a question in an assignment because she couldn’t understand many of the words in the sentence.
She takes her audience through a true and false quiz to demystify dyslexia. It’s false that people with dyslexia always write their letters back to front or that they are lazy and don’t try to learn. But it’s true that they have trouble hearing individual sounds in words and that they have normal to above-normal intelligence.
Cole educates schools and parents about dyslexia and other learning differences through her work with Dyslexia Support South, which along with the Growing Stars programme that she also runs, comes under the Learning Differences Aotearoa Trust umbrella. These small workshops help Southland children manage the emotional impact of living with a learning difference.
After the talk she will make the two-hour journey back to Invercargill to run an adult support group for dyslexics in the morning, another trust-run programme.
The parent talk is free, and the trust also subsidises sessions for children. It provides professional-development workshops to schools and other educational organisations and workshops to promote the acceptance and understanding of learning differences for adults and children.
Cole is proud of the community-grant-funded volunteer organisation. She and two other mothers of children with learning differences started it 12 years ago, and initially it was a support group for Southland families like theirs. It is unique in New Zealand.
“What we do isn’t done to the same level elsewhere,” says Cole.
School support is a big part of it.
“If we support the schools, then we support the parents and therefore we’re helping the kids,” she says.
Cole teaches parents and dyslexic students how to understand the workings of the dyslexic brain, especially under stress.
Well-being critical
Although having seen how it helped her dyslexic son has made her a structured-literacy advocate, her focus is on well-being. She has learnt that if someone is so anxious that their brain switches off, they will be unable to learn regardless of the intervention or programme used.
When she was home-schooling one of her sons while living abroad, Cole, a qualified accountant, began to realise he was struggling to read.
“He had been at school and when we tried to home-school him he really acted out,” she says.
She didn’t know anything about dyslexia and it was well before a structured-literacy movement.
Using an adapted Montessori approach that was very tactile, she taught her son to read, spell and write.
Awareness is now much greater and parents are having their children diagnosed younger.
“Usually one of the strong indicators is that kids get anxious about going to school, so we do a lot of work around the wellbeing and emotional impact that comes with it.”
An upside of Covid is more children with learning differences have been identified. “With kids being at home, parents actually saw how much they were struggling. So we got an increase in inquiries after the lockdowns.”
Teachers are wanting to know more about learning differences and, with increased awareness, are gaining the confidence to say to parents, “I think your child might be dyslexic.”
Increased awareness should also improve data collection, which is sparse in New Zealand.
“We know from UK data that 82 percent of children with the learning difference leave school as unrecognised dyslexics.”
It’s estimated that at least 10 percent of the UK population have the learning difference and as many as 20 percent in the US, where dyslexia represents 80 to 90 percent of all those with learning disabilities.
Comparable New Zealand figures aren’t available.
Cole says if the UK figure is applied to Southlanders aged five to 19, they would fill the equivalent of 68 classrooms.
People with dyslexia are over-represented in unemployment statistics, suicide figures and are more likely to drop out of school.
Despite the sobering statistics, Cole feels positive about what she is seeing in Southland schools. Although structured literacy is only being taught in pockets, she thinks there is more awareness in the province about dyslexia and structured literacy than other areas.
Made with the support of the Public Interest Journalism Fund
