Executive Summary

Key findings

Reading Recovery Outcomes

• Reading Recovery outcomes for students who exited the intervention in 2012 remained stable between 2011 and 2012. The majority (81%) of students who exited Reading Recovery made accelerated progress and were successfully discontinued from the intervention. A further 12 per cent of students were referred on for specialist literacy support; five per cent left their school before completing their series of lessons and two per cent were responding well but were unable to continue their lessons.
• The majority of successfully discontinued students (91%) were reading texts at, or above, the Turquoise level of Ready to Read (the New Zealand Curriculum Reading Standard for "After two years at school") when they exited Reading Recovery. Three-quarters (75%) of these students had not yet completed two years of schooling when they exited Reading Recovery. These results should be interpreted with care as classroom teachers will use a range of evidence (not just the text levels) when making judgements about student achievement in relation to the Standards.
• Data collected from the Burt Word Reading Test and the Writing Vocabulary Task (Clay) provided additional evidence that overall, successfully discontinued students were reading and writing within the average band of performance expected for their age group when they exited the intervention.
• Girls, NZ European/Pākehā and Asian students, and students from deciles 8 to 10 schools were more likely to have successfully discontinued their series of lessons than boys, Māori, Pasifika, and students from decile 1 to 3 schools. However, many students (ie, at least 75%) in these latter groups did achieve the levels required to successfully discontinue their Reading Recovery lessons.

Access to Reading Recovery

• In 2012 Reading Recovery was delivered to more students than in any other year over the past ten years. In total there were 1,542 Reading Recovery teachers in 1,266 schools delivering 507,436 hours of support to 11,202¹ students in 2012. There were 90 more Reading Recovery teachers in 2012 than in 2011.
• Two-thirds (64%) of state and state-integrated schools with six-year-old students offered Reading Recovery. Three-quarters (75%) of the total six-year-old population in state and state-integrated schools attended schools where Reading Recovery was offered. The proportion of schools offering Reading Recovery and access to Reading Recovery at the student level has decreased slightly (by 3% and 4% respectively) over the last ten years.
• Out of the 10,983 students (where individual reports were provided), three-quarters (74%; n=8,169) of students attending state and state-integrated schools entered Reading Recovery for the first time in 2012. Twenty-three per cent (n=2,484) were carried over from 2011 and the remaining three per cent (n=329) transferred from another school.
• Reading Recovery was more likely to be implemented in higher decile schools than in lower decile schools (68% for deciles 8 to 10 schools compared to 59% for deciles 1 to 3 schools). However lower decile schools that did offer Reading Recovery had proportionately more students enter the intervention than did higher decile schools (18% for deciles 1 to 3 schools compared to 11% for deciles 8 to 10 schools).
• Māori (71%) students were less likely to attend schools where Reading Recovery was offered, compared to the total six-year-old population (75%). However, Māori students from schools that did offer Reading Recovery were more likely than New Zealand European/Pākehā and Asian students to be involved in the intervention.
• Pasifika (76%) students were slightly more likely to attend schools where Reading Recovery was offered compared to the total six-year-old population (75%).
• Although access to Reading Recovery for Pasifika six-year-olds is high at the national  level (76%), the Auckland region continues to have the lowest level of access for Pasifika students (70%) despite close to three-quarters (72%) of all Pasifika six-year-olds enrolled in schools in the Auckland region.

Footnote

1. This figure includes 219 students whose individual reports were unavailable.