Summary

Background

Resource Teachers of Literacy (RT:Lits) are a specialist group of registered teachers who work with classroom teachers and students and provide intensive help to students throughout New Zealand in reading and written language. An RT:Lit works for a designated cluster of schools, but is based at a host school.

Many RT:Lits were previously employed as Resource Teachers of Reading (RTR). At the beginning of 2001 the role of the RTR was replaced by that of RT:Lits, with it being modified to allow RT:Lits to focus more on providing support to teachers and staff, rather than directly to the students concerned. In addition, the number of teachers involved increased gradually over the year, from 68 to over 100. Reports from previous years' data from the RTR programme have appeared in earlier editions of The Research Bulletin – first in the May 1993 edition (on 1992 data) and the last in the June 2001 edition (on 2000 data). The current report is an account of the work of RT:Lits in their first year. It is anticipated that there will be a period of transition whereby RT:Lits will increasingly spend more time working with teachers and staff and less time working with individual students.

Methodology

In November 2001, RT:Lit Annual Report was sent to all RT:Lits to complete. RT:Lit Annual Report provides for individual student data to be reported. It is in two parts:

• an Annual Return for Teachers (Part A ) covering all aspects of the work that RT:Lits undertake and the number of students they had enrolled on their books in 2001; and,
• an Annual Return for Students (Part B), to be completed for each student the RT:Lit worked with in 2001, gathering data on age, gender, ethnicity and reading levels, on entry to and discharge from the programme.

Completed Reports were received from 108 RT:Lits (of 109). It should be noted that many of these Reports however, do not cover a complete year as RT:Lits were appointed to their positions throughout 2001. The following report summarises the data for 2001.