Annual monitoring of reading recovery
This page presents data from state and state-integrated schools that offered Reading Recovery and the students who received support. All state and state-integrated schools can apply for funding from the Ministry of Education to help with the costs associated with the implementation of Reading Recovery.
Last Updated: November 2023
Following an evaluation of Reading Recovery in 2019, the Ministry has implemented enhanced services, renamed Reading Recovery and Early Literacy Support. Under this new model, some of the available teaching time is used to deliver literacy supports to small groups of students and whole-school advice on literacy learning, alongside the Reading Recovery programme’s traditional 1:1 intensive literacy support. The data here reflects the 1:1 support only.
Key Findings in 2022
Schools offering Reading Recovery
Fewer schools participated in Reading Recovery in 2022: 692 schools, compared to 929 in 2019 prior to the Reading Recovery enhancement, a 26% decrease, and a 9% decrease compared to 762 schools in 2021. The drop is a continuation of a declining trend since 2013.
There has also been a continued decline in 1:1 teaching, which will somewhat reflect the use of the same level of Reading Recovery resourcing to now also deliver small-group and whole-school supports. Therefore, fewer students received Reading Recovery in 2022: 5,789 students, compared to 8,336 in 2019 prior to the RR enhancement, a 31% decrease, and a 6% decrease compared to 6,187 students in 2021. Some students will have successfully completed the programme after the group sessions and some will have continued in 1-to-1 supports, although the data is not yet available to estimate the degree of overlap.
Entry levels and outcomes
Reflecting efforts to expand Reading Recovery supports to a wider age group, since 2021 students entering Reading Recovery have tended to be, on average, slightly older compared to prior years and had commensurately higher-level reading scores at entry to the programme. Some students may also be older at the start of the 1:1 supports as they had previously participated in the small-group tutoring.
Students who exited the programme had, on average, comparable age and outcome levels to previous years. With higher average entry levels and unchanged average exit levels, students were exposed to slightly fewer Reading Recovery lessons, on average, than in previous years and made similar progress per 100 lessons as in previous years.
After a small post-Covid jump in students either not completing Reading Recovery or making less progress than in prior years, in 2022 these returned back to 2019 pre-Covid levels. In 2022, as in 2021, there was a slightly elevated rate of students unable to continue. In 2022 the primary reasons for students being unable to continue were: school not offering Reading Recovery next year, Reading Recovery teacher-related reasons and student absence.
Compared to the overall national average rate of successful completion (74%), rates of successful completion were lower for boys (72%), Māori (68%) and Pacific (70%) students and were higher for girls (77%), European (77%) and Asian (82%) students. This is a similar pattern to previous years.
Background
Reading Recovery is a programme originally developed in the 1970s by the late Dame Marie Clay, previously Professor of Education at the University of Auckland. It is an intervention that targets students who after a year at school are having the most difficulty learning to read. It supports them with an intensive one-on-one reading programme of up to 20 weeks.
Data is collected for the purposes of monitoring this long-running programme, first implemented and monitored in NZ schools in 1984.
Why is the Ministry collecting this data?
Reading Recovery data is collected for the purposes of monitoring this long-running, Ministry-funded programme.
The Ministry uses Reading Recovery data:
- to monitor the number of students involved in Reading Recovery and the number of hours and teachers allocated to Reading Recovery for the year
- to monitor the amount of time students spent in Reading Recovery and their outcomes
- to support implementation and monitoring of literacy interventions and programme development
- to support a transparent and open system through public reporting
Reading Recovery data is also used for general research and statistics, in accordance with the Privacy Act 2020. This may include linking Reading Recovery data with other student data, for example, exploring pathways for Reading Recovery students referred on to supports from a Resource Teacher: Literacy (RTLit) or Resource Teacher: Learning and Behaviour (RTLB). Care is taken that no individual can ever be identified from published analysis.
Notes on the data collection
Throughout the year, Reading Recovery teachers record student-level information on an electronic data collection system as students enter and exit the programme. At the end of the year, when all individual student reports have been entered by the teacher(s), the principal of each Reading Recovery school is asked to confirm this information, as well as complete the end-of-year school report. These reports are submitted to the Ministry of Education at the end of the year by those state and state-integrated schools who offer Reading Recovery.
Fee-paying international students are removed from the analyses.
Counts may vary between tables when broken down by demographic variables, due to missing data for some students, or some tables only reporting a subset of responses.
Acknowledgements
The Ministry of Education would like to thank all the Reading Recovery tutors, teachers, and principals who completed their annual returns. We greatly appreciate the time and effort that went into providing the information. We would also like to thank National Reading Recovery for their feedback on the annual data analysis.