The NSW government has abandoned a $55-million-a-year program that teaches students to read, 10 months after a damning review found the program that has been used in up to 960 schools for more than 30 years does not work.
The move, buried within the state government's $340 million Literacy and Numeracy Strategy announced on Wednesday, will see Reading Recovery lose its mandated status while the NSW government pushes ahead with a heightened testing regime from the first day of kindergarten to ensure struggling children are not left behind.
"Some children don't know that you read from left to right, some kids don't know which way up a book is read, some kids don't know how to hold a pen," said NSW Education Minister Adrian Piccoli.
The early intervention strategy will introduce additional regular testing or "assessments" from day one of kindergarten, to online testing on the first day of year 7 until the end of year 12, at 670 schools over the next four years.
If the strategy is successful the government plans to extend it to all schools.
"The problem is if you just intervene early you will get an effect but that effect declines over time, so you have to intervene early and then keep intervening," said Mr Piccoli.
While the extra testing will require hundreds of millions of dollars in extra investment, from next year government schools that had previously mandated Reading Recovery will be able to redirect their resources to other reading support programs such as phonics, which helps students understand text by associating letters or groups of letters with sounds.
Schools will still be able to opt for Reading Recovery if they chose to, with many reporting positive results as debate stirred over its effectiveness last year when it was condemned by influential US literacy academic Louisa Moats.
The program is a privately run proprietary program - only teachers who have paid for training are permitted to teach it. The initiative was developed in New Zealand during the 1970s to help struggling year 1 students with daily 30-minute lessons from a specially trained teacher and has now spread to the US, UK, Canada and Australia.
In March last year, Dr Moats told Victorian education leaders that it was "indefensible" to spend money on the program.
"The whole approach is based on ideas that have not held up to scientific scrutiny," Dr Moats said.
The NSW government's report, released on Wednesday, found widely used interventions are not always the most effective.
"A 2015 evaluation of the impact of Reading Recovery on students' outcomes found that while the program had a modest short-term effect on the reading skills of the lowest performing students, it was not an effective intervention for students with more literacy skills, and effects had washed out for all students by the time they reached Year 3."
Mr Piccoli said the changes are about making principals accountable for their results.
"They said to me, 'if I'm accountable then I want to be able to make the decision about what input is going in'."
Labor education spokesman Jihad Dib said he was concerned the government's $340 million strategy is "big on over-arching statements but pretty thin on the detail.
"How is it going to translate in the classroom? How many extra teachers? It's good to have the [assessment] data, but what ultimately makes the difference is the level of support and resourcing in the classroom to address the need it identifies.
"It's not a time for self-congratulation. There's been five years of declining NAPLAN results and they've been forced into this position because they've left the numeracy and literacy space for so long."
Education research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies, Jennifer Buckingham, said the move to dump dedicated funding for Reading Recovery was long overdue.
"It is excellent that funding allocated solely to the program is going to be freed up so schools can use it for other more effective reading interventions," she said.
A spokesman for the Catholic Education Commission, which has in the past defended Reading Recovery, said any targeted Catholic school may use its allocation to implement the Reading Recovery intervention if it chooses to.
"CECNSW supports schools having the option to choose the most effective literacy program for their students," he said.
With Kelsey Munro
