Less than half of New Zealand five-year-olds passed the country’s new phonics test after a full year of schooling, according to data released by the Education Ministry on Monday.
Results from the 40-week phonics check, sat in term four last year, show 47 percent of the 4,209 children assessed were at or above curriculum expectations for letter sound knowledge and early decoding. In schools facing the highest level of socio-economic barriers, only 25 percent of children reached the same benchmark.
The check asked children to read up to 40 words, including real words and made-up words designed to test decoding rather than memory. Pupils needed to read 24 correctly to be judged at or above expectations. The same test is also given after 20 weeks of schooling, where nine correct answers is considered sufficient.
According to RNZ’s reporting on the figures, 27 percent of children who sat the term four check were flagged as needing extra support. The Ministry’s report covered 20,096 results from 16,896 students, around 28 percent of last year’s Year 1 cohort, after the test was made available to schools on an optional basis before becoming mandatory across all primary schools this year.
The Ministry described the figures as the clearest picture yet of how five-year-olds are progressing in early reading. It said the results showed why students who fall behind needed to be identified as early as possible so they could be helped before gaps widened in later years. Phonics ability in the first year of school is a strong predictor of reading proficiency further up the school, the report noted.
Canterbury University education professor Gail Gillon, who founded the Better Start Literacy Approach used widely in New Zealand classrooms, told RNZ the results showed real progress on previous years but still left too many children needing extra help.
“The percentage of children from this data showing that they still need more support is still high. It’s certainly better than it’s been in the past if we look back to national standards data,” she said.
Gillon said the gap could be narrowed with focused teaching in the first year of school, and she expected results to lift further as teachers became more familiar with the new structured literacy programme that has been rolled out nationally.
She also warned against treating phonics as the only marker of reading progress. “We’ve got to be careful that we’re also monitoring their oral language development and listening comprehension skills that really underpin reading comprehension, as well as of course their spelling skills,” she said.
The new figures show the cohort of children who sat the 40-week check in term four had higher pass rates than those who sat the same test earlier in the year. Pass rates were 35 percent for the term three cohort, 29 percent in term two, and 26 percent in term one, giving an average of 39 percent across the four cohorts of children who sat the 40-week check at different points in 2025.
The lower term one rate reflects that those children were tested earlier in their five-year-old year, before completing a full programme of phonics instruction. The Ministry says the trend across terms is consistent with steady gains in skill over time, rather than an underlying drop in achievement.
The phonics check is one of several changes introduced by Education Minister Erica Stanford as part of the structured literacy approach. From next year, children will start being tested after 20 weeks of schooling rather than waiting until the end of the year, with the aim of catching difficulties earlier. Stanford has said phonics testing is one small part of a broader picture, but supporters argue early data lets schools target reading support before children fall too far behind.
Critics have raised concerns that labelling young children as below expectations can become self-fulfilling, with some education academics arguing that test pressure on five-year-olds risks knocking confidence at the very start of school. The Ministry’s report does not name individual children or schools, and the pass mark is described as a guide for teacher follow up rather than a graded result for pupils.
The 25 percent pass rate in the lowest decile schools is the figure that will draw the most attention. It points to a clear link between household income and early reading progress, with children in lower-income areas starting school with smaller vocabularies on average and less access to books and structured language at home. Targeted reading interventions in the first year of school have shown strong gains in trials of the Better Start Literacy Approach, but extending that support across every Year 1 classroom is a much bigger logistical task for the Ministry and individual boards of trustees.
The wider question is whether the new phonics regime will deliver on the Government’s reading targets. The Coalition has committed to lifting the share of Year 8 students reading at the expected level to 80 percent by 2030. The starting point in 2024 sat well below that, and progress has been slow. Reading specialists say structured literacy in the first three years of school is the lever most likely to move the dial, provided schools get the staffing, training and resources to make it work.
What do you think of the new phonics check and the early results from Year 1? Are children in your community getting the support they need to read confidently? Let us know in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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