Why is it that everything worthwhile in education has its turn being “taken to task”, heavily criticised, questioned and derided?

Why is it that the hundreds of thousands of children who have benefited ENORMOUSLY through this fantastic reading support program, Reading Recovery, are overlooked by supposed “experts” who cleverly use stats and reports to “prove” their case against the program. Perish or publish, perhaps?

Any child, struggling to make his or her way through a literacy curriculum that doesn’t always make allowances for “individual differences and deficiencies”, knows that they personally have been given every chance to “pull up their socks” and make a real fist of literacy. Wonderful!

Any parent whose child has struggled with literacy but has had the privilege to participate in a Reading Recovery program, will be aware of the incredible value such a program can be.

Any teacher who has taught as part of the program knows how thorough, how systematic, how motivating Reading Recovery programs are.

So, why the fuss?

Well, now, it seems, someone SOMEWHERE has decreed that it’s all too expensive, to difficult to administer, too resource-intensive.

What a tragedy.

No, NOW is the time to adopt many of the principles embraced by the Reading Recovery structure, and migrate them into normal classroom curriculum strategies. Obviously, staffing ratios can’t be replicated. But certainly the very structured, logical, measured approaches, and the carefully-graded materials used, can be readily duplicated.

And why not? These are our children we’re talking about. They deserve the best.

And through Reading Recovery, they’ve been getting it.