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Just months before the government introduces regular phonics testing in primary schools, a UK study claims similar tests in England made little difference to children's reading achievement.
The Education Policy Institute said it found no evidence children's reading improved as a result of the 2012 introduction of phonics screening checks during their first year of school.
It also found no improvements in children's writing once pupil and school factors were taken into account.
It said most teachers wanted the checks scrapped or significantly changed.
The New Zealand government has been trialling a phonics check that from next year children would sit after six months and one year of schooling.
Education Ministry information indicated it would involve children attempting to read about 40 words, including some words that were made up, to test their ability to decode the sounds associated with different letters.
The EPI research said the percentage of children passing England's phonics screening check in their first year at school rose from 59 percent in 2012 to 83 percent in 2018.
But it said that did not result in significant improvements in general reading ability in later years.
It said England's results in an international reading test of Year 5 children, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), improved only slightly after the introduction of the tests.
"Were the PSC to have intervened significantly as a lever for reading improvement, this might be reflected by a substantial rise in scores in 2016 and 2021, compared to previous years," it said.
England's PIRLS average scores improved from 552 points in 2011, the year before the tests were introduced, to 559 and 558 in 2016 and 2021 respectively.
During the same period the percentage of children agreeing a lot that they enjoyed reading fell from 66 to 54 percent for girls and from 49 to 44 percent for boys.
The report said the percentage of Year 6 children passing England's "key stage two" reading test improved from 66 percent in 2016 to 71, 75 and 73 percent in the three subsequent years.
But it said improved key stage test results simply continued previously observed trends and did not show a significant effect from the introduction of the phonics checks.
"Overall, there are no discontinuities - breaks in the general trend - or other patterns in attainment results at KS1 and KS2 that support the hypothesis that the PSC has improved national average levels of reading or literacy skills," the report said.
Education Minister Erica Stanford. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Education Minister Erica Stanford said she had nothing to say about England's phonics checks, but the tests trialled in New Zealand schools had been well received.
"I know our phonics check that we've trialled here in New Zealand over the last few weeks, and I've been to talk to teachers, has been overwhelmingly positive," she said.
Stanford said a teacher in Dunedin told her the check alerted her that one of her pupils could not differentiate between a 'b' and a 'd' and she was able to act on that information immediately.
"So I've had fantastic feedback and it's really important that we intervene really to catch these things because if you let it go for many years we have a much bigger problem," she said.
Stanford said the evidence suggested teaching children to read using structured literacy was the best approach.
"Over 90 percent of children will learn to read using phonics. If we use the whole word approach like we've been doing for many years it's about 60 percent of kids will learn to read," she said.
The Education Ministry said the tests being trialled for introduction in New Zealand schools next year were adapted from an Australian version of the English phonics check.
"This check has over 10 years of psychometric evidence of being a valid and reliable assessment for both the UK and Australian population. We have adapted the NSW version because our linguistic context is more similar to Australia than that of the UK," it said.
"While the phonics check is similar to the NSW version of the UK phonics check, the Ministry of Education has selected only the word items in the phonics check that align with the 6- and 12-month curriculum expectations of the refreshed English learning area, as well as the scope and sequence of commonly used teaching resources. Word items have also been selected to be appropriate to the New Zealand learning context."
The ministry said the check was short, light-touch assessment that measured how well a child could read the sounds that made up words.
It would be carried out with children after they had been at school for 20 weeks and again at 40 weeks.
