The Better Start Literacy Approach (BSLA) was developed by a University of Canterbury research team led by Professor Gail Gillon and Professor Brigid McNeill.
Professor Gillon says it is the first culturally-responsive structured literacy approach designed to meet the specific needs of New Zealand children.
“We first trialled it in Christchurch primary schools before replicating the successful trial in Auckland primary schools,” Professor Gillon said. “We are very grateful to junior schoolteachers in Christchurch who provided feedback on earlier versions of BSLA and helped to shape its development.”
With funding from the Ministry of Education, the approach has since been widely taken up by schools throughout New Zealand. Teachers in nearly half of all primary schools across the country are now implementing BSLA in their junior school classes.
“Our latest research has proved it has delivered substantially improved literacy achievement outcomes for school children in those critical early years,” Professor Gillon said.
The local success of this University of Canterbury-grown approach has also proved timely given the Coalition Government’s recent announcement that by Term One next year all state schools will be required to teach using a proven ‘structured literacy’ approach.
“The advantage of BSLA is that it was designed for large-scale application, meaning it is an ideal fit for the New Zealand-wide requirement for a structured literacy approach,” Professor Gillon said. “We’re also gaining interest in the success of our approach from the international education and literacy sector, including from the UK, Australia and North America.”
Data published in May 2024 showed that BSLA:
- Is more effective for accelerating children’s early literacy skills than other classroom literacy approaches
- Is equally effective across schools of different socio-economic demographics
- After 10 weeks of BSLA teaching, students of all ages showed a higher rate of proficiency on letter knowledge and phoneme awareness tasks than students of the same age who had not received BSLA teaching
- Is effective across all cultural groups. Māori and Pasifika children showed accelerated learning in their early literacy skills
- It is accelerating literacy learning for children who have learning challenges. After 30 weeks of BSLA teaching, on average children with greater learning needs who received BSLA small group teaching had caught up with their peers in word reading and spelling skills.
Christchurch’s Burnside Primary School has been part of the BSLA development since the beginning; Junior School Leader and Assistant Principal Trudi Browne is an enthusiastic advocate for the programme.
“Many of our children arrive at school not knowing that ‘dog’ and ‘duck’ start the same way, so their phoneme* identity is really low, and they are not able to blend sounds together,” Browne said. “With BSLA the children experience accelerated progress so that by the time they finish end of year two we have a bigger proportion that are actually working at that level of the curriculum.”
Browne says the approach has also worked particularly well across cultural perspectives, enabling children in cultural groups that have generally underperformed in current school settings, to thrive.
“Our Māori and Pasifika children really thrive on seeing themselves in the BSLA reading resources and the te reo words really hook them in. All of our children can really see themselves in those stories, they are really relevant for their ages and stages.”
The results of the latest research into BSLA demonstrate that when classroom teachers are well supported with quality professional learning and development based on the science of reading, they can rapidly develop children’s foundational literacy skills, Professor Gillon says.
“In New Zealand we can still sometimes have a bit of a cultural cringe where we think that something from overseas is probably better than something developed locally. What the research shows is not only that a programme developed by New Zealanders for New Zealand kids gives better results, but also that the approach is flexible enough to be used as a template for other nations to adapt for use in their schools.”
* Phoneme – distinct units of sound that distinguish one word from another. For example, p, b, d, and t in the words pad, pat, bad, and bat.
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