http://www.nzherald.co.nz/hawkes-bay-to ... d=11755177
Do read the whole piece, and note this:...NCEA level one is not that simple to interpret, but it means that these people will have trouble writing coherent sentences or reading them.
We were happy to see seven prisoners learn to read and write, and it wasn't easy to get the programme underway in that jail, but Cave's numbers mean that there are still more than six hundred prisoners at that location who can't read and write.
What we managed is valuable, but it's a drop in the bucket.
Overall we are heading for a prison muster approaching ten thousand, so that means there are six and a half thousand fundamentally illiterate prisoners in New Zealand jails.
How does this happen?
Taxpayers fund an expensive and generally well-regarded compulsory education system which includes early childhood education, primary schools and secondary schools.
It seems incomprehensible that we allow young people to drop through the literacy net and leave school without the ability to read at a level that would enable them to get a driver's licence...
No doubt there will be many contributory circumstances leading to disaffected children lost to the education system - but we also know that New Zealand, like Australia, is suffering from 'whole language' and 'Reading Recovery' dominance - teaching which can potentially damage the literacy capability of youngsters with inability to read and write well turning children off learning in school contexts from an early age.One of our very first literacy graduates at Hawke's Bay Regional Prison was a young Maori who managed to leave school at the age of ten. I asked him if his school or the Education Department had followed up, and he described perfunctory efforts to get him back into the system.
Like many of his prisoner mates, he could not read well enough to get a driver's licence.
The driving offences mounted up to the point that he got a jail sentence.
Gang membership followed.
This was an intelligent bloke who learnt to read and write fluently in twelve weeks.
Had he got the personal attention our volunteer tutor was able to offer years before when he first disappeared off the education radar, the cost to us all would have been slashed.
IFERI committee members, James Chapman and Bill Tunmer have written about this many times. Read their critique of Reading Recovery here:
http://www.iferi.org/a-new-paper-by-pro ... -recovery/