Average reading comprehension scores for Year 4 to 8 students fell while vocabulary scores rose, according to 15 years of PAT data analysed by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER).
The report, PAT trends in Aotearoa New Zealand, covers just over 3 million Term 1 assessment records from 647,213 students in 1,306 English-medium state and state-integrated schools. Its author is NZCER senior statistician Dr David Coblentz.
A long slide in comprehension
Reading comprehension scores began falling before COVID-19 and kept falling through 2024, the last year of the old PAT Reading Comprehension test. By then the adjusted average was 1.76 scale points below 2012. NZCER says that’s about a quarter of the progress students typically make in a year between Years 4 and 8.
The decline showed up at every year level, in every region in the analysis, across the score range and in almost every ethnic group. Girls outscored boys throughout, but girls declined more. At Year 8, the top of the distribution fell further than the middle.
Schools in communities facing fewer socioeconomic barriers declined more than those facing more. The report says a smaller gap isn’t an equity gain when it comes from falling scores among higher achievers.
Vocabulary went the other way. Scores rose over the same period, and the 2026 adjusted average sat 1.34 points above 2012. Among students who sat both tests in the same year and at the same year level, the adjusted gap between their vocabulary and comprehension scores widened by 2.28 points between 2012 and 2024.
Already there at Year 4
Much of the decline was already visible by Year 4, when students first sit PAT. From 2015, each new Year 4 group generally started with lower adjusted comprehension scores than the 2012 group did, and between 2020 and 2024 Year 4 scores were about two points below 2012, roughly a quarter of a year’s progress.
The report says that early shortfall wasn’t reliably made up in later years. Coblentz says the bulk of the change in both maths and reading comprehension is “already there at Year 4”, and that following these cohorts for longer would tell us more.
Because PAT is sat in Term 1, each year’s results mainly reflect the previous year’s learning. The 2026 results mostly reflect 2025.
Signs of a turn
The refreshed PAT Pānui | PAT Reading Comprehension test, used since 2025, shows a rise of 0.51 scale points from 2025 to 2026. That’s less than a tenth of a typical year’s progress. Year 7 improved most and Year 8 barely moved.
NZCER calls the rise encouraging but says it doesn’t yet show the longer decline has ended. The report doesn’t estimate change across the switch, and treats the old and new tests as separate series.
Maths had recovered most of its earlier drop by 2023. On the new maths test, the 2026 adjusted average was 1.64 points above 2024, about a third of a year’s typical progress.
The maths rebound began in 2023, before the requirement to teach an hour a day of reading, writing and maths arrived in 2024 and before the revised maths curriculum became compulsory in 2025. The report says those changes can’t explain the start of the recovery, though they may have helped sustain it.
The data come from schools that chose to use PAT, around half of all schools, and NZCER says they aren’t a nationally representative sample. Coblentz says the report shows when and how achievement changed but not why, and that tying a change to any one policy or approach would take much more research.
The report recommends that future monitoring follow these groups into later years, watch the move from Year 6 to Year 7 closely, and test whether the improvement holds and is more evenly shared.
