Educators in Bermuda are celebrating after marking the fifth anniversary of the Reading Recovery programme for primary school students.

Since the international reading scheme was launched on the Island in 1997, 50 teachers in the public primary school system have been trained to deliver the programme - with ten being certified just last week.

Bermuda is only the sixth country in the world to incorporate Reading Recovery into its comprehensive literacy plan, and 32 teachers are currently delivering lessons every day to those children in primary two who are falling behind in their reading ability.

The six-year-olds have 30-minute one-on-one reading lessons each day, designed purely to meet their individual needs, with a trained instructor until they have reached the acceptable standard.

Each lesson involves both reading and writing with the aim of making the children independent learners.

Ministry Education officer Darnell Wynn, who leads the programme, said to mark the anniversary this year a special pin had been created.

She said: "Last year, some 33 percent of the primary two population received Reading Recovery and 81 percent were successful.

"That means these children who were at risk for literacy failure were able to go back into their classes able to read and write successfully with their peers."

And she said the average programme of reading recovery lasted 18 weeks.

Ms Wynn said the programme had taken off so well in Bermuda, they were hoping to form a Reading Recovery Council and host an international conference on the programme at a later stage.

Ms Wynn said unlike remedial programmes, which waited for the child to fail, Reading Recovery intervened early in the first grade and gave the lowest achieving children a chance to succeed with reading and writing before a cycle of failure began.

She added: "Children who do not learn to read by the end of the first grade will fail to achieve in almost all other areas of the academic curriculum for as long as they remain in school.

"The emotional weight of this early failure is costly to the child and to society. Such failure creates the need for additional schooling, remedial, special education, psychological, and other services.

"Reading Recovery challenges beliefs about children who are failing. It achieves a seemingly impossible task. Children with very low achievement are helped in a surprisingly short time to make rapid progress."

And she said Reading Recovery was based on the premise that intervention in the education process needed to occur before children's poor habits became difficult to change and block future learning.

To mark the milestone last week, a reception was held by the Ministry at La Coquille restaurant, when the newly qualified instructors were presented with their certificates and badges.

The guest speaker was Dr. Clifford Johnson, from Georgia State University, who is a Reading Recovery trainer and who was involved in the initial implementation in the US.

He is also on the Island to assist the Bermuda group in setting up a Reading Recovery Council and to discuss the possibility of holding an international conference here, as well as to help promote early literacy among professionals and parents.