The success of Marie Clay’s Reading Recovery programme in rescuing New Zealand children with reading difficulties sparked interest around the world. It has been implemented in most English-speaking countries and adapted into French, Spanish and Italian.

In Britain Reading Recovery was hailed as a panacea when it was introduced in the early 1990s, after a successful pilot scheme in 20 inner-city areas. But the scheme, which relies on up to 20 weeks of half-hour, one-to-one lessons, proved too costly for both Tory and Labour governments, and it was abandoned in 1995.

A study last year by the Institute of Education at the University of London provided new evidence of the programme’s effectiveness. Six-year-olds given Reading Recovery gained on average twenty months of reading age over the eight-month pilot, bringing them up to the same level as their peers. A BBC report suggested that successive governments’ failure to commit themselves to the scheme could have been “the biggest missed opportunity in education”.

But Reading Recovery was not without critics, and not only on the ground of cost (currently about £2,000 per child). They accuse the scheme of overrigidity, and the evidence for its long-term effectiveness has also been questioned.

Marie Clay was born in Wellington in 1926 and received a BA in education at the University of Wellington in 1946. In 1950 she won a Fulbright Scholarship to study developmental psychology at the University of Minnesota, before returning to New Zealand to teach. In 1960 she was offered a position at the University of Auckland, where she was to remain for the rest of her career. She became its first female professor in 1975.

Clay began collecting the data that would lead to Reading Recovery in 1963, as part of her PhD research. Trials began in 1978, and by 1983 the programme had become a New Zealand national standard.

She wrote numerous books to help parents and teachers with literacy learning. She was awarded numerous honours, capped by her appointment as DBE in 1987.

Dame Marie Clay, DBE, educationist, was born on January 3, 1926. She died on April 13, 2007, aged 81