Reading Together® pulled apart?

Education Aotearoa (published by NZEI - NZ's largest education union) has published a news item titled 'Reading Together® pulled apart?', available here. Extracts follow:

A reading initiative described as the nearest thing New Zealand education has to a silver bullet faces an uncertain future.
Reading Together, a long running reading initiative in primary schools, has transformed children's reading. Students gain the equivalent of a year's reading progress through a five hour intervention, with the gains maintained in an "upward trajectory", according to the Ministry of Education's own documents.
The programme, which had been run on a shoestring since the 1980s, cranked up a gear after being championed by the Māori Party's Dr Pita Sharples in 2011. Now, however, a key role driving it in the Ministry has been disestablished. ...
John Good, the coordinator who managed the project at the Ministry from 2011, says he hopes that the body of support in the sector will ensure that the work continues. "Where it has been implemented schools have themselves seen the transformational shift that the programme achieves." He says that managing the Reading Together programme for four years was the greatest privilege in his professional career.
Liz Horgan, Principal at decile one St Joseph’s School Otahuhu has been using Reading Together since 2005 and can’t speak highly enough of it. Every family in the school has been through it and it is the best programme the school has used to create links between home and school and teach children to both love reading and read independently.