policy was intended in the shorter term to increase staffing levels in the junior school, to identify appropriate ways in which to allocate staff to schools at each phase, and to develop guidelines for schools about implementation of the policy. The longer term objective of the policy was to enhance learning and teaching. Implementation procedures included a restriction on the creation of new classrooms, and this led to some initial confusion among teachers and parents. NZCER's evaluation of the implementation of the 1:20 policy surveyed: how the policy was translated into practice, who made decisions about the use of additional staffing, and what teachers saw as outcomes of the policy. Staff in the schools generally supported the policy. The extra staffing provision was used, in part, to staff the Reading Recovery programme, implemented in 1982 to enhance the reading performance of children with learning difficulties in the area of literacy (for further details of this and related New Zealand research, see McDonald, Podmore, Renwick, Smith, Vize, & Wylie, 1989). . A review of teacher/pupil ratio was commissioned in 1991 to develop a policy for establishing teacher-pupil ratios in the future. The report on the review recommended that: "The continued implementation of the current 1:20 policy should be postponed" (p. 14) and further, the New Zealand State Services commission recommended that: "The current teacher/pupil ratios on which school staffing is based should be suspended" (p.18). The review drew on a range of research and policy documents. These included the NZCER junior