This article reports research into the ways that early childhood teachers in three schools used narratives of blame as part of their theorisation of literacy failure in relation to Queensland's Year 2 Diagnostic Net. The teachers' narratives clustered into three groups: blaming families, blaming children and explanations that moved beyond blame and focused instead on teaching. However, despite the range of explanations, all of the teachers in this study based their pedagogical decisions for literacy failure and intervention on a deficit model of literacy learning. It is argued that a reconceptualisation of literacy that views literacy as a social practice might assist teachers to rethink intervention in the early childhood classroom.
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