This misconception is incredibly pervasive in the US, as well.

This is a massively important report from SRI. It captures a clear national trend: American children have been making progress on early literacy assessments (which focus more on word recognition/fluency), but not on state reading assessments in 3rd grade. There's a second grade cliff because we aren't nurturing comprehension as well as word recognition. "Recent research relying on early literacy assessments indicates that 56% of K–2 students nationally are “on track” for learning to read (Amplify, 2025), but only 31% of fourth graders performed at or above the proficient level on the 2024 NAEP reading assessment, a test that requires students to comprehend with greater depth (National Center for Education Statistics, 2025). In other words, Bridging the Divide: Connecting Word Recognition and Language Comprehension in Early Literacy 6 even students who are meeting proficiency benchmarks based on early literacy assessments are not well prepared to comprehend what they are expected to be able to read by third grade (see text box for more information about the literacy assessments). Prior research suggests that these gaps may reflect a lack of alignment between early literacy assessments and state literacy assessments (Koon et al., 2020)."