Current policy, media and curriculum initiatives across western nations are drawing literacy and literacy pedagogy toward enticingly simplistic understandings of literacy as commodity. Increasingly they focus on `fixing’ perceived literacy problems by assuming the primacy of early years literacy and `top-up’ intervention programs. In the wash-up of these narrow policies failing in their primary mission, it is important that literacy researchers and educators consider expanding notions of literacy rather than returning to `old’ solutions for new issues. This article revisits a prior critique of Reading Recovery as a solution to failure to learn school-based literacy. Using data collected as part a larger study into constructions of literacy failure, we analyse the shifting `ways to be a reader’ required of one student during a Reading Recovery lesson. We argue that the competence required to negotiate various literacy learning contexts across one morning of learning adds to the complexity of school-based literacy learning as much as it might provide support.

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