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Reading Reform in the UK

Rose Review and the reaction

The Rose Review final report was published in March 2006 and accepted by Ruth Kelly, Education Secretary, on behalf of the Government, with a promise that synthetic phonics would be mandated from September 2006 in all primary schools.

Further testing of literacy skills in primary schools showed that there had been no improvement, and Alan Johnson, the new Education Secretary, said that teachers would have to "return to a back-to-basics method of teaching reading", namely synthetic phonics. Nick Gibb for the opposition supports synthetic phonics. See www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2348054,00.html

The research evidence from England, Scotland and Canada is nicely summarised in this message: rrf.org.uk/messageforum/viewtopic.php?t=1981

There has been reluctance to accept these findings from some education establishments, and the Government has decided to stop funding the Basic Skills Agency, which criticised the Rose Review: education.guardian.co.uk/further/story/0,,1937921,00.html

The proportion of children aged 5 years that cannot read is nearly one in three - greater than the official figures would suggest, see www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2423985,00.html

The standards are not good enough. Lord Adonis has written to LEAs (Local Education Authorities) to demand action. In a separate development, Lord Adonis has said that the list of approved programmes (for teaching reading in primary schools) would be vetted by a panel of experts.

RRF Conference

The RRF (Reading Reform Foundation) held their conference on November 3rd. This was the provisional programme:

Talk content:

Jim Rose: The Reading Review. Challenge and Response

Diane McGuinness: "Fourth time at the ball. Will Phonics ever find her magic slipper?" This is the fourth time in 170 years that a synthetic phonics 'breakthrough' has been discovered and implemented only to be overtaken by ineffective sight word/whole word methods that repeatedly fail our children. What strange dynamic perpetuates this set of events? Can we find a way to stop it?

Debbie Hepplewhite: Keep it simple: Debbie will argue that in an effort to raise professionalism and standards we may be feeding a burgeoning bureaucratic monster.

Sue Lloyd: Synthetic phonics uses a completely different philosophy to the phonics that has been used for the last seventy years. This difference will be clearly explained. There will also be evidence of effectiveness provided, as well as an explanation as to why synthetic phonics programmes are beneficial for all children, especially boys, children from economically poor environments, and children with special educational needs.

Fiona Nevola will talk about the immediate impact of teaching the alphabet code to both struggling readers in Youth Offending Institutions and within schools.

Ruth Miskin: Leadership and phonics. The relentlessness and focus needed in our schools to ensure every child learns to read.

Notes on the talks

Jim Rose talked about the terms of reference for his review, which included EYFS - Early Years Foundation Stage (Framework). This would be statutory in 2008, and will give a start on phonics with "matching letters to sounds" now included.

Progress on literacy had stalled at around 80%. We had a greater number of teachers, and many more teaching assistants. The US National Reading Panel had shown the way ahead, but this was met by a lot of resistance, which seemed to be a deep feeling against "instruction", and people wanting to hedge their bets by having a sprinkling of methods. But the "searchlights" mixed-method model of NLS (UK National Literacy Strategy) did not work well enough. We need to get back to the basic idea: "beginning readers need to learn how to decode effortlessly". And we need to train the trainers in the ITT (initial teacher training) institutions.

As regards starting age, it was good to teach to read by age 5. There was great pride in progress. But teachers of older children must be able to help lagging children to catch up. There was a big variation between the best readers and the worst - this was more serious within a school than between schools.

As regards writing, children needed to see the reversibility (decoding/encoding) - we're still working on the framework.

Diane McGuinness, author of "Why our children can't read", discussed the writing system. All the world's writing systems, even Chinese, are based on either syllables, CV units, phonemes or just consonants. The human mind has difficulty remembering more than about 2000 different symbols. Some languages have relatively few syllables but English has many thousand, so requires an alphabetic writing system.

The Sumerians changed from pictures to syllables, about 3000BC, and this kind of writing spread throughout the world. Sumerian tablets have been found, showing how they would have learnt to write - CV word lists, etc. In 5000 years we've lost the plot - teachers don't know - and it's not their fault - it's the professors and teacher trainers at fault. Any teaching method not based on phonemes will not work. No spoken language is difficult to learn - but some are difficult to write. (In Sweden and Austria the 'dyslexic' is one who can spell but is a bit slow at decoding. In the UK it's one who cannot manage sound-letter correspondences.)

Diane spoke of some amazingly painstaking research done by Carr and Evans in Canada in 1985, which examined what children were doing, minute by minute, in the classroom, and correlated with reading test scores. They found that very few literacy activities in the classroom have a positive impact on reading skill. The main positive activities were blending and writing. Some had a negative impact, in particular learning whole words and listening to the teacher reading.

Critical factors are:

• Zero tolerance of learning sight words
• No word guessing
• Train the teachers so they understand phonemics and the writing system

Debbie Hepplewhite said what difficulty she had with education advisors, who would ignore her questions. There didn't seem anything to hold them to account. Politicians were better. In particular Nick Gibb is passionate about getting the best possible education system for the UK. But organisations like the BSA were actively subverting the Rose Review. And practitioners were being told that they could take or leave the report.

Debbie also complained about the volume of paperwork - teachers should be spending their time teaching, not filling in forms. Teachers are drowning!

All teachers need to be told about phonics, and when, say in Geography, a new word or place name comes up, the teacher should sound out the phonemes. English is all decodable. After you've grouped words like "should, would, could" together, and grouped other words similarly, there's almost nothing left.

Teachers should be accountable, not to the system, but to the children. If they are informed, they will make properly informed choices, and should have right to reply to any criticism, e.g. from Ofsted inspectors.

Sue Lloyd explained that synthetic phonics is different from other phonics we've had over the past 70 years. We start from the coding, not from reading words. The problem of acceptance of synthetic phonics is in the educational establishment hierarchy - they follow fads and fashions, and refuse to get into the classroom and see for themselves.

Sue illustrated what it must feel like to be presented with a flash card when you can't decode, by presenting us with some Arabic words on flash cards as if we were in class, learning to read. There was nothing to hold onto, to help you memorise the word.

With the Suffolk Reading Test you should in theory get a Bell curve of results, with a peak around the average reading ability. However it is found that there is a spike where children are scoring very low. These are the children that have not jumped the hurdle - they have not understood the alphabetic principle. However with synthetic phonics, the curve is skewed towards the top end ability, with perhaps one or two children left at the low end, who require one-to-one tuition.

The principle tasks are:

• Learning the letter sounds
• Letter formation
• Blending
• Identifying sounds in words
• Dealing with tricky words

You should teach the letter/sound correspondences one by one; the order does not matter. Vowel digraphs are very important, as they often cause trouble. Writing is done at the same time as reading. Have dictation for homework: "I am hot", etc.

Tips:

• Blend and segment with regular words
• Gradually build up
• No sight words
• No books with words that cannot be decoded (because some letter-sound correspondences have not yet been learnt)
• Don't spend a lot of time on phonemic awareness - it comes from decoding
• Rhyming doesn't help

The problem with advisors is there is no accountability. Programmes are passed down from on high without testing. Beware of early years directives. There should be no delay to start on reading. You should not spend time on assessments - you should know if your children are learning to read or not.

Fiona Nevola said that we have the potential to destroy our children's future. The random muddle thinking (arising from the mixed method approach) is torture to the brain. Something like 30% children cannot read - it's criminal. Teachers are not being taught to teach. But there was one school where synthetic phonics had been started, and all the children could read.

In prisons there is about 70% illiteracy. Phonics changes their lives - tapping into people's natural intelligence. They don't have to learn whole words - some people can't.

We've got to have the will from the authorities, to turn things around. The probation service has started taking it seriously. You will always have behaviour problems from kids who've not been taught to read, whatever kind of school.

Ruth Miskin considered what next. Should schools choose rather than having something thrust upon them? But we're waiting for schools to choose us!

There's a desperate need for good books, so that children can practice their decoding skills with lots of repetition. But the key to a successful introduction of synthetic phonics in a school is the support of the head teacher.

In the US she gets asked: are your children ABT or SEN. ABT means "ain't been taught"! People are to busy filling in IEPs to teach! And reading is not a top priority for the government. They are ignoring children in year 2 upwards who've got left behind.

She said it's hopeless trying to teach reading to a class of children who are at different stages, so she groups children according to decoding knowledge for the whole school, regardless of the different ages of children in a group. She gives each group 5 hours a week. The greater the homogeneity the better it works.

One has to be relentless. Every child has got to learn to read. It is criminal that schools are failing one in five pupils. Head teachers should expect and demand 100% literacy.

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