Category Archives: Reading

“The future doesn’t have to be like the past” by Sir Jim Rose

While England may not top PISA’s international league tables, we almost certainly surpass our international counterparts in the amount and pace of educational reform that governments of all stripes have generated since the Education Reform Act in 1988.* In a nutshell, the aim of these reforms has been ‘to raise standards and narrow gaps’ in pupil performance.

Headline news has recently focused yet again on falling standards of education as national examination results for 16 year-olds this year show that: ‘GCSE grades have seen the biggest ever fall in the overall pass rate in the history of the exams.’ These grades apply to schools in the state sector and stand in sharp contrast, to the independent, private sector where more than a third of the children achieved the highest grade of ‘A’ – nearly five times the national average.

The private sector in England now stands at around 7% of the school population and is way beyond the means of the great majority of parents. Lloyds Bank recently estimated the costs of sending one child to private school from reception to Year 13 as £156,653 – annual fees having nearly doubled from an average of £7,308 in 2003 to £13,341 in 2016.

sir-michael-wilshaw-quote

In a speech, earlier this year, our Chief Inspector of Schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, delivered a scathing attack on the ideologies of both left and right-wing politics, which he holds responsible for a woeful lack of progress on narrowing the achievement gap between socio-economic groups. He said that, despite a range of initiatives, including the Pupil Premium**, no real difference has been made over the last decade:

‘The needle has barely moved. In 2005, the attainment gap between free school meal and non-FSM pupils in secondary schools was 28 percentage points. It is still 28 percentage points now.’

‘Our failure to improve significantly the educational chances of the poor disfigures our school system. It scars our other achievements. It stands as a reproach to us all.’

It is hardly surprising, that this has prompted a resurgence of fierce debate about the stubborn obstacles in the way of boosting the attainment of children from low income families and narrowing the gap in educational performance between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers.

The debate has been further inflamed by recent government proposals to provide more selective, state grammar schools ‘to give parents a wider choice of schools’ irrespective of their background circumstances.

All of this has coincided with the latest national curriculum assessments for children in the final year of primary school (11yr-olds) showing that fewer pupils reached the expected standard in reading than in writing and mathematics. Moreover, evidence of lasting improvements from numerous targeted interventions to help struggling readers is rare. It seems that hard won, early gains from programmes designed to help them ‘catch-up’ tend to fade out as they fail to keep pace with the overall rate of progress of their year groups.

It is little comfort to know that some of these problems are not unique to England. However, some would say that we are the product of a historical past that has led to a more stratified society than many of our international counterparts, and that divisions between state and private education are at the root of these problems. One of our most visionary and dynamic erstwhile school ministers – now Lord Andrew Adonis – commented on the divide between state and private education:

‘Over the entire second half of the 20th century, these prejudices made it exceptionally hard to do more than fiddle around at the margins of state-private partnership. This, in turn, bred a deep fatalism which is with us still. Everyone knows that the status quo is terrible – rigid separation between most of the nation’s most privileged and powerful schools and the rest. Yet no-one has a credible plan or will to do much about it except say how bad it is, why it’s someone else’s fault, and why it will never change because, well, this is England, it’s deep and cultural, and it all began with Henry VIII. It’s the same fatalism which greeted gridlock in central London before the congestion charge, hospital waiting lists before patients’ rights, and rain stopping play at Wimbledon before the roof.

The call now is for activists not fatalists. The future doesn’t have to be like the past.’

In a bold attempt to achieve a strong ‘state-private partnership’, he paved the way for academising the school system – a major reform in England which, though not without criticism, remains a firm commitment of the present administration.

However, progress has been patchy. These radical systemic/organisational changes have yet to make the looked for impact on helping less well-off children scale the rock face of disadvantage. For them it is much like bicycling a ‘penny farthing’ uphill – the higher they get the harder it becomes. Well-off parents, it seems, are able to equip their children with an Olympic class bike in the shape of private schooling that boosts their rate of progress. So what might we do, or do differently to make sure all children have an educational super bike?

It is of first importance, not to lower our educational expectations for disadvantaged youngsters. There are some telling examples of those from the most unpromising background circumstances succeeding against the odds. Moreover, by no means all privately educated youngsters from prestigious schools ‘make it big’ – so caveat emptor.

Secondly, school inspections show that schools of all types vary in quality ranging, in OFSTED terms, from ‘outstanding’ to ‘in need of improvement’. This suggests that systemic change alone is unlikely to be the tide that lifts all boats. It is trite but true to say that to be successful such change must secure high quality teaching irrespective of school type or location – hence, we would do well to curb our appetite for systemic reform and put more effort into the professional development of teachers and training those who support them in the classroom.

While it ought to be a given that every school should endow all of its children with the advantage of high quality teaching, inspection reports show this not to be the case. Rather, the picture remains one of too much variation in the quality of teaching within and between schools. The well-worn mantra that no school can be better than its teachers needs more that a facelift. It needs a change of heart.

This part of the forest might also benefit from a clearer definition of what ‘high quality’ looks like. In other words, establish a common language for a discourse on optimal teaching (and learning). Some promising developments worth close attention have ‘moved the needle’ by encouraging schools to be ‘self-improving’. One recent piece of research points to a positive impact on narrowing the gap in the reading performance of disadvantaged primary children by means of cost effective, well-taught phonic programmes (Centre for Economic Performance Paper No.1425 April 2016).

We do not yet know how well these gains are sustained for example, when children move from primary to secondary education. However, OFSTED Annual Reports show that, in this respect at least, the primary sector is doing rather better than the secondary sector in narrowing the literacy gap – much to the credit of primary teachers. Given that we know far more about how to teach children to read and write than ever before there should be no excuses for poor teaching in this territory.

The future does not have to be like the past, nor ought the best we can do now be the best that we should hope for. All that said, if we are to secure high quality teaching for all children in England, reformers and policy makers would do well to heed the words of Alvin Toffler: “Future shock [is] the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.”

*The Education Reform Act 1988 is widely regarded as the most important single piece of education legislation in EnglandWales and Northern Ireland since the ‘Butler’ Education Act 1944. (Wikipaedia).

**The pupil premium is additional funding for publicly funded schools in England to raise the attainment of disadvantaged pupils of all abilities and to close the gaps between them and their peers.

Jim Rose

9th September 2016

Why we use the Phonics Screening Check in Australia

Students at the school at which I work learn to decode systematically and explicitly. We believe that, given the balance of evidence, a good grounding in phonics, taught systematically, will provide them with the best opportunity to improve their reading comprehension. A key part of our teaching strategy is using assessment evidence to pinpoint what a student can decode and what they still need to work on.

As an Australian school we don’t have access to an Australian national or state-wide assessment for decoding skills or early reading comprehension. In the absence of such an assessment we have decided to use the UK Phonics Screening Check to help inform our instruction. We use the Phonics Screening Check because:

It provides a standard

One of the most common questions students, staff and parents have is whether a child is “doing ok” – are they at the standard for their age? The Phonics Screening Check gives us a standard that we can measure between year levels and across years. We know that students are at standard for their age when they can pass the Phonics Screening Check. It gives a definitive anchor for our work and helps guide what we do. Instead of having an individual feel for what an appropriate level of decoding might be, we have an agreed standard. This aids conversation: we all know exactly what it means to say a student is above or below that standard and we know what instruction and learning is required to get them there. We are able to detect much earlier when a student is in danger of not making the required level and can intervene earlier and with more of a sense of what is required.

Another feature of the earlier Screening Checks that is useful is the published item difficulties for each of the words and non-words in the 2012 and 2013 pilots. This gives a good indication of what words or non-words were more difficult than others for the UK students. We can then compare that to how difficult our students found those items and investigate when differences arise. What items are we comparatively strong at? Are there aspects of our instruction around the use of that grapheme that we need to record and make sure we are all include in our practice?

There may be other words/non-words our students unexpectedly find difficult to decode. Why can’t our students decode the word? What part of the word is proving to be the stumbling block? What do we currently do to teach the decoding of that grapheme and why is not working? What parts of our instruction need to be revised in order for students to improve?

It builds a bridge between classrooms

In our school the Prep (5 year old) classes are fluid – the groups are altered every six weeks and teachers change between classes. This results in a shared responsibility for the progress of all students in Prep. Fantastic conversations are had between teachers as they realise that kids who have been in one class are much better at something than students who have been in another class. It might be as simple as noticing children from class A always construct sentences with a capital letter at the start and a full stop at the end, something that doesn’t happen in class B. What is happening in this class that allows students to do this consistently and how can I teach my kids to do the same?

Sometimes, though, the differences in student learning between classes are not so obvious and it takes a specific assessment to reveal them. On the UK Phonics Screening Check there are times when students who are notionally in an earlier phase of their phonics work that have greater success in decoding a non-word than a class that should have done better. Why did that happen? What instruction around that grapheme phoneme correspondence in that class was so effective and how is best implemented in the other classes? How can we learn from each other in order to improve the instruction for all students?

The sharing of demonstrably effective practice results in teaching that is more successful. It doesn’t necessarily mean that all classes are exactly the same but it does allow the gap in effectiveness of instruction to be decreased. This is an equity issue: a student’s progress should not be based on a lottery depending on whether or not they get an effective teacher when classes are allocated. When the instructional quality of the team is growing, both as a whole and as individuals, all students benefit.

The Phonics Screening Check is an important component of the process of instructional improvement and allows a sense of what an appropriate level of decoding looks like. As such, I would heartily recommend it to all schools teaching phonics.

IFERI would like to thank Reid Smith, who is a teacher in Australia, for allowing us to re-blog this post. You can subscribe to his blog here:

https://notquitetabularasa.wordpress.com/

And you’ll find him on Twitter here: @Smithre5

IFERI supports and promotes the use of the Phonics Screening Check internationally. It is a free, easy to use, light-touch assessment. For more information, or to download the check, click here.

Please Help: Get Ghana Reading with Phonics by Phone

Created by the charity Educators International, Phonics by Phone is an ambitious and innovative project which aims to train teachers in remote parts of Ghana. Using the basic mobile that is already in their pocket, teachers will be trained how to teach reading from the beginning, with a specially written phonics course and resources.Ghana Movement

This ingenious solution works by providing 100 Phonics Lessons, specially written by IFERI’s Debbie Hepplewhite and recorded by Sheena Campbell, which are available to download as audio files that teachers can easily access and listen to on their phone. To access or listen to these modules simply click here.project_1273_body_50629_chart_pic_00263

In addition, there is also a very clever assessment project to support and sustain the Phonics by Phone network.  It works from an android phone app which then prints to a tiny micro-printer! Each time the app is used a new assessment is generated – watch the video below to see it in action. Amazing!

A crowd-funding initiative has been established to support this innovative, low-cost project which is already having a huge impact. On an ‘all-or-nothing’ basis the charity has until 7th August to raise the £15k target. They are already more than halfway there – but with only days to go – every donation counts. And if they don’t hit their target – the project will receive no financial help at all.

If you feel that you could support this worthwhile initiative please visit: https://www.launchgood.com/project/help_get_ghana_reading__by_phone#/

Educators International is also keen to connect educators from around the world with some of the teachers in Ghana who are close to qualifying. If you would like to find out more about being a pen-pal mentor to one of the highly committed, volunteer teachers in Ghana please click here to find out more.Ghana boys reading

Michael Stark, one of Educators International’s directors and trustees, urges all those who value literacy and reading to make a difference:

‘If properly taught using phonics, all these children will learn to read and write well, rather than drop out of school early. Help us achieve a miracle – reading success for huge numbers of children in Ghana.’

Educators_International

Please help spread the word and share this blog post with friends and colleagues. Thank you.

The Reading Reform Foundation Conference, March 2015 *updated*

‘From the Rose Review to the New Curriculum. A growing number of schools successfully teach every child to read; the majority still don’t. Why?’

The theme of the Reading Reform Foundation conference (above) drew attention to the fact that some schools achieve very highly despite complex and challenging circumstances. Indeed, London schools, despite being ‘inner city’ schools, are gaining a reputation in England for nationally high standards and some commentators attribute this to the rise in standards particularly in primary schools. Many primary headteachers would attribute their rise in standards to getting the foundations of literacy right by ensuring high-quality Systematic Synthetic Phonics provision within enriched language and literature settings.

The conference was very well-received and attendees included people from America, Spain, Ireland, Scotland and Australia.

Most of the talks were filmed and will be added to this blog posting as the footage becomes available.

Debbie Hepplewhite gave the opening talk, ‘Does it really matter if teachers do not share a common understanding about phonics and reading instruction?’ Having watched the talk via youtube, a number of ‘tweeters’ recommended this video for INSET (In-service training) suggesting that ‘all teachers’ would benefit from watching it!

Debbie’s PowerPoint – click here

Next, Anne Glennie talked about the lack of ambition and lack of phonics training in Scotland with her talk, ‘The Attainment Gap? What about the Teaching Gap?’ – and this is despite the fact that England and other countries internationally paid heed to the Clackmannanshire research (Johnston and Watson) conducted in Scottish schools.

Following Anne was Josie Mingay with her talk, ‘Phonics in the Secondary Classroom’. This talk generated a great deal of interest and Josie had more questions from the audience than anyone else. Clearly we still have weak literacy in many of our secondary schools – and this is surely why ALL teachers need to be trained in reading and spelling instruction, not just infant and primary teachers. In any event, a ‘beginner’ for whom English is a ‘new’ language, isn’t necessarily a five year old.

Sam Bailey was appointed headteacher of a struggling school with results well below national expectations. The theme of her talk was, ‘Transforming the life chances of our children – simple methods, great results’.She described in detail the rapid improvements with the adoption of Systematic Synthetic Phonics programmes (Oxford Reading Tree Floppy’s Phonics Sounds and Letters and Phonics International) in a climate of support, expectation, challenge, and rigour.

Gordon Askew brought his wealth of knowledge and experience to bear for his excellent talk, ‘Assessment, including the Phonics Screening Check and assessing reading at the end of Key Stage One’. To be honest, his talk was not what one might have expected and it turned out to be quite inspirational considering the topic!

Marj Newbury is a retired Early Years teacher with 37 years experience, She has also delivered synthetic phonics training extensively in schools both in the UK and worldwide – including as guest lecturer in her local universities. Marj’s talk, ‘Teacher Training’ not only described her work, but also voiced her concern about changes to the way we are training teachers in England.

Angela Westington HMI CV (Her Majesty’s Inspector) was invited to talk about her very important Ofsted report, ‘How a sample of schools in Stoke-on-Trent teach pupils to read’. Angela has considerable experience of leading and participating in national surveys and what is so important about Angela’s report is the clear description of strong phonics and reading practice and weak practice. Angela was not filmed but her ‘Stoke-on-Trent’ report is a must read and you can find it via the link below:

Stoke-on-Trent report – click here

Finally, the RRF was very appreciative that Nick Gibb, Minister of State for School Reform, rounded off the conference with his final ministerial speech prior to the general election in the UK, Nick Gibb has been at the forefront at looking closely at the findings of international research to inform reading instruction and championing changes in the statutory National Curriculum to incorporate Systematic Synthetic Phonics. The theme of his talk was, ‘The Importance of Phonics’:

Nick Gibb’s speech – click here

 

A New Paper by Professors James W. Chapman and William E. Tunmer on Reading Recovery

IFERI is delighted to be able to share with you a brand new paper by Professors James W. Chapman and William E. Tunmer, from the Institute of Education at Massey University, New Zealand.

This paper was presented, by invitation, at the 39th Annual Conference of the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities (IARLD), Vancouver, Canada, July 8, 2015. Professor James Chapman has been a Fellow of IARLD since 1983.

IARLD (International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities) is an international professional organization dedicated to conducting and sharing research about individuals who have learning disabilities. Fellows of IARLD include premier scientists, educators and clinicians in the field of learning disabilities throughout the world.

For convenience, some extracts and conclusions from the paper are published as part of this blog post. To open or download the complete paper, simply click the title below.

The Literacy Performance of ex-Reading Recovery Students Between Two and Four Years Following Participation on the Program: Is this Intervention Effective for Students with Early Reading Difficulties?

 James W. Chapman and William E. Tunmer

Sustainability of Gains Made in Reading Recovery

Considered together, the PIRLS results for 9-year-old children who had received RR in Year 2, the enrolment data for students receiving support from RT:Lits, and the two New Zealand studies on the sustainability of RR outcomes for discontinued children, show that RR simply has not achieved its primary goals in New Zealand. Clay’s avowal that RR would “clear out of the remedial education system all children who do not learn to read” (Clay, 1987, p. 169), and the RR New Zealand’s website claim that RR operates as an “effective prevention strategy against later literacy difficulties” and, therefore, “may be characterised as an insurance against low literacy levels” (www.readingrecovery.ac.nz/reading_recovery), are without foundation.

Why Does Reading Recovery Fail to Result in Sustainable Gains?

We have argued elsewhere (Chapman et al., 2015) that the effectiveness of RR interacts with where children are located on the developmental progression from pre-reader to skilled reader. Because of limited knowledge of print at the outset of learning to read, and/or developmental delay in acquiring the phonological awareness skills that are essential for learning to read successfully (e.g., Pressley, 2006; Snow & Juel, 2005; Tunmer, Greaney & Prochnow, 2015), a large proportion of young struggling readers operate at low developmental phases of word learning, which Ehri (2005) described as pre-alphabetic and partial-alphabetic phases. Delayed readers who are still in these phases, typically those students who struggle the most with learning to read, will not be able to grasp the alphabetic principle and discover spelling-to-sound relationships on their own or in a program that emphasizes text rather than word level instructional approaches. These students will require more intensive and systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and phonemically based decoding skills than what is provided in typical RR lessons.

What Should be Done to Improve the Effectiveness of Reading Recovery?

There are serious shortcomings and much-needed improvements in several aspects of RR, including the theoretical underpinnings of the program, the assessment battery which fails to include measures of phonological processing skills, the specific instructional strategies emphasized in the program (e.g., the multiple cues approach to word identification), the manner of program delivery (one-to-one versus instruction in pairs), and the congruence between classroom literacy instruction and the RR program.

Regarding the issue of congruence between classroom literacy instruction and RR, the program was originally developed to complement regular whole language classroom literacy instruction in New Zealand. Clay (1993), nevertheless, claimed that RR was compatible with all types of classroom literacy programs, but she offered no evidence in support of this claim. To test this belief, Center et al. (2001) investigated whether the efficacy of RR varied as a function of the regular classroom literacy program. They compared the effects of RR in “meaning oriented” (i.e., whole language) classrooms and “code-oriented” classrooms (i.e., those that included explicit and systematic instruction in phonological awareness and alphabetic coding skills). Their results indicated that at the end of the second year of schooling, children in the code-oriented classrooms (regular and RR students combined) significantly outperformed children in the meaning-oriented classrooms on measures of phonological recoding, reading connected text, and invented spelling, as well as on a standardized measure of reading comprehension. Overall, however, Center et al. (2001) reported that the RR students in both types of classrooms failed to reach the average level of their peers on any of the literacy measures. These findings clearly contradict Clay’s (1993) claim that the regular classroom context does not differentially affect the literacy performance of RR children.

Although regular classroom literacy instruction influences the effectiveness of RR, the most serious shortcoming of the program is the differential benefit at the individual level. The program may be useful in the short term for some struggling readers but not others, especially those struggling readers who need help the most. More intensive and systematic instruction in phonemic awareness and phonemically-based decoding skills is likely to be required than what is normally provided in RR lessons for those who struggle most with learning to read, and for any gains made in RR to have a lasting effect (Iversen, Tunmer & Chapman, 2005; Tunmer & Greaney, 2010).

Slavin et al. (2011) found reading programs for younger children that had less emphasis on phonics, including RR, showed smaller effect sizes than those programs that included phonics. They noted that RR is the most extensively researched and used reading intervention program in the world, but that the outcomes were less than might be expected. Further, Slavin et al. observed that the overall effect size for 18 studies involving paraprofessional or volunteer tutors using structured and intensive programs was about the same as the effect size for RR studies (+0.24 vs. +0.23), despite the very intensive training that RR teachers receive.

Conclusion

The RR program remains largely un-revised in its instructional approach despite clear evidence showing that claims about RR being an insurance against on-going literacy difficulties are without foundation. The New Zealand Reading Recovery website continues to assert the effectiveness of RR; assertions that are not supported by the New Zealand Ministry of Education’s own data (national monitoring reports and PIRLS), or by the two independent studies undertaken in New Zealand on students two to four years following successful completion of the program. If the RR program is not changed to reflect contemporary scientific research on reading interventions, it should be dropped and replaced by a more contemporary, research-based, reading intervention approach, together with more effective literacy instruction in children’s first year of schooling.

See also:

Excellence and equity in literacy education: the case of New Zealand. W.E. Tunmer & J.W. Chapman (eds.) (June, 2015). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/excellence-and-equity-in-literacy-education-william-e-tunmer/?K=9781137415561

The Adoption and Spread of Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) in Latin America

The Adoption and Spread of Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) in Latin America: Argentina and Chile mainly, Uruguay, Brazil, Peru and Mexico

by Grace Vilar

In 2011, I became an independent, full-time Literacy and Phonics Trainer, and Educational and Literacy Consultant, in Latin America. I started providing training events, however, in 2007 whilst I was still working as Head of English Primary at Colegio San Antonio in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

I am the main phonics consultant and trainer developing Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) provision in Latin America. I am not a researcher, however, and I describe my findings based on my experience as teacher, head teacher and teacher-trainer.

Whilst visiting primary schools during a trip to Oxford, England, in September 2006, I discovered systematic synthetic phonics teaching. I was immediately aware that synthetic phonics was the solution to our problems in Latin American schools, as synthetic phonics provides a very easy and effective method to teach our bilingual Spanish/English children how to read and write.

Originally when I was teaching, I had to base my teaching on the whole word and whole language approach. I attended many teacher-training courses and was very much supported by my school and head teacher at that time. With much effort, my pupils did learn – however, I was never very happy with the whole language approach and used ‘decoding’ and ‘encoding’ to support the ‘mixed methods’. In reality I was getting frustrated year after year with mixed methods. In time, I became a head teacher myself, and continued to be very uncomfortable with the prevailing mixed methods. A ‘multi-cueing reading strategies’ approach was also used for struggling readers, and still children were not reading well, and writing… had worsened!

The problem was that our children were using their experience of the ‘transparent’ Spanish alphabetic code to read and write in English resulting in very inaccurate pronunciation and spelling. So once they started to learn the details of the ‘opaque’ (complex) English alphabetic code, together with the core phonics skills of blending (for reading), segmenting (for spelling) and handwriting with the English code rather than the Spanish code, they rapidly started to master the pronunciation and spelling of English with the accuracy I had been seeking. The children soon showed greater confidence in reading and writing and their language and reading comprehension in English grew stronger every day. With knowledge of the English alphabetic code, even the children with special educational needs became successful – such as those with short-term memory, and dyslexic tendencies.

Following my very positive findings of applying synthetic phonics in my own bilingual school, I started to share my experience with other schools – first in Argentina and then in Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Mexico and Brazil. All of these countries learn English as a new foreign language as Spanish is their mother tongue (and Portuguese in the case of Brazil).

Year after year more schools in Latin America are using the Systematic Synthetic Phonics Teaching Principles as their main and only method for teaching reading and writing in English, and a few of them have even started to use England’s statutory Year One Phonics Screening Check at the end of Year One to get an idea of how they are doing compared to schools in England. In Latin America, however, ‘Year One’ is only the first year of formal, structured phonics provision whereas in England’s schools, formal structured phonics provision starts in Reception so children in England have had two years of synthetic phonics by the time they undertake the Year One Phonics Screening Check. Early signs are that the Latin American schools are getting wonderful results, some at least getting better results than the average results of schools in England!

Further information about Latin America, Spanish-speaking countries

Argentina is the pioneering country for adoption of Systematic Synthetic Phonics. Most of the private schools in Argentina teach English for 8 to 15 hours a week. The level of teaching and teachers’ professionalism is very high in general. Chile and Uruguay follow in terms of adoption of synthetic phonics. These two countries in particular look to England as a guide for updating and perfecting their teaching of English. They take the Cambridge international examinations (IGCSE, A and AS levels, and IB programmes). Even state schools in the city of Buenos Aires have adopted some IB subjects for their secondary schools.

State schools in Argentina also teach English as a foreign language for 3 to 5 hours a week, starting from Primary 1 (5 to 6 year olds) or from Preschool (4 to 5 year olds). Others start in Year 4 (8 to 9 year olds) or they may start in secondary schools.

In the province of San Luis, Argentina, in 2013 the Department for Education launched a bilingual and multilingual project in three schools where English is taught two and a half hours daily following an immersion programme such as the ones used in the private schools in the country. These three schools offer Trinity examinations.

In Mexico, English is taught in all of the 32 states from Preschool (5 year olds) for 2 to 3 hours a week. The first state to adopt a Systematic Synthetic Phonics programme (Jolly Phonics) officially is Aguascalientes where I trained 300 teachers.

As I said before, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile are leading countries and they refer mainly to England’s education, so they adopt all the latest teaching practices and methods. When new methodologies appear, all schools send their staff to be trained and organisations such as the ESSARP centre based in Buenos Aires offer a wide range of courses which now include Systematic Synthetic Phonics courses.  (ABSCH in Chile delivers an annual conference.)

Click here to see an example of SSP course content

I devote my whole professional time now to training teachers around Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Mexico and online in Peru – and little by little interest is also growing in Brazil, where I sometimes have to speak in the Portuguese language to train the teachers in the state schools!

Countries that have adopted the Systematic Synthetic Phonics Teaching Principles as their main method to teach how to read and write in English as a foreign language:

Countries Private state
Argentina 70 % approx. San Luis province: 100% City of Buenos Aires: 20%
Mexico 2 % approx. State of Aguascalientes: 100%
Chile 35 % approx
Uruguay 40 % approx.
Brazil 3 % approx. State of Parana: Pinhais and Palotina: 6 municipal schools
Peru 10 % approx

Note: These are not official percentages and these figures are growing daily.

Spreading Systematic Synthetic Phonics

My main objective is to train all teachers in SSP, so wherever they teach, they take along the method!

You can find a list of schools and countries in Latin America using SSP to teach children how to read and write in English on my website (not complete as I cannot control the spread of SSP any more… it is in the hands of the teachers now!)

http://gracevilarphonics.weebly.com/schools.html

Year One Phonics Screening Check

This check is statutory in England; it is freely available to all practitioners and IFERI promotes the adoption of this check.  Click here to find out more, and to read about the success of the screening check in The British School of Costa Rica.

Examples of Children Reading

Fernando, 6 years old, from Argentina, his mother tongue is Spanish: Fernando has had one year of SSP instruction. We see Fernando reading decodable books at ‘first sight’:

Catalina, 6 years old, from Argentina, her mother tongue is Spanish: We see Catalina reading and writing nonsense words:

Grace Vilar is a Bilingual Literacy and Educational Consultant and Synthetic Phonics Trainer. She is also a member of the IFERI Committee.

Reading Between the Lines

Recent comments from First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, suggest that national testing might be about to return to Scotland. I do support our forward-thinking curriculum, but I also feel there are bits of it where we could do better. We cannot ignore the uncomfortable truth that, when it comes to literacy, we are in a worse place now than we were two years ago. Pointing the finger of blame at secondary teachers is not only entirely unfair, but it is missing the point. We are all teachers of literacy, but when children are unable to access the language and learning of their curriculum at secondary school, it is ludicrous to expect subject specialists to have the time – or knowledge – required to teach children how to read, write and spell properly.

‘Learning to read’ should be sorted out early on in primary; enabling children to go forward as confident readers who can then ‘read to learn’. We talk so much about the attainment gap, but fail to realise that it is manifested in low literacy levels. We need to ensure that all of our learners, but especially the most disadvantaged, are equipped with the necessary literacy skills to achieve success at primary school and beyond. Until we tackle the persistent underachievement in reading in primary school, the gap will not go away. It will grow, becoming a black hole at secondary level that swallows our least able learners as they try to compete in the uneven playing fields of our classrooms.

Is testing the answer? I’d argue that it would certainly help. I am not advocating a return to the 5-14 style of assessment, nor am I suggesting that we should implement high-stakes testing, such as the SATs, that cause such stress in England.  However, I do believe that we could adopt their Phonics Screening Check, which is a simple, light-touch assessment, administered by the class teacher in Primary 2.  This identifies children who are at risk of literacy failure by assessing their knowledge of the essential letter/sound correspondences, as well as the skill of being able to apply this knowledge through blending and reading words. Use of this test would also provide us with data and a benchmark to see how we are doing in those crucial early stages. Since the introduction of the screening check in England, the number of children passing it has been rising steadily. Last year 74% of Year 1(P2) pupils met the expected standard of phonic decoding, compared with 69% in 2013 and 58% in 2012. I like to think that if we introduced the same test here in Scotland, our children’s scores would compare favourably. However, given the recent SSLN results, I’m not brave enough to make a bet.

Anne Glennie is a literacy consultant and a founding member of IFERI (International Foundation for Effective Reading Instruction)

As published in TES Scotland, Friday 12th June 2015, No.2423

For more information about IFERI and the Phonics Screening Check click here

Dr Marlynne Grant at researchED 2014

Dr Marlynne Grant is a chartered educational psychologist and a member of the Reading Reform Foundation. She is also the author of the high quality phonics programme, Sound Discovery. Her must-see talk below, which was given at researchED 2014, is about ‘What works to achieve accurate and confident literacy for whole classes of children, from Reception to Secondary’. The talk is in three parts, all are listed below.

The slides from Dr Grant’s talk are also available here: http://www.workingoutwhatworks.com/en-GB/Resource-library/Videos/2014/rED-v-marlynne-grant-2014

Thanks to researchED!

 

Samuel Blumenfeld author of Alpha-Phonics: A Primer for Beginning Readers and The Whole Language/OBE Fraud has died.

Author of many books and articles on the topic of what’s wrong with education, Blumenfeld has been described as a ‘lonely voice in the wilderness’. His latest book, “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children,” , co-authored with Alex Newman, was published last month (May 2015) by WND Books.

Much of Blumenfeld’s work was dedicated to exposing what he saw as a faulty method of teaching children to read and championing an alternative. His 1973 book, “The New Illiterates,” blamed the “whole-word” method of reading instruction for dyslexia and reading disabilities in many children.

Blumenfeld’s answer was always the same – intensive, systematic phonics. In 1983, he published “Alpha-Phonics: A Primer for Beginning Readers” as a way to help parents, teachers and tutors teach children to read in an easy, effective manner.

IFERI acknowledges Samuel Blumenfeld’s contribution to the promotion of effective reading instruction.

‘Why Children Fail to Read’ – a new paper by Sir Jim Rose – 1st June 2015

Why children fail to read

‘’We have an opportunity before us, not just in medicine but in virtually any endeavour. Even the most expert among us can gain from searching out the patterns of mistakes and failures and putting a few checks in place. But will we do it? Are we ready to grab onto the idea? It is far from clear.’’ (Atul Gawande: The Checklist Manifesto – How to get things right)

The internationally acclaimed surgeon Atul Gawande said that he was in the ‘disturbance business’. His riveting 2014 Reith Lectures, drew upon detailed case histories as he explored such disturbing issues as: ‘Why doctors fail’ despite  the track record of astonishing success of the medical profession.

Much like medicine, education is a ‘person-to–person’ service subject to human fallibility and to human ingenuity for solving problems: success is won by learning from our mistakes. Both professions look to research for solutions. They also rely on knowledgeable and skilled practitioners to make sure that decisions are ‘evidence -based’, and who are capable of making sound judgements when faced with the hard question: ‘what should we do when research is inconclusive, evidence is lacking and doing nothing is not an option?’  From the standpoint of teaching primary children with dyslexia and reading difficulties, this paper explores a small corner of what these two highly valued, life-changing endeavours might learn from each other.

While the quip that ‘Dyslexia is like Marmite, you either love it or hate it,’ may be true it does not help to resolve the debate on why some children have far more serious difficulties learning to read than others. We know for sure that Marmite exists. ‘Dyslexia’, however, continues to come under fire as a myth. At its unkindest, this myth portrays dyslexia as an expensive invention to ease the pain of largely but not only middle class parents who cannot bear to have their child thought of as incapable of learning to read for reasons of low intelligence, idleness, or both. What we can be sure of is that the deep anxiety suffered by parents and children when these stubborn reading difficulties persist is most certainly real and not imagined.

Labelling children to place them into fixed categories is always risky and calls for a separate discussion. Meanwhile, this debate has at least highlighted the question of how, so-called, ‘within the child’, inherited characteristics associated with dyslexia might be disentangled from reading difficulties associated with environmental factors ‘outside the child’, such as, poor quality teaching, weaknesses in parenting, disadvantageous socio-economic circumstances, or a sticky mix of all these conditions that obstruct learning to read. The hardly surprising consensus from research seems to be that both environmental and genetic factors influence reading ability. Further, where ‘genes were strongly implicated, it was more likely that the reading problem would be accompanied by broader difficulties with oral language  …’, [1]

‘Learn to read and read to learn’ is a familiar slogan worthy of a T-shirt. It encapsulates the obvious truth that the goal of reading is not only to sound out but also to understand the meaning of the words on the page. Those children who reach the expected standard in English at the end of their primary education have attained a good level of language comprehension as well as fluent, accurate word reading. Our national tests assess both attributes. The tests also allow us to assemble a picture of how well children spell and write and thus convey meaning to others. Another useful slogan is, ‘If they can’t say it they can’t write it.’ This reminds us of the importance of developing the spoken word and attentive listening, thereby enriching children’s vocabulary so that they have a good stock of words on which to draw.

Defining and getting to grips with the reading problems we are trying to fix are not about ‘blaming’ children, teachers, parents or poverty. Rather, we should start from a picture that is more reliable than dubious headlines about falling standards of reading in England.

According to the Government’s latest statistics [2], the great majority of children in England (nearly 90%) now learn to read to the standard expected of them by the age of eleven: ‘the 2014 figure for level 4 is the highest ever.’ This was far from the case in 1997 when only 69% did so. Should we be content with that rate of progress? The answer is no. We must strive for more because the figures mask patterns of serious under-achievement by vulnerable minority groups. Moreover, some schools in the most unpromising circumstances demonstrate that more is achievable, hence a fair judgement on the state of play might be: so far so good but not yet good enough.

To what might we attribute the rising trend in reading standards? At least four elements have come together to make a positive impact on children’s progress. First, there has been a powerful political and professional drive to prioritise and strengthen literacy, especially through the systematic teaching of reading in primary schools, and in the training of teachers. Secondly, this momentum has been backed by an unprecedented growth of good commercial and government-funded resources for teaching reading, with due attention to phonic work designed to make sure that children understand how the alphabet works for reading and writing. Thirdly, there has been a spectacular growth of excellent children’s literature by our world-class authors. Finally, the last decade or so has seen advances from research, for example, in neuroscience and cognitive psychology that have given us a better understanding of dyslexia, reading disorders and how the brain learns to read. It is often said that learning to read is a complex and difficult task but it is often forgotten that the brain is a complex and highly adaptable endowment that is well-capable of coping with that task in the great majority of children by the age of seven.

Because it is teachers whose knowledge and skills harness these resources to best effect for each child, we are told repeatedly that no education system can exceed the quality of its teachers. In recent years, someone coined the term ‘instructional casualties’ to describe a broad swathe of children who struggle to read because the quality of teaching they receive is simply not good enough, for long enough, for them to become fluent readers. Attaching percentages to the incidence of dyslexia, as factors within the child, compared to instructional failure, as weaknesses in teaching, is far from a precise science. However, it is safe to say that more children fetch up in the latter than in the former category. Moreover, overcoming instructional failure is within the control of the school whereas other factors, such as parenting and background conditions, though amenable to influence by the school, are much less so.

This era of ‘self-improving’ schools has thrown into sharp relief the urgency of strengthening the quality of teaching based on robust evidence of how successful learning is achieved. It is hardly surprising therefore that self-improving teachers are at the heart of self-improving schools. Acceptance of the virtue of reflective, self-improvement is a no-brainer. It should be an ethical principle which applies to all those who provide, and those who provide for, education, including teachers, school leaders and governors, as well as the recipients of education, that is to say, the pupils themselves. Willingness to ask: ‘What do I need to do to improve?’ is a positive and courageous acknowledgement of our ‘necessary fallibility’, irrespective of whether we are leading-edge surgeons or leading-edge teachers. For pupils, too, we ought to foster a strong ‘can do’ attitude and an appetite for self-improvement through which they learn to teach themselves worthwhile things.

Further, schools like hospitals know full well that there is no escape from professional accountability. OFSTED style inspections and published performance data, for example, are now common to both services. Where schools achieve an outstanding OFSTED report and high national test results parents   beat a path to their door in pursuit of a place for their child. Fail badly on these measures and heads will most likely roll, or resign. Within the context of accountability, recent statutory requirements, such as, the introduction of Education, Health and Care Assessments and plans which focus upon how well schools meet the needs of children with learning difficulties have been thrown into sharp relief and somewhat resemble Gawande’s enlightened idea of a safe-guarding checklist.

Anyone who has spent time working on the frontline, or as a recipient, of either of these two services will quickly conclude that lack of time to do the job well is often, in itself, a serious problem that bears upon the twin concerns raised by Gawande, notably, lack of professional knowledge and ‘ineptitude’: the latter being a failure to apply knowledge effectively.

The title of the memorable ‘Rag Trade’ TV series: ‘Never mind the quality feel the width’ might well describe the curriculum prior to its recent revisions. Unwittingly expanding the curriculum, under the banner of ‘breadth and balance’, has been a besetting sin of curriculum reviews. In consequence, slimming down the curriculum to make it more manageable and resistant to overload have been unmet goals of earlier reforms. Has the new National Curriculum and its assessment succeeded in meeting these goals where earlier attempts have failed? It seems the jury is still out. But the issue should be kept under review not least because of the heightened risk of failure that lack of time presents for those pupils who often need more regular, skilled teaching to become literate. Numeracy, too, should be held up to the same light.

Whatever else they do, primary teachers know full well that it is crucial to induct pupils into the symbolic system of language in its various manifestations because: ‘Language is the core symbolic system underpinning human cognitive activity, vastly increasing the efficiency of memory, reasoning and problem solving. Symbolic systems (language, writing, numbers, pictures, maps) enable the individual to develop a cognitive system that goes beyond the constraints of biology…’ [3]

Reading music, too, requires understanding its code, as indeed does computing where ‘coding’ is now embedded in the new primary curriculum. Making sufficient time for children to learn these various codes is a sizeable challenge for teachers and schools.

As the great edifice of inspection, assessment and testing, curriculum expansion and laudable attempts to co-ordinate services goes up, arguably, outstripping that of our allegedly more successful international counterparts, we may have forgotten that school time is finite. If so, we must find ways to prioritise the essential from the desirable and do less to achieve more. Though easier said than done, this suggests, that accountability for children’s success should extend beyond the frontline in schools.

For ‘instructional casualties’, as for ‘dyslexic casualties’, early identification through comparison with their typically developing peers, combined with good assessments, such as, the recently introduced ‘phonics check’ are invaluable starting points for teaching on a regular, daily basis and from which to plan for continuity. Further, one–to–one teaching interventions for reading need to be ‘quality assured’ and mesh with the rest of the curriculum to make sure that the total experience is coherent from the standpoint of the child.

One of the best recent summations on dyslexia is provided by Professor Dorothy Bishop [1]:

‘A genetic aetiology does not mean a condition is untreatable

Could genetic findings be useful in intervention? All too often it is assumed that if genetic effects are found, the child will be untreatable. Yet, high heritability does not imply immutability: it implies that the range of environmental experiences that is usually encountered in everyday life does not have much impact on a trait, but says nothing about potential impact of novel environmental experiences. When, for instance, a child has the heritable myopia, we do not treat them as passive victims of their genetic destiny. Instead, they are given spectacles: an intervention that is out- side the range of normal environmental experiences, but which is tailored to counteract the genetic effect. Similar logic can be applied in the case of dyslexia: if there are genetic variants that affect how children learn, we need to find out how they work to affect brain development and function. That will allow us to develop ways of intervening to over- come the problem—interventions that may need to be different from regular teaching experiences. We are still a long way from knowing how to do this, but genetic information points us towards the right path. It is not helpful to assume that all poor readers are the consequence of poor teaching and that additional or earlier reading instruction will fix the problem. We need studies that examine which kinds of reading instruction are most effective for children at high genetic risk, who often have disproportionate difficulties with aspects of speech sound analysis and associative learning that other children find easy. Genetic research does not lead us to write off children who are poor readers, but rather to recognize that they may need more individualized instruction tailored to their specific needs.’

Dyslexia is not yet well enough understood as an extreme reading disorder for which we have precise solutions. Pretending it is a myth, however, risks burying our heads in the sand and giving up the search. 

[1] The interface between genetics and psychology: lessons from developmental dyslexia: D.V. M. Bishop Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3UD, UK.  Proc. R. Soc. B 282: 20143139. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2014.3139

[2] Department for Education: National curriculum assessments at key stage 2 in England, 2014 (Revised)

[3] Foresight Mental Capital and Wellbeing Project (2008) Jim Rose 01.06.15

Download a PDF of the paper.