Worrying article: Driver Youth Trust - suggesting a 'focus on phonics' excludes children with special needs
Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2017 11:25 am
I've just read the most worrying article via the Times Educational Supplement (TES) regarding a 'focus on phonics' excluding special needs children!
I've left a comment accordingly.
https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/br ... cy-charity
I commented:
I recently flagged up that the Driver Youth Trust was publishing via the internet free guidance documents based on flawed reading strategies - the kind of multi-cueing guessing-words strategies that will fail the slowest and most disadvantage children the most! The Driver Youth Trust is also claiming the high results in the Year One phonics check in the Ark schools - with no mention of the Read Write Inc programme which is favoured in those schools. I find it extraordinary, too, that this piece is suggesting that some children need something different from phonics to become literate. Year on year, more and more schools are teaching phonics more effectively to the point of all, or virtually all, their children being able to decode real and pseudo-words in the phonics check. This indicates that teaching content and quality makes a difference as more teachers improve their phonics provision.
Would Chris Rossiter suggest that those 1,200+ schools achieving 95% to 100% of their children reaching or exceeding the 32 out of 40 benchmark in the phonics check simply don't get children with dyslexic tendencies or individual learning difficulties?
This is a worrying article for someone involved with SEND.
See here for my blog posting about this issue of continued promotion of flawed strategies, contra to the research on reading, being promoted by organisations often associated with special needs which includes mention of the Driver Youth Trust organisation:
https://phonicsintervention.org/.../big ... slexia.../
My apologies, I got the figure of 1,200+ schools slightly wrong, here is the DfE report with the exact figures:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/s ... 1_2016.pdf
I've left a comment accordingly.
https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/br ... cy-charity
And here is the comment I left. Note that I had already written about my concerns regarding guidance and free documents by various organisations associated with special needs via a blog I started quite recently. It is quite a coincidence, then, that Helen Ward's article is about the Driver Youth Trust criticising the 'focus on phonics'!Focus on phonics excludes SEND children from the discussion on literacy, charity warns
Helen Ward
23rd March 2017
We need policies and research that lead the way for children who face the greatest disadvantage – being ignored, says director the Driver Youth Trust
Children with special educational needs and disabilities are being left out of the discussion on how to improve literacy, according to a new report published today.
The report, "Through the Looking Glass", from the Driver Youth Trust, a literacy charity specialising in dyslexia, says the focus on phonics has shut down discussion on alternatives for those children for whom phonics proves ineffective.
“Phonics does not work for every learner,” the report states. “This needs to be accepted and alternative strategies for accessing literacy addressed, recognising that failure to pass a phonics test at age 5 or 6 does not mean a learner is destined for failure.”
The phonics test is taken by pupils at the end of Year 1. Children must read 40 words, including 20 non-words, aloud to their teacher, who marks the test. To reach the phonics standard, children must read 32 words correctly. In 2016, just 42 per cent of children with SEND reached the phonics standard, compared with 86 per cent of children without SEND.
The report adds that the term “universal provision” too often means provision for those children who can catch up – and ignores those with SEND, or sidelines them as the concern of specialist staff.
'What about the children who don't learn to read?'
“In the looking-glass world, we see oversimplified messages that suggest all children can learn to read if they just receive a good quality education, are read to by their parents and develop a love for reading,” Christopher Rossiter, author of the report and director of trust, says.
“Yet the evidence is clear – some children continue to fail to learn to read, write and spell to the expected standard. These children go on to be the 6 million adults in the UK who are functionally illiterate, which means they can’t read a tin of baked beans or the instructions on a packet of pills.
“These children need to be part of the agenda. We need policies and research that lead the way for children who face the greatest disadvantage; that is being ignored.”
"Through the Looking Glass" examines the focus of 21 strategies, policies and initiatives on literacy from organisations including Ofsted, the Department for Education and Save the Children.
It says that, while all the strategies had at heart “a commendable desire to improve literacy”, there was a confusion over which children are the true focus of literacy improvement, a limited discussion of SEND and a supposition that family background is the reason for a failure to progress rather than the school system.
“'Universal' needs to mean for everyone, it needs to be inclusive, and only then will we see a change in both what we understand to be literacy and in the achievements of our children and young people,” the report concludes.
The 21 documents analysed were published by: Ofsted, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Education, the Department for Education, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, the Sutton Trust, the Education Policy Institute, the Education Foundation, the National Literacy Forum, Beanstalk, the World Literacy Foundation, the National Literacy Trust and Save the Children.
I commented:
I recently flagged up that the Driver Youth Trust was publishing via the internet free guidance documents based on flawed reading strategies - the kind of multi-cueing guessing-words strategies that will fail the slowest and most disadvantage children the most! The Driver Youth Trust is also claiming the high results in the Year One phonics check in the Ark schools - with no mention of the Read Write Inc programme which is favoured in those schools. I find it extraordinary, too, that this piece is suggesting that some children need something different from phonics to become literate. Year on year, more and more schools are teaching phonics more effectively to the point of all, or virtually all, their children being able to decode real and pseudo-words in the phonics check. This indicates that teaching content and quality makes a difference as more teachers improve their phonics provision.
Would Chris Rossiter suggest that those 1,200+ schools achieving 95% to 100% of their children reaching or exceeding the 32 out of 40 benchmark in the phonics check simply don't get children with dyslexic tendencies or individual learning difficulties?
This is a worrying article for someone involved with SEND.
See here for my blog posting about this issue of continued promotion of flawed strategies, contra to the research on reading, being promoted by organisations often associated with special needs which includes mention of the Driver Youth Trust organisation:
https://phonicsintervention.org/.../big ... slexia.../
My apologies, I got the figure of 1,200+ schools slightly wrong, here is the DfE report with the exact figures:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/s ... 1_2016.pdf
School level figures are not published for phonics, but 1138 schools have at least 95% of the pupils achieving the phonics standard in year 1 in 2016 compared with 753 schools in 2015 and 611 in 2014.