To think literacy standards are not falling in way reports state? Did anyone see Sky TV interview earlier?

[Cortina]

Saw a report earlier that literacy standards in the UK are too low. We are continuing to fall behind in terms of the international league table.

Will come back and link to the report. I was struck by the TV row between the presenter and a teacher spokesperson. Did anyone see the interview? There was also a head of a UK based Chinese school who said she believed that part of the problem lay with parents who were not spending sufficient time helping children learn at home. She said good study habits needed to be laid down by the age of seven.

My thoughts are not that we are doing increasingly badly but other countries are doing better. More countries are involved in the international league table than previously too.

Literacy standards in the UK are apalling

We cannot rely on all parents to teach their children to read themselves and therefore the schools are massively failing the country and society.

What kind of life options are open to the functionally illiterate or inumerate? And yet one in 5 adults is functionally illiterate. So of your child's primary class of 30, 6 of them will never be literate. Is it any suprise that many of these kids will be persistently disruptive in your child's lessons until they leave school at 16? Shocking beyond all words.

They teach literacy for one hour a day for 7 years in primary school so there are no excuses for this epic fail. If the arguement is that class sizes are too big I would recommend we cut the class size in half for the first few years of school. Half the class can have morning school only and the other half can have afternoon school only.

My child had a reading age 2 years behind her actual age when she was 8, and this in a particularly middle class school with "good" ofsted ratings. Four years on, her reading age is now 3 years ahead of her chronological age - this is in no way due to the school helping her, I have had to pay for help. Without that help she would be illiterate.

I feel very strongly that standards in the UK are criminally low.

I do take blackeyedsusan's point that if a child is experimenting with vocabulary that it's as important to praise that effort as it is to correct the spelling mistakes, otherwise everything will just be "nice" and "good" rather than "interesting" and "fabulous".

In secondary school I had to take my English teacher aside at the end of a lesson when I was 12 and admit I didn't understand the apostrophe rules at all and couldn't get the hang of it from her corrections, that I had never been taught at primary school and needed an explanation. Five minutes later, I had it.

I would just like to say something to the posters who've 'jumped on' things that other posters, such as Lifeissweet, have said about what teachers prioritise in their teaching and their marking and why.

You're just shooting the messenger. When teachers tell you what they do and why, don't make the mistake of thinking they believe it all, or that they, have any control over it whatsover.

When we're on our training courses and Inset days, we're being told by LA educational advisors and 'experts' exactly how to 'do' our job. And we get assessed and performance managed on our adherence to this. It's a job, we get told how to do it by our bosses (the government) and we do it.

We don't have the choice as to whether we follow this or not, we have to do it. So if we get told that in a piece of work we can only correct three spellings, then we can only correct three spellings. Because if we don't, the HT wants to know why the next time there's a 'book trawl' and there's only so many run ins with SMT I want to have because I'm challenging an interpretation of government policy I have no power to change on my own on a Thursday morning!

A lot of the way literacy is taught 'currently', is about catching lower attaining children and encouraging reluctant writers. The idea being, as Lifeissweet said, that an already reluctant writer might decide to not bother again if the piece of work they have returned to them has several spelling/grammatical errors highlighted to them, however, 'nicely' it is done. The current focus is on encouraging, facilitating and enabling creativity and ideas, rather than some of the other aspects of literacy that might have taken precedence during our own education. Whether you think that is bollocks or not is up to you (and may or maynot be right), but it's not the fault of teachers.

And as someone else eluded to earlier, a teacher's own skills, knowledge and understanding of any subject is only as good as the education they themselves received. They haven't just abandoned their own knowledge and don't give a shit. So clearly there were failings in their education too. We had the same educational experience as our peers, PGCEs don't fill in the gaps in our own primary and secondary education! They tell us what the current government values and expects to see, ideas we can use in lessons to teach this and how we should mark them.

I don't know what the answer is. I see some things in schools, particularly lower down in primary, that I think are brilliant, I see other things (my own son's secondary work) that make me despair. I think we might need to pay a bit more attention to what other countries are doing so well and seeing what we can learn from them.

Data blast over

Oh and I never understood English grammar properly until I did German GCSE.

Regardless of what is considered important these days, we still need to be able to communicate our ideas and understand other people's ideas.
If we can't express ourselves properly there's little chance of that.

I recognise that languages evolve, but I draw the line at basic things such as there/their/they're.

5foot5: "What amused me was that the minister sounding off about this (didn't catch his name) said that "23% of children are leaving primary school with below average literacy"

There was a Guardian blog about this. The person quoted was Michael Wilshaw, head of Ofsted, and he later said that it was a "slip of the tongue". He didn't mean average apparently, he meant expected standard.

www.guardian.co.uk/politics/reality-check-with-polly-curtis/2012/mar/15/ofsted-chief-maths-wrong

You're just shooting the messenger. When teachers tell you what they do and why, don't make the mistake of thinking they believe it all, or that they, have any control over it whatsover.

When we're on our training courses and Inset days, we're being told by LA educational advisors and 'experts' exactly how to 'do' our job. And we get assessed and performance managed on our adherence to this. It's a job, we get told how to do it by our bosses (the government) and we do it

How true! It is laughable that you think that teachers can mark in a way that they want to. When I started teaching you were allowed to- but now, even as a supply teacher, you have to have the school's marking code and stick to it.

The 'in' thing is green and pink. I think that it is to get away from the negative red, but you underline the best bits in pink and highlight in green the corrections as in 'tickled pink' and 'green for growth'. Peer marking is 'in' too. When you have been in it for a long time you see it all. There was a time when you only used pencil and a time when you didn't write anything-in case it stunted their creativity!!

The Head will take in a selection of books to check the marking -i.e. mark the teacher's marking!

There have been too many changes. Things are never given long enough before it is decided it wasn't working and it is 'try something else'.

A lot of DCs simply don't have time. Whoever decided on the old Literacy Hour with 10 mins on something didn't appreciate that it can take a 5 yr old almost that long to find a pencil!

Slow writers can take ages to write down the objective of the lesson, and you wonder why they need to if the teacher has already written it down.

I agree that standards of the written word, particularly among young adults are pretty bad (don't even get me started on incorrect use of apostrophes!), BUT I agree with the posters about not always correcting everything or marking down for bad spelling if that isn't what the learning objective is about.

DD1 is 9 and knows she spells badly (and we're working on it), however she also writes poetry and has won competitions for it. If every time she wrote a poem her teacher returned it to her covered in red pen with all the spelling mistakes marked, she would quickly form the impression that it was "all wrong" or "bad" which isn't always helpful when the aim is to produce a piece of creative writing using complicated descriptive words.

I think the minister must have made a mistake when he said 23% were below average. For it is clear that what was meant is that 23% were not achieving the expected level and that is not the same thing at all, and it is far too many children who are being failed.

Is level 4 not the level achieved by the average child then? So that if 23% achieve below a level 4, then 23% of children would be below average?

It seems to be kind of odd that multiple posters would be having this discussion about what is actually primary school level understanding of averages.

I really feel I must be missing something here because I don't see why the statement is odd or confusing. If, for example, 15% of children get a 5, 23% of children get a 3 and 62% get a 4, then 23% of children are below average.

No, level for is the expected level of achievement for all pupils.

So the "average" would be some way above this.

Obviously there will always be children who do not reach the expected standard (SEN, new arrivals) but it should not be one fifth of the school population.

When children are doing a piece of writing, there will be a set learning objective, for example: use connectives to join simple sentences. They will be marked on their use of connectives. Spellings are phonics are taught in discrete lessons. I do agree that spellings should be returned to on a regular basis as they do get forgotten.

LeQueen Hi, no, not an English teacher, I teach primary.

It wasn't me on the other thread that talked about Shakespeare writing in middle English. Not having studied Shakespeare since A Level I'd be very careful saying anything about Shakespeare

ClothesOfSand We are encouraged not to think in terms of 'the average child' when discussing the magic 4b target for maths and English at KS2. Rather, that's the target level for students at KS2. Of course, it translates into 'the average child' but the very fact we aren't supposed to say it shows just how confusing all the Education Speak can be for everyone!

I can understand a reluctance to correct a child's spelling and grammar errors, especially when they need a lot of encouragement to write in the first place. The six year-old in my house is just now starting to have a go at writing on her own, without copying text, and is finally writing actual words down instead of gibberish. She wrote a note to her teacher last week that said, "Yu or the best teechr." I told her she'd done really well, but corrected the spellings and she re-wrote the letter. The next day she wrote a bunch of gibberish in her notebook again and told me, "I can't really write real words." :(

There is a balance to strike, and it's been difficult for me personally, looking after just one child, to find it. So, I can understand how challenging that must be when one is looking after 30. I do think it needs to be done, though. Poor spelling and grammar make you look like you are careless at best, and ignorant at worst.

A few years ago, a good friend of mine at uni asked me to proofread a biology paper that she was about to hand in. There were so many basic errors (e.g. "How spiders make silk?"), I didn't have the heart to correct them; I was afraid I would hurt her feelings marking the whole paper up. I suggested she speak to her biology instructor instead. She was 22 at the time.

The learning authority experts may think they are encouraging children to write when they save spelling and grammar training for separate lessons only, but it is corrections to our writing that reinforce what those spelling and grammar lessons teach in the first place. I feel like I did the wrong thing correcting my stepdaughter's spelling, but I'm going to keep trying to find a good way to do it. I don't want her to reach age 22, submitting papers to university tutors that make her look like a dizzy girl who didn't pay attention in class.

Yes, what blackeyedsusan says is quite true. If the LO is, as she suggests, To use connectives to join simple sentences, then that is what will be marked. You're not really supposed to 'mark' other elements of the work because the connectives are what you are marking and otherwise it could be seen as trying to catch the pupil out.

And you can't give quality marking on that LO if you're also picking up on capital letters in the middle of words, missed capitals at the start of sentences, full stops at the end of sentences, comma use or spellings.

Those will be marked on another day, and with another LO...

LeQueen That's ok , but tbf, teachers do sometimes make errors because of things they were taught at school. I've learned to be very mistrustful of some of the 'facts' I was taught at school and never pass anything on without checking it holds with current thinking!

My current bugbear is emails and presentations from dd's school informing us of upcoming parent's evenings.

At a recent open evening, when it was in a presentation unfortunately dd wouldn't let me put my hand up and ask how they would select the lucky parent.

In my job I recruit and sift for work placements. We need good communication skills amongst those we take on. It makes short listing easier, if somewhat dismaying, to reject all those with spelling and grammatical errors.

In answer to the op, yes, standards have fallen.

To anyone who worries about their grammar / syntax may I recommend "English for Journalists" by Wynford Hicks? It's very good at highlighting common mistakes and beating them out of you

Well I'm dyslexic. And I had a very poor school education (much better at tertiary level).
My spelling and grammar are attrocious.

Hilariously I make my living (and a very nice one thnks very much) from writing. So I guess letting my creative spirit soar while not worrying about their and there did me only good!

However, let's be honest, how many of our DC are going to make their living writing creatively? Hmmmm. I'd much rather they learn the nuts and bolts of good spelling etc. For most of them it will be faaaarrrr more important. And they won't have an editor on hand to help .
And, I'm going to stick my neck out here and say most English teachers and certainly most primary teachers are not qualified in the least to teach creative writing!!!!

The biggest problem facing literacy among kids is an emphasis on learning at home. In an ideal world every chil dwould have parents who could and would halp them in this but in the real world there are many people either can't/ won't do so. People have long working hours, some parents haven't had a particulary good education themselves, a lot of kids have a busy after school schedule, whether these are valid excuses or not, the fact remains that kids are not all given the same help at home. The schools seem to feel that they are vindicated in bad resukts because they can blame the parents - "we send homework/ reading books/ spelling lists etc home and it's not our fault if the children don't do it". When I was in school, the onus was on the teachers to teach us and on the parents to do the "fun" things like building models etc. My kids come home from school having spent three weeks of literacy watching and re-watching Bugs Life, in order to write their own story about an insect. Why not read a book about a bug instead? I also take issue with the lack of writing that kids are expected to do ina school day. Our English book would be full every term, now an excercise book may last 2 years. They are given "fill-in-the-gaps" worksheets instead of being expected to write out full answers. They no longer do dictation as it "stifles imagination", I disagree, I believe taht it taught children to spell and write fluently with speed, if there was an issue with imagination then dictate the start of a story and get the children to finish it using their own imagination. I could go on all day, but will shut up now,