to find it difficult to take the year one phonics test seriously?

[xmasadsboohiss]

i understand the theory behind it, but i still think it's bonkers!

If all teachers had been properly teaching phonics the government wouldn't have felt a need to introduce a test to check ...

A teacher/school secure they are doing a good job shouldn't need to get all stressed about it, and thus should not be making it into any kind of big deal to the children.

I think the fact that there are schools with pass rates as low as 29% shows exactly why teachers can't be trusted. This test was never meant to be a dtck to beat teachers with. It was supposed to pick up the small percentage of children who are at risk of having reading issues later on.

Unfortunately the low pass rates showed something else. And the blame for that doesn't lie with the gvt. If schools decide that the way they are going to address that is to put pressure on the childten rather than address their own practice I supect that says mpre about their professionalism than it does about the govrnment.

This check should have been a complete non issue.

It is also worth knowing that this year the pass mark hasn't been announced ahead of time. In fact it won't be announced until the 30th by which time all the papers have to be in.
This could be so that teachers don't 'make sure' that children reach the pass mark. But if someone was of a conspiratorial nature then they could come to the conclusion that the pass mark isn't going to be announced until they have had the results in and decided what it suits them for it to be.

Rafa do you think that teachers don't know which children are at risk of having difficulty with reading?

At the school where I teach, the children who have finished or almost finished Read Write Inc pass and those who haven't don't. There are no surprise results ever. It is a waste of time, which could be spent helping those children who need it.

The phonics check has focussed schools attention on teaching phonics properly. It is high lighted the fact that the teachers at dd's school didn't know their arse from their elbow when it came to phonics teaching.

I wish there was a better way of testing the way that children are taught phonics.

CrystalSkulls

They've just switched from using Jolly Phonics to the "Read Write Inc" system, and i think the new one is much better than jolly phonics!

Most teachers have very little training in phonics. PGCE courses hardly touch on it.

RWI is much better than Jolly phonics.

The books that tie in are so much more interesting for a start.

Our school didn't use JP books, they used Dandelion Readers/Launchers and Jelly and Bean, plus the ORT Songbirds.

My DD loved the Dandelion books, and I have to say I think they're the best phonics readers I've seen so far.

temporarilyjerry, I assume if you are teaching RWI then you are well trained. It is probably a mistake to extend that to all schools. The NFER report was pretty damming. Of the 60% of year 1 teachers that said they taught systematic phonics, closer examination of the answers to their survey revealed that most (about 87%) were likely to be using mixed methods and didn't really understand what 'systematic phonics first and fast means'.

If that's reflected nationally, that leaves us with 40% saying they teach multicueing strategies, 52% saying they teach systematic phonics but who are actually teaching multicueing strategies and about 8% who are actually teaching systematic phonics.

Those figures probably roughly match what I get from talking to people on my BEd who are still working in KS1. Maybe less in the multicueing group and more in the group that think they are teaching systematic phonics. Some of them have pretty poor phonic knowledge which is not surprising given we got 1hr of training on a 4 yr BEd that dedicated 30hrs teaching time to how to teach reading.

So, as much as it pains me to say it, I'm no longer entirely convinced that many teachers are able to assess correctly even if they think they are. Which doesn't mean that there aren't lots of teachers out there who are doing a very good job of it.