School not sending physical books home for phonics learning

[LoftyPlumFox]

I might just be massively behind the times but... my daughter has just started Reception and we are expected to read online books with her to practice phonics. We don't have a tablet at home so this would have to be on a laptop. Am I being unreasonable to expect a physical book to be sent home so we can read it together on the sofa rather than on a laptop screen?? Or is this the norm at primary schools these days?

My children are 11 and 8 and they read more books in school than I ever did in school in the 90s. Our teachers read to us in primary but we didn’t have the physical books to follow along with like they do now. Reading after school is pushed a lot more too. My daughter is in year 7 t a local state. The English homework is online (sparx reader so basically an e book) , but on top of that they have guided reading every day where the whole form group read together, these are classics the school think you should read and then at the end of the day they have 10 minutes of personal reading where they read their own books. I assume it’s not hugely dissimilar across the country.

It's a good thing you aren't in charge of national reading policy then, isn't it, as "I did just fine" does not trump "the research over many years and thousands of kids shows..."

We all know the importance of books and the downsides to screens. So many children will be affected by this especially those that can’t afford books.

Its surprising though because BP has said every school must have a library and £10m has been set aside for this.

Lastly, I assume it’s cheaper because parents are expected to have the tech needed. No doubt some will cotton in to this and before long school will be providing the tech at a cost if £££! I’m also guessing it won’t be that much cheaper as these companies will have a model that means it isn’t.

How could we fine parents of children that come in without breakfast, or don’t take their jumper off on a very hot day because ‘mummy doesn’t want it lost’? Also, people say just go to the library but many libraries do not have a scheme of phonetically decodable books, not to mention that the children who really really need the practise come from a family where library attendance is not part of what they do.

@1apenny2apenny how far do you think £10m goes? There are about 9m pupils in England across about 30,000 schools. That wouldn’t even buy one book per pupil

It was tried but with all best intentions, you can’t make people pay if they can’t, or they don’t want to.

Have you had an Ofsted since doing this? We did exactly what you said in my last school, our EYFS and KS1 staff spent literally days of their own time in the summer holidays going through book by book to match it to the SW scheme they started using. Ofsted came and the inspector picked them up on a singular instance of the ‘oy’ sound in a book which had been matched to a unit before that sound had been taught. The vast majority of old Pink and Red band books have sounds which are way past the Reception phases and this makes it very difficult to TRULY match them up.

I am going to assume that this school uses the Little Wandle phonics scheme where ch have 3 reads of that book a week in school focusing on different skills - it is then sent home to practise with. Ch move very rapidly through this scheme and many schools arw inundated with ch learning phonics uo to year 6 which means a lot of books are required and they are often rotated though school. These books arw incredible expensive and schools just don't have the funding to buy enough to send them home for the amount of pupils learning phonics (as its not just reception ch anymore). Whilst I agree physical books are best this is for phonetically practise only and you can still.enjot other books at home with your ch. I personally make sure my class have a tell to the library once a week and take home a book for pleasure. If I have certain parents that have issues with online books or are reducing screen time I then spend lots of time photocopying those books for them. Unfortunately it's just not so black and white.

Of course schools would prefer you to read actual physical books to using an e-book but they would prefer you to use an e-book compared to no book at all. They are hard pressed to send physical books home now due to lack of funds and because there is a significant proportion of parents and children in this country who vandalise or break books or don’t return them regularly and expect the school to just deal with it. Replacing books cost money.

Fortunately, you can go to the library to get as many books as you want for free, buy books cheaply online or in charity shops or borrow them off friends and other children.

When we grew up it was never expected that the school would provide an endless stream of books and if they didn’t, it didn’t mean literacy and reading stopped. How peculiar. Everyone who wanted to read at home or who wanted to encourage reading at home either bought books or used the library. It was never seen as the schools job to provide basic life resources. It’s lovely if kids can check out books from the school library but if they can’t, just go to any library or buy them.

Yes, things really are fucked, I'm glad people are noticing.

Schools can't afford books.

Schools can't afford to replace crumbling buildings.

Schools can't afford to pay class TAs so many schools are just one teacher and 30 pupils. Before people say, 'well, I was at school with just one teacher and no TA and that was fine, the teacher should be able to cope'-I can guarantee the curriculum and expectations were completely different, the behaviour was very different and if a child kicked/bit or hit the teacher, they probably wouldn't have been staying in that class for long without support, they would also not have had high need pupils who are non-verbal and in nappies, alongside 5-6 others with ASD, ADHD, and no funding with which to support them.

Schools can't afford to pay experienced teachers so are putting them on 'support' plans to make their life so horrendous, they leave to free up some money in the budget which is desperate.

Schools are putting unqualified staff in to replace them and just not telling parents.

Yes, things are very fucked.

I didn't vote, because on the one hand, I can't think of many things duller than learning to read without access to physical books. On the other, you'd have to be living under a rock somewhere not to know about the financial pressures schools are living with and why e-books might be seen as a way to cover the gap. As others have said, there are children living in homes that don't rattle with gadgets and they'll miss out, maybe to the extent of being held back in possibly the most important thing school has to offer, literacy. That's awful, but if schools are going with what they can get most of their parents to accept, there are good reasons for it. The only way to avoid the trade-off between school budgets and acceptable provision for children regardless of family circumstances is for a lot more money to go into schools and it's hard to see how that will happen.

It's a lot more complex than just money though. For one thing, while learning to read from physical books is easier more pleasurable for some children, learning to read and being a reader aren't necessarily the same. I'm lucky enough to have learned in the late 60s/early 70s, when reading practice was a regular fixture in the primary school day (I don't know if it still is.) Having done the technical stuff with my teacher, and Peter and Jane, Topsy and Tim etc, I went home (I can't remember if we took our reading scheme books home or not) and I was lucky again. We had comics, books and newspapers about the house long before I'd properly grasped the technicalities, so I sharpened my skills with the misdeeds of Naughty Amelia Jane and became a reader. And of course, it was a pre-screen age. Budgetary constraints aside, nowadays we do so much on screens, that many children are more attuned to them than they are to paper and ink and that's how they learn best.

100% this. I'm not buying into the argument that parents can't afford to pay deposits for relatively cheap books, but they're magically affording tablets for their children. Completely unfair of the schools to push this expense AND to ignore scientific evidence of the nagative impact of screen use on children. It's crazy.

iPads are also expensive and get lost and damaged… but they can afford those! Plus any amount of gamified shitty Edtech apps….

Ipads don't get sent home at primary school, not where I live anyway.

Yes, I loved the local library as a child/teen, school library wasn't great though.

Agreed. So often it's that someone is promoted into a role where they have a larger budget than they were used to, so they knee jerk into paying for some shiny techy subscription that everyone else has to be trained to use and is a bore. Then the school is locked into paying for it for a certain time and then there's the sunk costs fallacy. Aargh

It’s the norm at my DS’s school because of reduced budgets.

I bought a lot of the reading scheme books online, but now follow the set text weekly on a laptop now DS is in year 2. I don’t want to encourage screens either but this way it avoids the iPad and I don’t spend £5 a week anymore on physical phonics scheme books though I still spend far too much on lots of other books for him.

They do where I live, from the age of 7.

Our school tried this one year, along with an online reading diary. The next year physical books and diaries were back. I'm guessing less parents read with their child at home when it meant faffing about with apps and huddling around a phone screen. I'm not sure what they cut from the budget to make this possible but I am so glad to see the books back!

Maybe schools should hold frequent book amnesties or have some place where books can be discreetly posted back, no questions asked.

Speak to the teacher and say you don't have a tablet. Chances are they do have some physical versions of the book - just perhaps not enough for everyone in the class.

You can only ask and see what happens.