What do you think of the Education White Paper?

[Shamster]

Our head went through the key points at last nights staff meeting and the effect was pretty depressing. Sounds stupid but two of us almost started crying! Just wondered if anyone has read it for themselves, rather than picking up whichever bits each paper decides to highlight according to their leanings. If you have; what do you think?

Actually, do you know what? I have no idea how this turned into a slagging match. Mrz, Moondog and Feenie; you seem to be intent on putting other people down and quite frankly, it's sad. People are entitled to their opinions and an opinion can given without insulting a person who doesn't see things the same way as you. Sandytoes79, I'm sorry that you're at the end of another users rudeness. Isn't the whole point that children learn different ways and take different amounts of time to do that. Which one of you three are going to put a big chunk of this in speech marks and throw it back at me?

The vast majority of English words are phonically regular.

Can I ask you which words you think are not?

You may be interested in this document by Debbie Hep, which gives an excellent overview of the code of letter/sound correspondences in the English language.

I'm sorry you are bored with your deeply flawed (mis)conception of the English language.

buy, by, bye.
station, though, thought, cough. They're, Their, there etc.

I'm married to a linguist who also agrees that English is highlt irregular. Arabic, on the other hand, is completely regular; every word is written exactly as it is spelt.

You're confusing perfectly decodable with mostly decodable - if someone bothers to arm a child with the code. Why wouldn't you give children those skills?

by, bye - perfectly decodable. y and ye are alternative graphemes of the 'I' sound, as in my, sky, sty, rye, dye, fly - shall I go on?

I may give you buy - although guy uses the same grapheme. I did say mostly decodable.

station - do you not teach children that 'a' is an altrenative grapheme for the 'ai' phoneme then? Jeez. Or that 'tion' makes the 'shun' sound? Why not?

though - accepted alternative grapheme for the 'oa' sound. (e.g. dough)

thought - ough: accepted alternative grapheme for 'or' - bought, sought, brought. See? (How do you teach spelling, incidentally? Genuinely interested.)

Cough - gh is an alternative grapheme for 'f' - e.g laugh

Continued...

There/their - both eir and ere are alternative graphemes for 'air' - heir, where.

You can have they're, but they and are are simples.

I guess you've been looking at the chart you sent me, which is very similar to the Jolly Phonics one, by the way. Listen Feenie, I do teach phonics I do believe that it is a part of reading. In phonetically regular languages, there are no alternative graphemes, as I'd have thought you would understand. I'm not bored of the phonics argment, although I do think you and I will never agree on this one. I feel bored because this wasn't what this post was originally about. Phonics is a tiny part of a very big paper. I wanted to know what people thought about the education paper and the tread has, as somebody else put it, been hijacked by a few people dogmatically sticking to one point. Had I opened up a discussion about phonics that would be great. I respect that people can disagree with me, but the implication that I am a poor teacher, a bad SENCo, a joke etc, is insulting. Anyone got anything to say about the education paper or is this thread dead in the water now? Cough, yes I know ph is 'f'. I was more concerned with the 'ou' bit of it.

Sorry, not a primary teacher, but an ELT specialist - no idea why you're all picking on shamster, who is entirely correct. English is not like Spanish, say, where all words can be read once you know the sounds the letters make. In English, it's all very well knowing the theory that ough can be an oh sound or an off sound or an oo sound - but how the hell do you get to read fluently if you have to try out every variant on every word?

The answer is - you don't. You learn and remember it, so next time you see it, you recognise it, recognise the 'shape' if you like.
I'm currently teaching my 4 year old to read - if I had to wait until his class had covered the 'th' sound in class, he wouldn't currently be able to read any book with 'the' in. I'm teaching him, as I learnt to read and as his sisters learnt to read, with nice vintage Peter and Jane books, so he can learn key words' whole' as it were. Worked for me - I can still vividly remember exactly what every word looked like in my first readers, on the page. Worked for my DDs, who are top of their classes and learned to read long before their peers, and who are far more fluent readers. Sure, they did the synthetic phonics at school - it all helps.

But to say that it is enough or the most efficient method in English is laughable - try reading a common sentence like 'the woman is here' - you'd have to have gone through about 3 years of synthetic phonics before you could handle all those supposedly complex sounds.

As I explain endlessly to numerous distressed Italians/Spaniards etc etc, ENGLISH IS NOT SAID THE WAY IT IS WRITTEN. And there is really no point at all in pretending it is.

By the way, thanks for your reply, shamster. Interested in some of the points you raise - can't quite believe thwey're planning to get rid of the 'value addd' - have I understood you right?

That would be a massive change, certainly.

Thank you so much garnted! I completely and utterly agree with you.

Sorry; Granted!

No they're keeping value added but taking away context value added. So basically they'll look at the bits they want to rather than the whole picture. So nice to have something to respond to that is about the paper!

It isn't as phonetically regular as, say, Spanish. But it is mostly decodable. It is widely accepted (except by you and your dh) that it is around 85% phonetically regular.

I still don't know how any teacher can say that picture clues are a recognised reading startegy with a straight face.

Debbie Hep used to be a Jolly Phonics consultant, so it isn't surprising that her chart is similar.

" how the hell do you get to read fluently if you have to try out every variant on every word?"

The vast majority of Reception children learn how to do this very quickly and with ease. You need to see a good Reception teacher teaching a phonics session - I have, and the children can spot lots of alternative graphemes instantly. 'The' is taught extremely quickly, as a 'tricky' word which is partly decodable.

'The woman is here' - all of those phonemes would be covered in Reception, and definitely in Year 1 - even if sticking rigidly to Letters and Sounds.

Sorry granted. There is somebody here that simply won't move on. They clearly don't value your or my opinion it is nice to know you tried to get this back on track. My Dad is not english, and he knows too well the complexity of the English language. So much so that after 45 year of living here, he still can not spell things correctly. I remeber being to told by my Arabic teacher, when I was trying to learn Arabic that the easiest way to learn to speak Arabic was by learning the alphabet and then learning to read. She said it was a completely regular language and very easy once you had the letters of the alphabet.

Shamster is clearly an advocate of the discredited ?Whole Language/constructivist? ideology which objects to direct, explicit and systematic teacher-directed instruction in the hierarchy of prearranged discrete reading skills, suggesting that it is somehow not in the child?s best interest to be properly taught the foundational skill of decoding in the manner proved by scientific, evidenced based research to be the most effective for all children, especially for disadvantaged children ? synthetic phonics.

Shamster?s objection to the test of decoding skills is that it will do precisely what s/he does not want to do ? teach all children to read and write using proven methods.

Instead, s/he would prefer that the current status quo where an unacceptably large percentage of our children, especially disadvantaged children who do not have families with the resources to supplement inadequate classroom teaching at home and actually rely on their teachers and schools to do the job they are paid to do, to endure 10 years of formal schooling with basic reading and writing skills too weak to access the curriculum or for the everyday activities of adult life.

I hope the proposed decoding test identifies Shamster and others like him/her in our schools and boots them out as quickly as possible.

I've never heard of that approach. As I've stated, I do teach and believe in phonics as part of a system that responds to each childs individual needs. You know nothing about the children I've taught and the success I've had with them. I'm absolutely disgusted at the level of personal attack that has taken place on this posting which WAS ABOUT THE EDUCATION PAPER. I believe, as does my school that I am a good teacher. How dare you suggest that I want a large percentage of children to fail.I thought that Mumsnet was a place for informed, polite discussions. Instead, what I've found out tonight is that there are people that seem to enjoy flinging mud and upsetting people. I've met some tricky parents face to face, but never actually been as upset as I feel tonight. A question to the three or four people who've decided to take me to task over a view that they think I have; have any of you read the Education White Paper? Do with this thread what you will. There's clearly no point in trying to have an intelligent conversation about the paper when all you want to do is boot me out of education. For the record, I have not once said that I am against testing reading at 6. If you're going to have a pop, you should bother to read the entire thread first.

"Shamster is clearly an advocate of the discredited ?Whole Language/constructivist? ideology which objects to direct, explicit and systematic teacher-directed instruction in the hierarchy of prearranged discrete reading skills, suggesting that it is somehow not in the child?s best interest to be properly taught the foundational skill of decoding in the manner proved by scientific, evidenced based research to be the most effective for all children, especially for disadvantaged children ? synthetic phonics."

Can I quote you in Pseud's Corner?

What a load of guff.

No need to be gratuitously rude to shamster, by the way, just because you disagree with her views on reading.

Feenie - the problem with your reply - which I dare say is correct - that 85% of words are decodeable is that many if not most of the really high frequency words fall into the 15% - which is why Peter and Jane's 'key word' scheme worked so well for my, my DCs and numerous other children.

I never learned to sound out irregular words - I didn't need to - I recognided whole words which saved me a whole hgeap of time and effort.

Not saying that some kids might not struggle with this (those with poor visual memories?), but to deny all childen the opportunity to learn to read by this means because it is not suitable for all is just bizarre.

Should add my spelling (though not my typing, lo!) are the best of anyone I've ever met - that visual memory, whole-word thing again. MYDH, incidentally, who learnt to read with synthetic phonics, can't spell for toffee - because he expects things to spell as he's sounded them out in his head.

Basically, synthetic phonics is a great method - for learning other languages. Not English. I've taught thousands of foreigners English and unlike kids they can articulate exactly what does and doesn't work for them. If synthetic phonics was suh a great method we'd use it to teach non-native speakers to learn to read English too.

We don't.

You'd be laughed out of the place if you suggested using that method within an ELT context.

Shamster, try not to take attacks too personally - some right weirdos on tonight. Totally out of order, though.

To return to topic - can you explain the difference between value added and context value added, please?

Again, thank you granted.

I feel quite angry for you.

Really unpleasant attacks - no idea why reading methodologies should cause that level of angst!!!

I can do granted, but not tonight. I'm ready for my bed now! I wil return to this post though, and reply on Sunday. Am away this weekend. Phew; wasn't really expecting a fight!

So much for a decent discussion about the White Paper ?? It's been like peeping into a dysfunctional staff room . Sorry you seem to have had a rough time Shamster.

I used to think that synthetic phonics was the best way to go about teaching reading. DD1 was taught this way and was sounding out and blending with the best of her classmates.

DD2 was a totally different kettle of fish, however. I don't think she ever really 'got' phonics yet is a perfectly proficient reader. It dawned on me after a while (after many evenings of trying to get her to sound out words from her readers, in fact) that she had learnt to read words by sight.

Her primary (big advocates of synthetic phonics) didn't seem to see this and at one stage DD (yr2 at the time) was sent back down to yr1 for phonics catch up sessions whilst being one of the best readers of her class. She probably reads more fluently now than DD1 did at her age. Using one method to teach all students doesn't seem like a good idea IMO.

By the way a language teacher once told me that most Spanish children arrive at primary school reading or well on their way to fluency because spanish is such a phonetic language - vowel sounds, for example, in Spanish are very easy - a, e, i, o, u are always pronounced the same way. If you compare that to english it's easy to see why some students struggle to become proficient readers early on.

Golly. I am totally about the removal of pastoral care from inspections.

How very depressing...I predict an enormous rise in HE soon. Within three years...I reckon current numbers will double.