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?

Feenie - in that case your methods sound quite reasonable, but I still think you do shamster's views a disservice, as I don't think she really disagrees with your practice at all - the only matter of difference appears to be the issue of picture clues, which as I stated, really doesn't seem so controversial to me (I say with my parent hat on). She never climed it her main method or first choice, just an avenue she would explore if all else failed.

Seems reasonable to me.

I believe Moondog already has a job - she is a SALT, I think. Thank Christ someone knows what she is talking about.

What's a SALT?

She cited it first in a list of alternative methods, decried phonics teaching as totally without comprehension teaching and confessed she didn't believe that English is decodable - yet that's what she teaches.

Why are you defending her?

Speech and Language Therapist.

You seem ignorant of a lot of things, considering your profession, granted.

Why am I defending her?

Because I felt you were attacking her (a) unfairly in terms of what she had actually said, and (b) unnecessarily personally, in a matter likely to and designed to wound personally.

And she was too nice and polite to respond in like manner.

Yes, I'm ignorant of acronyms used in primary schools.

Guilty as charged.

I've never worked in one.

Sppech and language therapists work in a related but possibly paallel profession to ELT; our paths don't really cross.

Horrified to hear that someone who laughs at people being killed by the police works with vulnerable children.

You keep repeating the accusation, yet cannot find any evidence to back it up. I suggest you either reread the thread to finally do so, or try to find some sound educational theory to back up those 3 ridiculous points. The latter will take you more time, however, since you won't find any.

I've no idea why it should be controversial, either. You would think that a method of teaching reading which suceeds brilliantly with all but a tiny number would be welcomed. But this 'war' has been raging for decades now all over the English speaking world. Some very highly respected academics have had hate mail, death threats, the lot, because they dared to suggest that learning the English Alphabetic code, how letters correspond to the phonemes of English and how to 'decode' and blend for reading was the best way to teach the foundational skills of reading.

I am, personally, absolutely sick to death of snidey comments about phonics being all about big business and right wing politics.

Of course, all the developers of 'look and say'/Whole word programmes, authors of How to Teach Reading (the lunatic way) books and the publishers of ORT and similar reading schemes are all doing it out of the goodness of their bleeding left wing hearts and never take a penny in profit. Not to mention the huge and profitable 'dyslexia' industry which has grown very fat on children's struggles to learn to read.

Right wing? Don't make me laugh! I would DIE rather than vote Conservative.

I rather think that the ignorance which is displayed on many 'reading' threads about the English Alphabetic code and the teaching of reading stems from the fact that most people under the age of about 40 never had any good, systematic phonics teaching (I said most, before you all start shouting) so have absolutely no idea how it works and are really in no position to pass judgement.

I can tell you that if children have good phonics teaching, they don't need any 'other strategies' for working out what the words say. All this 'other strategies' rubbish is just another way of saying 'I really don't know how to teach reading effectively'.

The other key thing about phonics teaching is that children who actually understand what they are doing really enjoy reading and are happy and confident about it. We don't have to keep on going on at children about the 'Joy of Reading', they can discover it themselves. Good phonics teaching brings this benefit to far more children than does mixed methods/multi-strategy muddling.

I get very passionate about this because I don't work with the MN children who all taught themselves to read in the cradle and don't have any need for phonics, thank you very much (as if it were some nasty disease). I work with all the poor muddled up children who hate reading because they find it very hard because they can't learn by osmosis and no-one has shown them consistently that there is any other way. That's about 20% of our intake. 1 child in 5.

Of course, by the time they get to me in Y7 they aren't exactly among the high fliers of their year; in fact, they have been labelled 'low ability' for most of their school careers, though most of them are actually of good, at least average, intelligence and nice characters as well. It is pretty well acknowledged that reading is a great way to enhance knowledge and improve 'intelligence; these children have been denied that advantage. So their self esteem is pretty low. But perhaps these children don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. Someone has to be at the bottom of the pile, after all...

I don't think anyone would disagree with your main points, maizie, that learning to read is a Good Thing, that phonics are generally a Good Idea and clearly I fall into the category of people who've never seen phonics taught really well, because yes, I am one of those annoying creatures who learnt to read back in the days when A was called A and not 'aaa' and started off with sentences like 'Janet can see an aeroplane. I can see an aeroplane, Mummy can see an aeroplane. Can you see an aeroplane?', without it ever crossing my mind for a second that I shouldn't be getting to words like 'aeroplane' for a long time because they were far too 'tricky'. I just read them and got on with it, as did all the other kids in my mixed-ability class.

I'd love to see one of your really good classes at work, just so I could know what I've clearly been missing all these years.

And that's only semi-ironic.

The way some of you go on about phonics, either, yes, I have clearly never been exposed to it done 'properly', or some of you on here are either deluded or obsessed.

I sincerely hope it's the former, or I fear for our chldren's future.

There's money in all aspects of reading - both whole language approaches and phonics.

Whole language is a progressive philosophy, and it emanates from progressives like Dewey via Rousseau and in its modern form was heavily influenced by the Soviet Marxist Lev Vygotsky. It is this philosophy that is behind child-centred, play-based learning and whole language. As the poster, ymeyer, said, it is a constructivist philosophy.

Phonics is an instructionist approach, a more Skinnerian approach.

The progressives in California mandated a whole language teaching approach in 1987. It was George Bush and the Reading First programme of No Child Left Behind that changed US education and again brought phonics to the fore in about 2000-2001 etc. As usual, in the UK, we were influenced by what was happening in America, and Labour later on advocated synthetic phonics etc.

The progressive whole language approach went out of favour, but many of the progressives' ideas like child-centred learning etc. remain.

There are a lot of articles about certain Bush backers and funders who gained financially from the switch in the reading wars.

Oddly enough I use an EFL site for lots of my phonics teaching because they have a whole phonics section of fantastic fun activities.

I would suggest with older learners of English who can already read and write in their own language teaching follows a similar process as MFL teaching rather than reading instruction of non readers. It's certainly the impression I get from a friend who teaches young adults in an EFL school.

Actually claig I would argue that whichever approach is in favour the big publishers rub their hands with glee.
Oxford University press for example produce ORT most definitely a Look & Say scheme alongside Songbirds and Floppy phonics.
Just as they are waiting in the wings to produce a whole new set of documents when it becomes clear what direction the new curriculum will finally take.

Exactly right mrz. There is a lot of money in equipping schools with new materials. Historically, there have been reading wars between phonics and whole language, and at every switch in fashion, a new set of materials needs to be sold and publishers make more money. Some of the funders of Bush were CEOs of large publishers. But it will be exactly the same the next time when whole language again makes a comeback some time in the future.

I really hope that doesn't happen.
I accept what you are saying about the USA but phonics was already well established in the UK pre Bush, certainly from the early 90s. Obviously Clackmannanshire brought it to the public attention but it really wasn't a change for many schools around the country.

Yes phonics has existed for hundreds of years. I'm not sure when the Clackmannanshire report came out, was it mid 2000s?

In the 1970s the government experts and educational establishment ditched phonics and went for look and say. It was under the last Labour government that synthetic phonics became the preferred method. Bush and the Republicans had already made it a preferred method in the States before Labour did so here. I think there is quite a lot of cross-fertilisation of ideas between the States and the UK.

This is from wikipedia

"Up until the 1970s a mixture of synthetic and analytic phonics was used for teaching reading in British schools. From that time forward phonics was abandoned altogether in most state primary schools to be replaced by the "whole word recognition" method sometimes called "look and say". In the following years the average reading age of children in primary schools fell and the standard expectation for children of various ages was adjusted downward.[1]. Though there were a few proponents of phonic methods the major lobbying bodies such as the Institute of Education and the National Literacy Trust disdained early attention to the alphabetic code in favor of taking clues from the context of the text (such as illustrations). During the period of the Labor Government 1997-2010 research showing that Synthetic Phonics increased the literacy of all groups finally received attention. A rearguard action by teachers resulted in a period when Synthetic Phonics was taken as part of a mixture of methods but during the period in which Ruth Kelly was the responsible minister this was replaced by an imperative to teach Synthetic Phonics "first and fast". As of 2007 Synthetic Phonics is the favored method of the UK government"

I wouldn't be surprised if in 40 years' time, government experts once again revert to whole language. That seems to be the history of how the changes in reading policy take place.

granted says:

"The way some of you go on about phonics, either, yes, I have clearly never been exposed to it done 'properly', or some of you on here are either deluded or obsessed."

I am neither deluded nor obsessed. I just have experience of helping struggling readers at KS3 using both synthetic phonics and the mix of confusing strategies which I was originally trained in. If the original strategies had worked I wouldn't have bothered to change my practice.

I suspect that very few of you have ever heard 'bottom set' KS3 children attempting to read a 'normal' book. It is a shocking and depressing experience, not to mention verging on heartbreaking when you know that these children are disadvantaged for life by their lack of reading skills. And, 99% of them are bloody nice kids who are already disadvantaged in many ways and who don't deserve illiteracy on top of everything else.

The thing many people seem to forget as they smugly recount their own experience of successfully learning to read without the need for, ugh, phonics (or that of their dcs) is that the illiterate and semi-literate cannot participate in these fora. They can't recount their experience of not learning to read without phonics because, 'der', they can't read and write.. I'll remind you again, they comprise some 20% of childen. They need advocates, they need people who will fight for their life chances because they can't do it for themselves.

It's called passion, not obesession.

Dr Joyce Morris, an early 'phonics proponent' has a nice account here of a phenomenom which is still prevalent nearly 2 decades later.

It might also be a bit of a corrective to the Wikipedia article quoted by claig.

Sorry I explained that badly
Phonics as a method of reading instruction became widely popular/accepted (again) in the early 90s. Jolly Phonics 93? was adopted by many education authorities and individual schools in the first half of the decade.
The Clackmannanshire study began in 1998 and was published in 2005.

Stranmillis University published a study of the impact of linguistic phonics involving 22 schools the following year which is my own area of interest.

You may feel we are obsessed and have been rude to Sham(although I don't accept that) but it is because we fear for the children she is responsible for and worry about the misinformation she has written here.
We care passionately about all children not just those we teach and have seen the damage done by guessing and using picture clues and work extremely hard (with huge success) to ensure that all children leave us literate.

Brilliant link, maizie, thanks

Agree with mrz date line DS was learning jolly phonics in a private preschool when he was 3 and 4 in 1998-2000 and continued when he started reception at a state school in 2000.

DH was born in 1961 and started school in 1966,he was taught Look and Say and even then the HT admitted that it didn't work for lots of children but her hands were tied. She told my MIL that DH would never learn to read using that method. When he was 10 he was finally taken for remedial lessons with a lady who taught him to read using phonics.

I also went to secondary school with children who were taught I.T.A (mentioned in Maizes link) at primary, most of them went straight into the remedial class in the 1st year of secondary, although some did end up in the o'level band rather than the cse band
.
Calfornia may have changed to whole word methods in 1987 but by 1993 California had the lowest level of 4th grade readers in the US. ie those were the children that were starting to learn to read in the late 80s.

I'm back from my lovely weekend away. Just to say thankyou granted. All you people who think that I do not teach phnics, if you can be bothered to go through this, I have said several times that I do. We do the Letters and sounds/Jolly phoncs things. We also teach Key words/tricky words. I a yet to have a child leave the school who can not read, under my guise as SENCo. I do put interventions into place when a child is not responding to mainsteam methods. I can not comment on what other schools do or how they respond. I too, had no idea that phonics was such a thorny area. I daren't say what our very good school actually thinks of people who are fanatical about it because it would cause some people on this forum great offence. I have been teaching a long time too, and do nt feel bound by fashion, 'latest research' which almost always discounts previous research. I do trust my gut instinct and show me a teacher who does not claim to have instincts about what children need; I'd be worried if that was the case. I guess I can't stop those of you who want to worry about my ability and the untld damage I'm doing by being a teacher who responds to individual needs. After a weekend away I don't care anymore. I've just read the entire thread back and what strikes me is that a few people, 4 or 5 at the most, have hsouted down anyone who has come up with any alternative suggestins on a post that was supposed to be about something bigger. That is narrow minded. Granted, I think the way that you write is very straight forward and clear and if certain people are rude enough not to accept that an ELT specialist is well placed to talk about how the English language works, then it highlights the lack of respect and understanding for what you do and a high level of ignorance. I pray that I never come across any Feenie, Mrs or Moondog in my life, in a professional sense. To me, professionals that do not accept that there are sometimes other ways and that their way is the only way are frightening t parents and children alike. I have an excellent friend who is also a Jolly Phoics fanatic. I love her to bits and we have had many discussions about it. She argues her points with far more grace and willingness to listen thatI have seen here, and at the end of the day, we agree to disagree and have a cup of tea. She knows I get results, and the children in my care are happy and well catered for. In the car, I was asking my husband who yes, as a linguist, has studied phonetic systems and is an academic expert in the area. he said people are confusing phonics with 'regular' There are no alternative graphemes for regular phonetic languages and each grapheme makes only one sound. He's looked at languages from ancient norse, through to modern english. He wants to totally revise the language to make it completely regular; as the Americans tried but failed to do.Yes you can teach with phonics, of course you can. But there are bits that need filling in with other methods. And Granted; I like pictures. They make books more fun and to me, THAT is what reading should be about with little kids. Reading is a life skill that has to be mastered ofcourse, but who am I to tell them to 'Stop guessing and just look at the letters'! Pictures add to the context of the story. As an SALT, Moondog,(that's a real surprise: I'd love you t meet our excellent SALT who thoroughly approves of what I do)you'll know about picture readthroughs, sequencing cards after you've read a story etc. Too many children end up barking at text and not understanding what they have 'read'.

I meant to say, but typed badly again; no child has left our school unable to read, SEN or not.