John Bald on today's media efforts:
''The Left is blazing away at phonics, and especially at the phonics check. They are good at getting on tv and radio, and truth takes a back seat. Michael Rosen on ITV Daybreak, for example, repeatedly said that two thirds of children in the pilot scheme for the check had failed, and that the school by law had to tell parents that their child had failed. The truth is that schools are advised to tell parents that their child needs more help with phonics, and to examine their own work to ensure that phonics are properly taught.
Meantime on Radio 4, Dr Mary Bousted, of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, protested that "I've got a PhD in this and should not be patronised in this manner" (by Hackney headteacher, Greg Wallace). The title of her PhD is A socio-political analysis of the personal growth ideology of English teaching. What evidence this provides on how children learn to read I'll let you know after I've read it. Her alternative strategies amount to guessing games, and were smashed by research evidence years before she wrote her thesis - eg Schatz and Baldwin, Context Clues are Unreliable Predictors of Word Meanings, 1986. I'll see if this and the work of others, notably Stanovitch, are cited in her work, but am not holding my breath.
John Humphrys told Dr Bousted that having a PhD did not mean that a person could not be wrong, which leads to the broader question of whether this medieval degree actually meets the needs of modern research. It doesn't - or at least not always. Communication and publication, especially in brain research, are moving so fast that it's hard to keep up. At the other end of the time-scale, most educational issues take more than the standard three years to investigate, so that work is often truncated to get it completed. I've recently seen a doctorate that were based on no more than 10 weeks of direct observation of children.
PhDs should be treated on their merits, and not with deference, so well done to Mr Humphrys''.