Spelling tests to be banned in my school. Will spelling standards decrease?

[Millie13]

My school has recently decided to stop spelling tests altogether which is of great concern to me. How are children therefore going to learn the skill of accurate spelling? There is no other way of monitoring spelling that i know of. Apparently children do well in tests but can't write spelling words correctly in a sentence, which is why tests are being banned. Why can't tests incorporating the spelling word in a sentence be adopted instead?
Our school insists children will pick it up through reading. I agree this may be the case with some children but others are still struggling with reading. How is this approach going to help them ? Surely spelling standards will slip! I am a very supportive parent but I feel that the school is just shooting itself in the foot here, the consequences of which will be evident in the quality of children's writing in years to come.
When I queried the head teacher, her response was that generally all the pupils know the high frequency words which is enough, as these days with technology, spell checkers do it for you. Am I too old fashioned to expect my children to spell as many words as they can accurately without the use of a spellchecker?

That is an absolute outrage.

a weekly spelling test separate to the rest of the curriculum has been shown to be ineffective in teaching children to spell.
Many will get full marks every week but it never translates to their written work. For those who struggle they can try and try and put in loads of effort but still fail meaning they give up trying with school work.

I very much doubt standards will slip.

Ours dont do spelling tests and the standards havent slipped. They concentrate on a sound in class each week (I think it's igh/i-e this week) and write lots around that sound but dont test on it.

Really it isn't outrageous!

How will accuracy in spelling take place unless it is learnt?

I imagine its a measure to stop teachers seeing a spelling test as being the same as 'teaching spelling' which it certainly isn't. As other posters and staff at your school have said it does little to impact children's spelling.

Correcting (through dictionary or phonic work) their own and others spellings, learning spelling rules, recapping and using the phonic knowledge to spell unknown words, using target words in their work - these things teach children to spell tricky, long, unknown words or simply words that are commonly misspelt.

Your final paragraph makes me pretty certain this is a wind up; I don't believe a head teacher told you that beyond the high frequency words spelling doesn't matter. When queried on why they have made a certain choice any teacher with half a brain will tell you its because it has been shown to have greater impact and will improve the education of the children even if this isn't true.

Do you really think the only way they learn to spell is by reciting a list of ten words?

As I said, ours concentrate on a sound a week and learn lots of words with those spellings in and how to use them in a sentence.

It will be learnt but not by memorising lists

It is not a wind up . She did indeed say spellcheckers are commonly used and the high frequency are really the important ones to be concerned with. I was quite taken aback by her attitude and very worried. Hence I have posted on here for advice

My children are in yr2 and have only had spellings to learn for about a month. Two friends have children in a different school, and they've had spelling tests every week since half way through Yr R. There is no discernible difference in their spelling. If anything, my kids are better, but then, they're better readers too.

Temporarily learning words off by heart is very ineffective. Learning the rules of how most words are formed on the other hand might give children some useful tools. to tackle writing challenges.

My experience of most spelling tests is that they were a bunch of random words, sometimes quite obscure. My dd happily learned and forgot them, my ds usually refused to look at them. The only spelling test scheme that I ever thought anything of was all about word patterns, and only one of my children's teachers used it (and ds happily learned those ones, and some of the rules actually stuck).

Monitoring spelling is surely pretty easy in an environment where children are often writing pieces in class? Children will often ace the test because they have learned the words for that purpose and then go on writing them incorrectly afterwards because they have promptly forgotten all about them.

My school made this decision a while back, we teach spelling 3 times a week, going through patterns and phonics work- in our latest spelling assessment ( taking the spelling age of each child) there has been accelerated progress almost universally.

we did give parents the lists of words/patterns we were focusing on every term, as some parents still wanted to do tests at home- maybe you could ask your school for the same.

I know they concentrate on sounds but I don't think it's every week and I have no idea what the words are. I would like to know more , so I can support my child but we are not given information about it.

www.spelfabet.com.au/2013/02/100-first-words/

i was thinking "it won't matter that much because they will be monitoring progress through work anyway"
but your last line ".... because spellcheckers do it for you" outraged me.
that's surely the worst reason they can give?

get an american spellcheck and they'll be writing color instead, and if they don't know which version of your/you're or there/their/they're to use, the spellcheck is no help whatsoever!

Thank you mrz for your link. Indeed nickel babe I think to rely on spellcheckers is a worrying comment for a head teacher to make. I think I have lost a lot of faith in her from hearing that.

Have been doing weekly spellings with DCs for getting on for nine years now! I always come round to thinking that I have no recollection of doing spellings for the entirety of my primary education, as my DD (youngest) struggles to recall all ten of hers on a weekly basis and often comes home having got the simplest one wrong (hmm).

There is a huge variation in the difficulty of the spelling lists too. Some are easy-peasy and some are really very difficult. I also think that if anything they show how complex English is to master in terms of the lack of rules with spellings/pronunciations etc....

DS (12) has a brilliant memory and I think (I'm not kidding) only got about five spelling mistakes in all his years of primary education. DD (7) hardly ever gets all ten correct. She hasn't got such a good memory and is just generally more easily distracted. She certainly does the same amount of practice at home.... However, I would not say that DS is a better speller than his sister...this is the boy who wrote Psychics instead of Physics on his coursework book in Year 7 [frown] - and he's at a super-selective!

There are a variety of good assessments out there looking at how children are progressing with early literacy skills.
We use DIBELS a great deal.
Of course it is true that learning the rules of spelling is the key to mastering the idiosyncracies of English, rather than painfully acquiring words singly by rote.

Having said that, I'm all for the discipline of learning a list at a time and thus ironing out issues that the child is having. I went to a very traditional school and spelling tests in all the languages we studied happened every week.

Really clued up teachers like MRZ are very thin on the ground.
Most know terrifyingly little about spelling and how to teach it because they were never taught so themselves. That is my experience, working with scores of teachers over the last 20 years.

Therefore I supsect it is a way of letting themsleves of the hook rather than because they have a deep understanding of the complexities of the English orthographic system.

Why Johnny can't read is an old book but a very worthwhile read as it explains some of the rules (and the idiocyncracies) of spelling very clearly.

DD's school doesn't do spelling tests. She is in year 1 and recently wrote on her own:

Apples are red and green when they are ripe.

She made two mistakes, apples with just one "p" and when without the "h".

She is in Year1.

When we do homework we ask her to spell for us and if necessary we correct. I think that brings more than learning 10 words out of context.