OFSTED criticise reading instruction ...

[mrz]

I wonder how many more schools around the country would "fail" to meet expectations

www.ofsted.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/surveys-and-good-practice/r/Ready%20to%20read%20-%20How%20a%20sample%20of%20primary%20schools%20in%20Stoke-on-Trent%20teach%20people%20to%20read.pdf

"Not all the schools taught early reading using phonic decoding as ‘the route to decode words’, as required by the national curriculum
2014. Three headteachers were unaware of this requirement in the new programme of study.

Almost all of the schools visited used a range of early reading books to teach young children to read. Many of these books, however, were not ‘closely matched to pupils’ developing phonics knowledge and knowledge of common exception words’. In other words, the books used did not support young children to practise and apply the phonics they were learning.

Four of the schools did not send home phonically decodable books so that
children could practise their new knowledge and skills at home."

I suspect there is some truth in that. Teachers and heads become disinclined to change their approach after 12 years of the same practices according to research someone recruiting for an international school that I was shown recently.

Thankfully that hasn't been my experience but there are always a few who prefer to keep doing what they have always done regardless of the outcomes.

Our school still use biff and kipper. I listen to older readers most of whom are now past that stage but have a son about to hit reception. How do I support him at home and which books will give him a better chance of picking things up? They use a phonetic method to teach letters...

The school must provide appropriate books for the learner from September

The school my children are at solely use ORT. Is there funding available for September, Mrz, if schools should not be using them from then?

No funding ended in April ... schools have had over 2 years to prepare for Sept

We use ORT Biff, Chip and Kipper - but they are Debbie Hepplewhite's Floppy's Phonics books, in case anyone thinks ORT books are never decodable ones.

We also use Phonics Bug, Big Cat Phonics, Comics for Phonics, etc.

I don't know whether mums are aware, but there has just been an 'open letter' published in the TES from people who describe themselves as 'leading educationalists' calling upon Michael Gove to 'abolish' the Year 1 phonics screening check.

These people may well be regarded as 'leading educationalists' by some - but they certainly don't understand about modern-day phonics teaching in England and they appear to chose to disregard the positives about the check - not least being the fact it has sharpened teachers minds about the notion of teaching 'effectiveness' and, to be honest, accountability.

I spend a considerable amount of my time trying to draw attention to the range of issues around the Year 1 phonics check and have already been involved with a so-called 'debate' with Reedy who heads up the United Kingdom Literacy Association and who heads up the 'open letter' calling for the abolition of the check.

Someone above mentioned the issue of the better readers regarding the check - so I thought that at least some mums would be interested in some responses to the negative issues regarding the check - and I personally would be interested in knowing what mums think about it. (So, if interested, you might want to read the link below.)

Bear in mind that many of us (teachers, headteachers, researchers, special needs teachers, parents) have fought long and hard to try to get decent phonics teaching into our schools - including the training - and I find it utterly dismaying to hear of heads who, on face value, seem to be clueless about phonics teaching and its importance.

Most worrying is that the vast majority of schools still say they use 'Letters and Sounds' as their 'programme' but this is a resourceless publication and should never have been presented as a programme - thus, the reality is that one school's phonics provision can be a million miles away from a school down the road.

It is clear to me from mumsnet conversations that at least some mums are aware of this state of affairs.

I would also like to contribute something about Oxford Reading Tree as people have mentioned it above. OUP have given the message that ORT now needs to 'start' with systematic synthetic phonics - acknowledging that times have changed and the approach in the original Biff, Chip and Kipper stories is not the approach that is best for beginner readers. In newly printed Biff, Chip and Kipper books, the advice of the cover notes is very clear that blending is the main decoding method, and that children may need help with some words, and the words are listed.

Someone above also mentioned how well and how quickly children can read all manner of books when they have had the best systematic synthetic phonics start. When I was teaching, for example, I would expect the vast majority of my Year 1 children to be pretty much at the free reading stage with no need for a staggered scheme.

As a guide, I would now expect schools doing high-quality SSP to be reaching high 80s-90+% of children reaching the phonics check benchmark as the 'norm' pretty much regardless of intake.

Warm regards,

Debbie

[post edited by MNHQ]

A head, strapped for cash, who feels passionately about enabling all children to read can ensure decodable book practice for around £10 per struggling child p.a.

Heads/teachers who aren't thoroughly trained often lack confidence and spend far too much money on unnecessary or less than effective 'luxuries'. Those with sufficiently generous budgets can invest in some of the many effective and colourful decodables - the more a school understands how to teach beginner readers, the quicker children are able to progress to chapter' books.

Being strapped for cash is no excuse for a head to allow inappropriate books which may well mean that some children will go on struggling with reading throughout their school career.

What an excellent response, Debbie - concise and to the point. I just don't understand why some people can't grasp that if these out-of-date strategies that supposedly teach "reading for meaning" lead to children guessing and skipping over unfamiliar words, then their appreciation of the meaning of texts is going to be diminished, not enhanced.

As for the check supposedly not providing any new information - well! How many times have I read on Mumsnet someone commenting that their child's teacher clearly doesn't have a clue what level their child is reading at? How often do these teachers hear children read individually? And how often do they hear these 'free readers' (who can't decode the names of aliens) read text where lots of the words aren't either familiar to them or easily guessable?

Buckskid: I think things won't really change till this generation of HTs retire.

By then people will hopefully have a much better understanding of the value and limitations of phonics in English. Namely, that phonics is excellent for teaching children the basic rudiments of reading and writing, but must then increasingly give way to learning to recognise words by sight for reading and word by word memorisation of quirky spellings for writing, as the Rose Review recognised.

With phonically consistent spelling systems, u don't need anything but phonics for teaching children to read and write.

But English spelling is phonically inconsistent for reading and writing:
80 spelling patterns have some exceptions (e.g. the long oo of zoo - blue, shoe, flew, through, to, you) and
69 of them also have more than one pronunciation (e.g. the ou of sound - soup, soul, touch).

Masha Bell

I have just read DebbieHep's post - it rings very true. Those of us who have had to deal with the fallout of 6,7 + children who cannot decode are struck by mixture of approaches + illogical introduction for little children. The majority of teacher training courses introduce phonics in a very haphazard way - some colleges are very hostile and only pay lip service by teaching the subject in a perfunctory manner. Hence many teachers don't have the body of knowledge required for easy and effective teaching. Very, very sad for children.

Allchildrenreading -

The report quoted by Mrz mentions this problem with teacher training courses:

"The schools visited generally considered that newly qualified teachers (NQTs) were not well prepared to teach reading. Of the five most effective schools, one headteacher reported that NQTs’ subject knowledge was weak and that they lacked a basic understanding of the teaching of phonics and reading. As a result, in this school, NQTs had a two-year induction programme that included weekly meetings and bespoke training. Two further headteachers confirmed this view, reporting that NQTs were ‘not well grounded’ in the teaching of phonics or reading. In contrast, two other headteachers reported that the quality of NQTs varied depending on where they had studied."

It's very depressing.

The pseudo-words in the Y1 phonics test have, predictably, undermined its validity. I was interested to read Debbie Hepplewhite - for whom I have great respect - defend the pseudo-words by saying that if adults could read them with no difficulty then children who had been taught phonics properly could be expected to too. Her assertion reveals a huge lack of understanding of language development and the differences in meta linguistic awareness between adults and young children.

But she does this successfully every single day, Bonsoir.

I would agree that phonics works well for the majority of children - it definitely works for more children than 'look and say'.

It doesn't work for ALL children though, and it doesn't work in its current guise for some children for whom phonic awareness is the only way they can learn, as it doesn't extend fully into the different families of words that use alternative pronunciations. When it was fairly new and mixed methods were more widespread, there were a few children who never figured out reading - there are as many now in the schools I've visited more recently. The difference is that more of those who would have been poor readers are keeping up with age related expectations.

I have a friend who works in a special school, and they have found that their children don't really 'get' reading until they have learnt about 100 words. I have encountered this also in non-readers in mainstream schools - children who got to cvc words, then encountered digraphs and completely gave up. I've managed to help them understand the concept in some cases by going more slowly 1:1, joining the digraphs and leaving the other letters single, lots and lots of repetition etc. Even that didn't work for a few children, and we ended up back at 'look and say'. After a certain point, they then DID get it. It isn't common, but it happens, and an awareness that not all children learn the same way needs to be retained.

Bonsoir,

Reading psychologists have used pseudowords to test decoding ability for a long time, and they have been shown to be reliably related to reading ability. In fact, pseudowords are the only way to reliably measure decoding, since tests cannot predict which words children will have memorised or already learned to automaticity.

It's also important to remember that, in past years, children have had to get more than 8 out of 40 words wrong, in order to not pass the test. Thus, the idea that lots of 6 year old "good readers" are failing solely due to a metalinguistic inability to grasp that the little alien picture means the word is an alien name strikes me as implausible.

If you read the report Mrz linked to, you will see evidence of schools that teach phonics poorly, and that continue to promote word-guessing strategies over sound decoding. Such word-guessing strategies, applied to the pseudowords, would produce precisely the effect that some teachers complain about, of children "misreading" the pseudowords as real words.

As long as such schools exist, while other schools with similar intake manage to get 100% of their pupils to pass the test, I think we will continue to need the phonics check.

No - she has decided that it is going to work when she does it.

I love phonics and am 100% behind the government's agenda to ensure phonics and decodable books alone are used to reach reading in the early years. I am 100% behind a phonics reading check in Y1. But pseudo words destroy the validity of the test. Anyone who really understands language development in young DC will understand this instantly.

I think the whole furore about alien words for good readers is nonsensical. DS3 is still in reception, but been given a good solid phonics grounding. He loves reading Star Wars Angry Birds books which are full of 'word play' names. He also reads Roald Dahl with all his made up nonsense words. If he was being taught to read by look and say he'd have no chance of being able to read them and would just assume that they were the original 'similar' real Star Wars name. Words such as snozzcumber, gloriumptious, crabcruncher, trogglehumper etc would be impossible, and the glorious richness of Dahl would be lost.

He is reading at orange band which according to reading chest is the books children would usually be reading in year 1 around the time of the phonics check. I can't see that he is going to go backwards and suddenly lose this skill. DS2 hasn't, although our school do continue to do phonics lessons right through to year 6 as opposed to paying lip service to it in KS1/Foundation phase only.

Reading nonsense words in a work of fiction or a poem is not comparable to a word recognition check. Again, the very weak understanding of language development is leading to intellectual short cuts that undermine the validity of the test.

Not a weak understanding of language development - I have no knowledge at all . What is it that is different between the two that makes the nonsense words in isolation problematical?

I find this debate between using only phonics as the route to decode words vs the look and say or even mixed methods quite interesting, as a parent who has no knowledge whatsoever of phonics and learned English only much later as an adult as a foreing language.

My DS (5) is in reception, and he pretty much is able to "decode" and read any book he grabs from our bookshelf as I have recently discovered. I have no idea what method they used at his school to teach him, but I'm curious to ask as it was most definitely successful, at least judging by his experience.

As an aside, I had taught him to read in his first language previous to entering school. I have read that if you know how to read in your first language, you can transfer these skills and pick up reading in a second language. My language is a phonetically consistent language, so I only needed to teach him the basic syllables and from there he could read words, sentences, etc.

By the way, this might be a silly question, but why do the schools need to change their books to adapt to the new trend of teaching to read only by phonics? If decoding words by using knowledge of phonics is the only way, aren't all words and books decodable by principle? So, any could be used, new or old school books?

Most schools when they teach phonics start by teaching the phonemes /s/ /a/ /t/ /p/ /i/ and /n/. The first phonics books just then use these phonemes to make up words that the child can fully decode. e.g. sat, tap, pin, tip, etc.
The old style look and say books start with things like 'Kipper is running' 'Kipper is doing gymnastics' 'Kipper is reading'. The child is expected to look at the picture to work out what the words might say. They tend to remember the first two in the patter 'Kipper is' and then guess the last one/two from the picture. They can't be decoded from phonics until the child has learnt many more phonemes.
Or the Ginn books start with 'look' on every page of their first books but /oo/ isn't taught until quite a way into the phonics program.

Elle, the thing is that the English phonics code is very complex, with lots of phonetic correspondences to learn, in comparison to a lot of languages. That means children need to build up their knowledge over time. So they start with what is called the 'simple' code (the most common sound/letters correspondences), and build up from there. Decodable readers give them a chance to practise this simple code when they first start out, by limiting the words in the books. This means they aren't switched off by being expected to read words they can't yet decode, and it is also means the time they spend practising reading is used more efficiently, by giving them more intensive exposure to the correspondences they are currently learning.