Anyone else with a child who scored low in the phonics screening.

[Gileswithachainsaw]

Was it expected

What support is being offered

What can we do at home

Was this the first you heard of any problems ?

Cross posted but honestly if you have heard another term and you know that is out of date why use it?

I'm asking for the correct term for those pupils who have no special needs or learning difficulties but who lack academic intelligence, which used to be called remedial but I don't know what it's now called.

My ds has asd so is no doubt what the charming pp would call remedial. He was absolutely brilliant at phonics and learned to read in the sense of being able to read well ahead of NT peers.
Does he understand what he reads tho - that's another question altogether.
You will probably not be surprised to learn I am deeply suspicious of these tests

You're clearly just a GF 2014.

@chippednailvarnishing
I'm asking what the appropriate terminology is. Nobody will tell me.

Well, a child who is a "slow learner" in general, to the extent that they learn everything noticeably slower than the rest of their class - by definition they have special educational needs.

If they are slow to read but catch up then perhaps a "child with poorer reading skills" would describe them currently. Especially if that's all they have a problem with. If they catch up, no additional description needed. If not, they may eventually be diagnosed with dyslexia.

A child who has little home support is not "remedial", they are a child who has little home support.

Your lesson for today is on inclusive language. Use an accurate term - if a child has little home support, say "a child with little home support".
Name the disability not the person if someone actually has a disability. Not "a disabled child" (or "a remedial child"). A child with a disability/additional needs/SEN.

TL:DR there is no one appropriate term referring to the group of children you've lumped together. So don't lump them together.

Slow learner thank you.

Slow learner
No, not slow learner. That is a) really inaccurate for the group you are talking about and b) out of date and c) labels the child not the difficulty.

Back to your question op, it was the slow learners that didn't pass in my dds class and they had had intensive daily support but were probably not quite ready yet. They do get the chance to resit.

@chippednailvarnish I have reported you. Just because someone asks what the right terminology is doesn't make them a troll.

2014newme It's important to remember that the age variation when children start school is disproportionately large - the oldest have been around and developing for 25% longer than than the youngest. That's a big difference. That's one reason why 'slow learner' is a problematic term. Ironically, this is reflected in the age of children who are labelled as having 'learning difficulties' - a startlingly large proportion of them have summer birthdays, whereas if the labels were really accurate you would have the same number born in each month throughout the year.

I give up! I'm still none the wiser!

I think people are being a bit harsh towards 2014newme. According to Wikipedia:

Remedial education (also known as developmental education, basic skills education, compensatory education, preparatory education, and academic upgrading) is assigned to assist students in order to achieve expected competencies in core academic skills such as literacy and numeracy.

Whereas special education is designed specifically for students with special needs, remedial education can be designed for any students, with or without special needs; the defining trait is simply that they have reached a point of underpreparedness, regardless of why. For example, even people of high intelligence can be underprepared if their education was disrupted, for example, by internal displacement during civil disorder or a war.

If the provenance of this article is to be trusted (and there may be valid doubts - I am not endorsing it), 'remedial' would seem not to be so far off the mark.

Of course, Urban Dictionary says that 'remedial' is a synonym for 'stupid'. I doubt 2014newme was aware of that.

Wow i.missed alot didn't I.. ..

She does get home support but between outside activities two working parents homework/reading/spellings and shock horror wanting to play it's difficult to fit it in all the time.

Thats s kinda why I send her to school.

The books obviously I guess can't he helped she's not ready to move up but there's not going to he an endless supply...

I would want to know why my dc was not going to pass. Ds2 passed by one mark and now is a fantastic reader. He just took a while for the reading penny to drop. He had some extra support at school but we did not do too much extra and school was not worried. However with ds1 it was really important that lots of support went in from home and school and school were aware of that and it was an ongoing conversation with us. The phonics screening should not tell the school anything they don't already know and was mainly put in place to make sure schools were doing synthetic phonics!

We subscribed to 'reading chest' to give all ds a broader range of appropriate reading scheme books. It was very popular with them and I could give ds2 harder books as once the reading penny dropped he whizzed through the stages . I could also give ds1 easier books so he could feel a sense of achievement in being able to read different books.

I don't Have a problem.with them.telling me. It's more that this is the first I've heard if any problems. And how there's time to dig for coins in sand and hour four million pieces of foil to a cereal box but my child can barely read or write and that I've been saying since reception there was a problem.

I obviously expected to have to support at home but school seems to becoming more and more like having a dog and barking yourself.

And why send the homework that's completely beyond her along side spellings and stupid projects which sucks up any time you may have had to provide the ever increasing amount of support/teaching

And glue four million

Ffs autocorrect

Have you seen tests Giles? I'm not surprised some kids don't do well - they're trying to make sense of non-sense words - phonics or no phonics. It's a ridiculous test imo.

Dts are getting stressy about it - they had a practice last week, one passed, one didn't although of course no one knows what the pass mark will be any way.

I just feel it's really unfair to be putting pressure on such small kids, mine are only 5 won't be 6 until late August.

Our school has started showing the reception year children alien words this year.

Wonder if I will get away with telling them I'm not going to bother doing the homework we will instead focus on basics like reading and writing

We have a YR DS and we don't have the spellings yet thankfully and he's just about OK on phonics but his handwriting is awful, he clearly has motor difficulties, and is in a special motor skills boosting group at school plus they've suggested extra pre-writing stuff to do at home.

Which is all very well as you say except that we also get the homework that's beyond him (mainly beyond his powers of concentration/writing - he can tell me quite happily which numbers are missing on the number line but you might as well get your cat to write them for all they look like what they are supposed to and he gives up after 2).

But I know he won't concentrate for more than approx 90 seconds so I don't much mind the endless junk models/planting seeds/trim trail/dancing/singing because at least it gets him liking school and among those there are some he can concentrate on for maybe 5 minutes.

Drspouse, have you spoke to the teacher about that?

I really think you will.

We have a discussion homework (easy to slip in) and a writing/number homework and if we've spent more than about 10 minutes starting, and more than 15 minutes doing it, I just write "this is all we did" or " after 10 minutes he'd done nothing".

IME, the main reason for children failing the phonics test is poor phonics teaching, rather than anything to do with the child.

Yes, even in schools with excellent phonics teaching, children with high levels of SEN do not pass the screening - but, again IME, we are talking about quite a significant level of SEN.

So Giles, in your case, i would be asking how many children out of the cohort are in the same position as your DS. If it is more than a very tiny number, then I would be asking significant questions about the teaching - do they just do the initial phoneme / grapheme correspondences rather than continuing to teach the full code? Do they have all phonic reading books at the 'learning to read' stages, or do they still have some 'Look and say' books? Do they send home 'tricky words' to learn as wholes? Have they said e.g. 'tell your child to use the pictures / guess from the first letter if they don't know the word'? All of those are clear signs that the phonics teaching is poor.