I don't know where that "Lt" came from. My cursor has a will of its own.

Brian

It's not very heartening when you tune in to Teachers' TV as an innocent infants' school teacher to get some enlightenment on the latest literacy thinking and hear at the top of the Early Years programme "Phonics is controversial". This wasn't true even 2,500 years ago in Greece, and has only been t...

Jenny, The BBC news broadcasts (unattributed) said the new pupils (40% average, obviously) were unable to tackle the texts of the secondary curriculum. What proportion of this incompetence was due to literacy problems and what due to mathematical ones they didn't say. I'm sorry: the broadcasts were ...

Jim,

THE GOVERNMENT say 40% can't handle the texts of the secondary curriculum. (BBC news twice).

Brian K.

In the last couple of days the government has been broadcasting an admission that despite the SATs tests producing up to 80% average results in so-called examinations of skills, when it comes to putting these together some 40% of children aren't equipped to tackle texts in the secondary schools. Tha...

Mona, Whenever you do a reply or open a new topic, you will see on the left hand side a choice of Emoticons. Wherever your cursor (vertical thingy when you are writing a message) is you can temporarily point it at a smiley face etc. and hit the left hand mouse key and the emoticon is reproduced in y...

Thanks Jenny, So we have to look out for the new initials DCFS, the latest of the big ideas, instead of DFES which we had sort of grown used to. And that they 'may check up to see that teacher training institutions are training according to the new government guidelines'. But the question is, how ma...

Debbie, This is surely the danger of the 'time limitation' for instilling Synthetic Phonics included in the Rose Report. To have those children who are not reading etc. by the age of 6 then receiving 'early intervention' courses involving damaging mixed methods or even worse is a recipe for sabatagi...

There is an aesthetic logic behind the pronunciation of our beautiful language, one which is unfortunately not taught at most schools, even private ones. Prescribed pronunciations don't appear in RP, and therefore in good dictionaries, arbitrarily. 'The' is pronounced 'thee' before vowels and 'thuh'...

I have just googled up a definition from the DfES, via a LEA:

Foundation Stage Profile - a report summarising a group of children's achievements by the end of the reception year in six designated ares of learning. English (and Welsh?).

Brian

Mary, You interest me strangely. You obviously know more than I, or probably most of the RRFers, do about Gervase's ignorance and duplicity. Would you care to enlighten us with examples of his misunderstanding and money-spinning fictionalisation? As it's Saturday night? Brian (from Nottingham, even ...

...in fact, I think the accent-fighting Gervase takes the customary humorous approach of the progressives to teaching. This attitude to the unfortunate classes particularly, in the urban sink schools, gives him the impetus to expand his humour to relating tales of social degeneration in a pretty exp...

I'd be happier about listening to Gervase relating his charming anecdotes about straightforward rural Yorkshire children if his interest in education extended beyond self-created 'poetry' and such creative stuff. He doesn't seem to have any in levels of literacy, judging by writing of his I have rea...

Hey I didn't really object to the slightly porno end of Photobucket, but I just wondered if the site was some sort of cover job. I am glad to hear of its respectability. Your action accounts for my not being able to duplicate my results subsequently. Apologies for any aspersions received.

Brian

I hit 'welcome to the group' and came across a mildly pornographic photo collection: this looks pretty dodgy.

Brian