Ed Ball's evasion of valid questions and observations:

chew8 · **Joined:** Sun Nov 02, 2003 6:26 pm **Posts:** 2322

Hi Derrie -

Maizie wrote:

I'm afraid that, as a taxpayer and as someone who works within the education system , I deplore the amount of money that is being spent on this ineffective intervention. While I accept that adding in a bit of better phonics might improve RR, to the benefit of the children, I can see no justification for spending huge sums to benefit relatively few children. Particularly now that it is recognised that it is not suitable for 'dyslexic' children, who must be a significant number of RR's current 'clients'.

I agree with all of that. I have been opposing RR since I first saw it in action in Surrey in 1990.

Jenny C.

Debbie Hepplewhite · **Joined:** Mon Aug 29, 2005 4:13 pm **Posts:** 2159

My position is that it is not accountable for the government to have promoted a named intervention programme which was not (and probably still IS not) in line with Jim Rose's recommendations and the Simple View of Reading model.

I suggest that it makes a mockery of the time, effort and money spent on the House of Commons inquiry 'Teaching Children to Read' and Jim Rose's independent review of the teaching of reading - and the government's subsequent acceptance of Rose's recommendations.

I don't take the position that some phonics to improve Reading Recovery is the best solution under the circumstances. We have pointed out over and again that some phonics plus multi-cueing in no way equates to synthetic phonics or to the conclusions of the research on reading. Apart from which - have we any evidence that RR has come in line with the Rose Review other than RR claims?

My view is that the government should be held to account about its promotion of Reading Recovery on many levels - both past promotion and current promotion. Why should this one programme have been so favoured?

We now have several groups and individuals who have written papers questioning the efficacy of Reading Recovery and questioning the government's promotion of Reading Recovery.

So how does one, realistically, hold government to account for flawed action or unacceptable action?

This smacks of the difficulties of challenging 'Establishment'.

chew8 · **Joined:** Sun Nov 02, 2003 6:26 pm **Posts:** 2322

What I've been trying to comment on is not the line I myself take on RR but the line Jim Rose is reported as taking. Susan G. drew attention to Slide 12 in his presentation to the 'Australian Dyslexia SPELD Foundation':

Jim Rose wrote:

Every Child a Reader

This programme stems from Reading Recovery which has been a long running response to children with reading difficulties – including dyslexia.
However, Reading Recovery as a multi-cueing, non-systematic approach is not advocated as the preferred intervention by the Dyslexia Review.

So he made it clear that his Dyslexia Review had not advocated RR.

JAC then wrote:

He also added that the phonics element of RR should be strengthened if it is used.

I took him to be saying something like 'If you are absolutely determined to go on using RR, for goodness sake put more phonics into it'.

I see the line taken by Jim R. during an Australian conference as a separate issue from whether the UK government should be supporting RR as it does. I agree that the UK government should not be supporting RR and I have been saying this to various people in high places since 1991 - I think my first letter on the subject was to Kenneth Clark's 'special adviser' when Clark was Secretary of State for Education. I wouldn't go as far as saying the following, however:

Debbie wrote:

I suggest that it makes a mockery of the time, effort and money spent on the House of Commons inquiry 'Teaching Children to Read' and Jim Rose's independent review of the teaching of reading - and the government's subsequent acceptance of Rose's recommendations.

The government has strongly supported good initial mainstream synthetic phonics teaching, making it clear that schools can choose between commercial programmes fulfilling the right criteria, locally-produced programmes, and Letters and Sounds. I agree that its support for RR is seriously inconsistent with this advice, but I don't think it's a big enough part of the whole picture to justify language such as 'makes a mockery' of the HoC inquiry or of Jim R's independent review.

Jenny C.

Debbie Hepplewhite · **Joined:** Mon Aug 29, 2005 4:13 pm **Posts:** 2159

I would suggest that many of us understand that synthetic phonics teaching is imperative for slower-to-learn and struggling learners.

Ruth Miskin, for example, described how she looked at the fact that phonics teaching was provided for the weakest children through the 'special needs' route and thought it was sensible to provide systematic phonics teaching for all the children - backed up by the research on reading.

For the government to have undertaken official inquiries and national reviews to result in official 'mainstream' teaching being of the synthetic phonics ilk - but to promote the opposite for the weakest and slowest-to-learn pupils - is surely the greatest irony and the greatest possible tragedy. :?:

I DO think it is a mockery to promote systematic synthetic phonics teaching on the one hand and yet to promote a discredited whole language intervention programme on the other warranting such language as a 'mockery'.

This is an unaccountable inconsistency. For a start, which teaching methods are teachers and teaching assistants supposed to follow with their pupils? Which teacher training events should they attend? Which 'experts' should they heed?

The very fact that Jim Rose IS prepared to make it clear that the dyslexia review does not advocate Reading Recovery illustrates that this is a contradiction in terms.

So, is the government going to be selective about whom it listens to - and when?

For example, my understanding is that Reading Recovery does not get the thumbs up by Jim Rose - so are we going to see a change in government position?

Or is the government going to continue to bluff this one out?

And are the Reading Recovery personnel going to provide transparent evidence that their programme is now in line with Jim Rose's recommendations?

Hmm........

Debbie Hepplewhite · **Joined:** Mon Aug 29, 2005 4:13 pm **Posts:** 2159

viewtopic.php?t=4298

The link above leads to another thread on the RRF forum relating to the December 2009 Science and Technology select committee's inquiry and subsequent report into the UK government's promotion of Reading Recovery as its favoured intervention programme.

Everything we have been saying about the government's position and the Reading Recovery programme has been confirmed by this report.

Now we have to wait and see if the UK government persists with the training of several thousand teachers in the Reading Recovery programme in the light of the Science and Technology committee's report.

Debbie Hepplewhite · **Joined:** Mon Aug 29, 2005 4:13 pm **Posts:** 2159

Quote:

Or is the government going to continue to bluff this one out?

This is the question.

Derrie Clark · **Posted:** Fri Jan 22, 2010 2:17 pm

I am certainly aware of teachers starting on the 18 month Reading Recovery training this month.

Furthermore, RR is continuing to be rolled out in schools by these trained teachers under the heading of Better Reading Partnership (BRP).

I'm not sure how the snowball can now be stopped???

chew8 · **Joined:** Sun Nov 02, 2003 6:26 pm **Posts:** 2322

Our best hope for stopping the snowball may be that the Conservatives win the next election. Even then, the RR influence probably won't stop overnight, but at least it's likely to diminish.

Jenny C.

Debbie Hepplewhite · **Joined:** Mon Aug 29, 2005 4:13 pm **Posts:** 2159

I have copied and posted this exchange from two RRF contributors as it describes the kind of levelling for reading which is undertaken as part of the Reading Recovery programme's approach:

Quote:

teejay100000 Post subject: Re: CPS paper by Burkard&Clelford: Cutting the Children’s PlanPosted: Tue Jun 15, 2010 4:56 pm

Joined: Mon Jun 07, 2010 10:29 pm
Posts: 9

I often read quotes similar to: " Independent research in the US and Australia, where
Reading Recovery has been used on a large scale, is uniformly
negative: gains tend to fade out quickly. "

I would question this take on Reading Recovery. RR doesn't provide short-lived gains, but teaches tricks and coping strategies, that, when applied to particular well-chosen text-types (such as the PM reading scheme), give the impression of gains. The "gains" appear to fade away as the texts become less suited to guessing from the picture, first letter, language structure and repetition and the children's gaps in phonetic code-breaking become their downfall.

Quote:

Susan Godsland Post subject: Re: CPS paper by Burkard&Clelford: Cutting the Children’s PlanPosted: Tue Jun 15, 2010 5:00 pm

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Joined: Thu Oct 30, 2003 11:10 pm
Posts: 3117
Location: Exeter UK

So are you saying that any RR 'gains' are a complete illusion, teejay?

Quote:

teejay100000 Post subject: Re: CPS paper by Burkard&Clelford: Cutting the Children’s PlanPosted: Tue Jun 15, 2010 6:44 pm

Joined: Mon Jun 07, 2010 10:29 pm
Posts: 9

No, I am not saying that, Susan. Obviously, any 1-1 reading tuition with a teacher 5 x 30 minutes per week over 16-20 weeks will have some impact for most children. Although I have seen examples where a child made zero progress but these are rare.

Reading Recovery (RR) progress is measured primarily in two ways. First is the Observational Survey, which you may be familiar with (if not I will post more at a later date). OS is carried out at the beginning and after RR programme. The OS measures a variety of "skills", many of which are quite bizarre (for example, one asks a child to see how many words they can write in 10 minutes). As RR will teach everything needed to score highly on this test, the final OS always shows a large "progression", but this has little to do with how well a child reads.

The second measure of RR progress is progress on Book Bands and a so-called finer grading of books called RR book levels. A child is deemed to be reading at a RR level, say level12, when they can read 95% of the words or more using a running record.

There is all manner of things wrong with this approach and I believe it is deliberately designed to create an illusion of fast reading progress. In the first instance, as these book levels are being used as a progress measure, you would expect them to have some consitency. They do not. The books are levelled and book-banded, not on some arbitary criteria, but on the opinions of RR teachers who have used them! I have "tested" children on the books of the same RR level and got completely different results. The RR tutor who did INSET at my school called this a "scientific" approach!

RR likes to use books with predictable text, very informative pictures, obvious storylines and a very controlled vocabulary. They then teach a few sight words and multi-cueing strategies and the result is what appears to be fast progress. For example, a scheme highly-favoured by RR teachers is the PM scheme. Books in the early levels rely on children knowing the words: Here, is, comes and This on sight. Add some obvious pictures and the child can "read" sentences such as "Here is a bull-dozer." This continues up through the scheme, hey presto the children rapidly progress through the book levels.

The final scam that RR teachers use is this. As a "safeguard" to ensure their data is independent, the final assessments are not carried out by the RR teacher (who could be seen to have a vested interest). It is carried out by the link-teacher in the school (who has had a great deal of RR-led training already and is actually heavily involved in the programme. She carries out the Observational Survey (see above) and "levels" the children for final RR data collection. Now, prior to every final assessment, both RR teachers we have had, have, without fail, taken the children out and gone over the books to be used in this final test with the children. (Imagine if a Y6 teacher did that with a SATs paper!)

So in answer to your original question, gains made on RR are certainly exaggerated by the flawed assessment regime and this is the data that is reported by IoE. But what is most damaging is that RR teachers are blatantly teaching tricks to children, using texts that can easily be guessed. When the support of these texts (and the thorough "walk-throughs" of books by RR teachers) is no longer there, and children need to decode, they find their RR skills do not work very well. RR has taught them some phonics, in an ad hoc way (almost paying lip-service to it), but they have gaps, often huge gaps as they've missed class teaching of phonics, etc. RR-veterans' reflex is to do anything before blending all through the word.

Ed Ball's evasion of valid questions and observations:

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