Steady progress should not amount to going along with Boris Johnson's schools' competition idea which continues to condone and encourage schools to use discredited teaching methods.

This is also taking accountability away from the government and those in authority over giving contradictory guidance to schools and allowing schools to continue with flawed methods ESPECIALLY with the weakest and most vulnerable children.

There is a huge difference between proper research and a schools' competition.

Not only that, there is perhaps no such thing as a completely objective researcher. Only a few days ago, Jenny, you yourself were describing the situation regarding researchers and academics where their existing 'understanding' can, in effect, skew the research and their 'understanding' of conclusions - inadvertently. This is where there may well be full and transparent intregity.

Over and again we research the research and can find it wanting in terms of its conclusions.

I would not pander to Boris Johnson's idea. If he wants to be a leader in London for moving forwards the scenario in our education system, he should become more knowledgeable about research and achievements to date - and take them seriously with the question as to whether interfering bodies such as the government, local authority advisors and inspectors - and teacher-trainers - are ensuring full and proper information reaches the teaching profession.

Then, Boris and others should be scrutinising their notion of all this adult freedom to teach children according to the adults' preferences and whether this is more important than the children's rights to be guaranteed the best possible teaching of alphabetic code information and the core skills - which we KNOW all schools should be doing.

If you don't stick to the issues at the heart of the matter, you end up getting side-tracked by desperation for 'something' to happen.

Stick to what is right, and that is the path to follow.

John Walker's analysis of the pamphlet and the issues surrounding it:

http://literacyblog.blogspot.com/2010/0 ... -read.html

Sue Lloyd has just told me that Miriam Gross was on Radio 4's Woman's Hour this morning talking about the report:



http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p008zjgq

FE Tutor has written a message about 'Womans Hour Today', with a link to listen to the programme.

I also heard the Woman's hour and then downloaded the Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet.
Debbie is absolutely right, the competition idea is quite shocking and sufficient research has been done to show conclusively that SP is most appropriate for high flyers and slow learners as well as the "average" child. I know people who teach Reading Recovery who can never be convinced and, of course that is because of the way they have been trained. The "whole word"/ searchlight paradigm is STILL prominent in teacher training albeit mixed in with "mixed methods" mumbo jumbo. It is not the schools that should be experimenting - wasting more of the children's precious potential - but the teacher-training tutors. Until the PGCE and degree courses start to wake up to their responsibilities to keep up with the professional and academic research we will carry on getting nowhere fast.

It is also rather shocking that even in a dedicated discussion like that of Ms Gross (Lady Owen) there is no grasp of the key principle of the "Simple View of Reading" so that the concept of decoding can be so misunderstood.

Isn't there still room, though, for comparisons of the sort which Diane McG. said in 2004 were still needed? On p. 323 of Early Reading Instruction, she says of linguistic phonics programmes 'We need to pin down the elements that make a differemce. Given their complexity and variety, this is not a straightforward task'. On p. 325 she gives the Jolly Phonics actions as an example, saying that 'Sumbler's data suggest that the JP actions matter, whereas Johnston and Watson's data suggest that they do not'.

If there were a competition which schools were free to enter or not, it's likely that only schools which were confident that they were doing a good job would enter, and that might give scome scope for the sort of pinning down that Diane has in mind. We may learn quite a lot of what we need to know if the present government goes ahead with the idea of a simple but compulsory decoding test in Year 1, but a competition might provide useful additional information. Kobi Nazrul, for example, would probably have done extremely well in such a competition when Ruth Miskin was head there, and that would have given good publicity to the ditinctive features of her approach.

Jenny C.

A shoot out would require the sort of resources that Reading Recovery has at its disposal. Also I think it gives the wrong messages - there is a mountain of evidence that shows that Reading Recovery interfers with children's understanding, and practise, of the alphabetic code.
As with the US 'What Works' Clearing House and the odd results from the US controlled randomised tests on bob slavin's 2 year intervention programme, strange things can happen. It would take a massive amount of resources to analyse the structure of such a shoot out, ensure that finance-backed PR is matched, design a shoot out that takes into account the amount of additional funds required to operate a remedial programme, additional training, cost of additional materials etc. We would probably need a full-time team of people looking not only at costs, but also evaluating ease of use, need for strong head (kobi nazul, from memory, I think failed to do particularly well after Ruth left - please correct this statement if I'm wrong!).We would also need robust simple, cheat-proof tests at 10-11 to see the impact of initial remediation.
We do, badly, need a list of schools - such as the Tower Hamlets school that focuses on Jolly Phonics mentioned by Miriam Gross on Woman's Hour yesterday.

The report is being discussed on an Irish message board, Politics.ie:

http://www.politics.ie/education-scienc ... ns-us.html

Teacher Training is and continues to be a huge problem. Most of the Colleges are locked in a constructivist view of education that sees teachers as “facilitators”. This view sees all things natural as good and all things artificial as bad. If something has to be taught to children it is seen as artificial and of limited value.

I and others in the Reading Reform Foundation believe that all trainee teachers , at least in the primary sector, should be subject to a two part test in the theory and practice of teaching reading. It could be a bit like the format for the Driving Test , there would be a theory test and a practical teaching test which could be carried out in a school with a good synthetic phonics approach. The student would have to pass both parts of the test. The test would be compulsory and all primary school teachers would need this qualification in order to teach.

Gosh, it's as much as I can do to keep my fingers away from the 'registr' button!

Doesn't that person who is triumphantly quoting the 1999 English Primary curriculum know that it is at least 3 years out of date?

Well, obviously not!

Gross puts Bangs to rights!
http://literacyblog.blogspot.com/2010/0 ... ights.html

Michael Shaw, opinion editor at the TES, finally finds time to read the pamphlet, 'So why can't they read?'. He gives it 2/10.

Marks out of 10 - No place for facts in fiction



http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6054229

Thanks, Susan. I've added my two pence worth.

Michael Shaw has replied to maizie and promethean:



-then follows an advert from Thrass