Training of Ofsted Inspectors is happening right now and the new Framework will be in place from January 2012. Not long...

I hope this is sorted very quickly.

This was utterly shocking and I'm sorry that I did not respond at the time that you flagged it up, Maizie.

There may be all sorts of reasons for this muddle but it is a reflection of the huge and destructive mess that teachers have to cope with. Children are being denied the chance to become truly literate (at the last count around 20%) and this mess is allowed to go on and on and on without anyone being accountable.

Ifeel extremely sorry for Nick Gibb and Michael Gove. The same people in the DfE who made the mess in the first place are continuing to do so. No one seems strong enough in the Department to get a grip.

Unfortunately, the bit quoted by Geraldine is in the current National Curriculum and the revised version won't come into force until 2013.

One of the OFSTED training documents ('Getting Them Reading Early') does at least flag up the fact that this bit of the current NC is out of line with what the present government wants. It also has quite a lot in it about the Year 1 screening check, which makes it very clear that the government wants Reception and Y1 teachers to focus on decoding.

Jenny C.

The DFE Assessment Framework and Assessment and Reporting Arrangements (ARA) are now out.

Plenty for us all to mull over.

http://www.education.gov.uk/schools/tea ... ning-check

Thank you Lesley for this alert - I've just seen it. I'm v. surprised that no-one has commented yet. I've a few reservations about the strugglers and how the DfE can encourage teachers to stick to basic decoding skills' practice without getting neurotic about all children reaching the benchmark. It's a difficult balance between complacency and returning to the default position of multi-strategy teaching on the one hand and pushing relentlessly to get all children up to scratch. The middle of Year 2 might be more appropriate for a small minority of children? But please, DfE, don't push these children into inappropriate, expensive, often confusing multi-strategy approaches as Stephen Twigg wants to do.

I hope before the next election Stephen Twigg will read the Select Committee Evidence Based report, listen to Graham Stringer, and have a look at SP in action. It should be a top priority.

The only way children can reach the expected standard in the screening check is by being competent at decoding. I hope teachers will realise that multi-strategy approaches will not produce this competence.

Jenny C.

People can learn to read English without non-words.
If you want low-frequency, there are thousands in an a tlas.
We NEED old tests to allow comparison over time
The supposed 6+ should have been 5+ - it does not cover soft c,g for instance.
How much did it cost?
Mona McNee

Yes, people can learn to read English without non-words and the DfE itself recommends that teachers use rare real words rather than non-words for teaching purposes - but non-words are useful for assessment purposes and the screening check is an assessment tool. Reputable researchers regard non-words as the most stringent way of assessing decoding ability.

Re. soft c and g: they may not have occurred in the 2012 check but the Framework makes it clear that they could occur and that they therefore need to be taught. See pages 12 and 13 of http://media.education.gov.uk/assets/files/pdf/a/phonics_assessment_framework_web_ready_final.pdf

Jenny C.

It is looking like the non-words in the Year One Phonics Screening Check caused the most surprises - not so much the real words.

Children that teachers described as good readers made mistakes or tried to make the non-words into real words.

Personally, I doubt the children were trying to make sense of the non-words, I suggest that they were doing what they perhaps do routinely when reading which may be having a good stab at words that they are looking at quickly and not necessarily attentively.

I suggest that the non-words have a very important role to play in the screening check even though not everyone appreciates the rationale and what could well be happening with the children's reading reflex.

We NEED old tests to allow comparison over time.
Non-words are NEW. We need to go BACKA bCK TO COMMON SENSE.
New ideas come from people inn the Df
We trying to justify their jobs.
Chris Woodhead called for a massive reduction in the ed-budget and so do I.
£50bn a year, at lest.....

ISTR that the check was supposed to be aimed at providing information about the children to the teachers. My hope is that the surprisingly (to the teachers) low achievement of their "good" readers tells some of them about themselves, in particular the inadequacy of their own judgments.

It is not fair to blame teachers' judgment when they are given poor materials (Letters and Soudns) and supposed to teach that!
We NEED the old tests, to allow comparison over time.
Why spend money on new ones? (Why? To provide jobs for "highly qualified professionals".)

I agree that we need ‘the old tests’ to allow comparison over time - results on such tests are reported from time to time on the RRF message-board. These tests, however, tend to contain a number of words taught as ‘sight’ words in many schools, so I think we also need the Year 1 phonics screening check to make it clear that the top priority in the early stages of schooling is to ensure that children have good decoding skills.

Letters and Sounds promotes the reading of unfamiliar words by phonic decoding and warns against the use of cues from pictures and context (see Notes of Guidance, p. 12) so I don’t think it can be blamed for the particular aspect of teachers’ judgement that we are talking about in connection with the screening check. We are talking about teachers who think that good readers identify words by using picture cues and context cues – teachers who think like the one quoted in the Sheffield Hallam evaluation of the screening-check pilot:

‘Very difficult test for Year One pupils because it's not something they are familiar with doing. So we are used to asking them to decode words in context. In books to apply their knowledge of the picture cues, the context and so on.’ (p. 50)

Jenny C.

I don't blame them, because it's not their fault that they have been poorly informed at their university, and are not able to get the best out of their materials.

To give the teachers (and their managers?) new information, viz. that their "good" readers aren't, and need to be taught something that is missing from their current teaching.