I thought Askew was very good indeed and that he said nothing that most
of the contributors to the RRF could disagree with. In fact, he included in his talks the point about writing being a representation of the sounds in the language. Gill Jones, for Ofsted, also made absolutely clear that Ofsted would be looking closely at the screening check results, how schools were teaching reading (i.e. whether they were using decodable readers to build fluency and confidence and whether the decodable books were broadly commensurate with where children were in their phonics instruction), and whether phonics was being used as the primary strategy for writing.In many other presentations, I felt that the 'systematic' aspect of instruction was fudged or was even tipping over into analytic phonics, which is anything but systematic. I guess that knowledgeable delegates could sit still for all of that inasmuch as there were other aspects of the talks to appreciate, especially two women from New Horizons, who seemed to be doing truly marvellous work with children who have been excluded from mainstream.
But then [he hadn't attended the previous sessions] along came Frank Monaghan from the OU to undermine pretty much everything that had gone before. [I'm writing a blogposting about it.] Of course, he said, nobody is saying that we don't need phonics at all - the Rosen line - but then I learned to read by reading. Frank Smith came up, of course, as well as other anti-phonics academics (Stephen L. Strauss, for example). It was anecdotal and the kind of insidious, dog-whistle anti-phonics politics at which some of these clever, confident academics excel; you know the kind of thing, a joke here, a joke there, let me inveigle you into my ideological stance by getting you to enjoy my joke at Michael Gove's expense, and so on.
Infuriatingly, we weren't allowed to make contributions to the conference, only to ask questions. So, our Frank was able to waltz in, throw his theoretical hand-grenade, watch it go off and waltz out again. I thought that the arrogance was breathtaking. What's more, I'd like to know who invited him because this was most certainly not the future of phonics.
