Could better reading skills save lives?
16th November 2016
http://pamelasnow.blogspot.co.uk/2016/1 ... lives.html
Do read the whole piece - it is very important and very telling....While ways of effectively approaching the sad, complex, and often seemingly hopeless lives of young people in custody are as elusive as they are thin on the ground, we are not lacking in evidence about how to lift improvement in a key protective factor for vulnerable young people: making the transition to literacy.
Children cannot succeed academically if they do not make this transition, and they need to do so in the first three years of school, to prevent a yawning canyon opening up between them, their achieving peers, and the rapidly increasing language and literacy demands of the school curriculum.
Ironically, we do not need more research to know how to do a better job of teaching reading. We simply need to do a better job of applying the abundance of high-quality research that has been reported, replicated, and supported in three national inquiries (the USA, Australia, and the UK). My interactions with teachers, as well as research of which I am a part, affirms time and time again, that pre-service teacher education is not equipping teachers to teach reading in ways that are consistent with the recommendations of these national reviews.
It is sobering to consider that young males in Victoria who are youth justice clients are 9 times more likely than non-offending peers to die before the age of 21. Their female counterparts are 41 times more likely than non-offending peers to die before the age of 21.
Could better reading skills save lives?
I'll leave the final word on this to Rod Morgan, the former Chair of the UK, Youth Justice Board:
"It may be too much to say that if we reformed our schools, we would have no need of prisons. But if we better engaged our children and young people in education we would almost certainly have less need of prisons. Effective crime prevention has arguably more to do with education than sentencing policy” (2007).
Professor Pamela Snow is a member of IFERI's Advisory Group. You can learn more about her work here:
http://www.iferi.org/professor-pamela-snow/