Tag Archives: England

‘War and Peace in Reading – Time for a Truce?’ by Sir Jim Rose

Some children we teach imprint indelible memories. One such was Raymond. He was a ‘blitz of a boy’ fashioned in the mould of Charles Causley’s, ‘Timothy Winters’. For him, school was not always a pretty sight. During a story writing lesson, he asked: ‘‘Sir, how do you spell peace?’’ I said, ‘’Do you mean as in a piece of pie, Raymond?’’ He said, ‘’No. I mean like when ‘me’ dad says: turn that bloody telly off and let’s have a bit of peace.’’ This was almost 60 years ago when I was a ‘rookie’ primary teacher and Raymond was one of 40 children in my class of nine-year-olds.

While much has changed markedly for the better in primary education over the years it seems that peace has yet to break out over how best to teach young children to read and write. In the never-ending ‘Reading Wars’, the noise of battle is sometimes akin to those repetitious adverts on the ‘telly’ that numb the brain: once described by a teacher colleague as ‘stereophonic porridge — cold grey and coming at you from all directions’. For hardworking, dedicated primary teachers much of this debate must come over as a Tower of Babel, especially when they look to research for help only to find that it, too, often points in opposite directions.

On the face of it, two recent papers by Greg Brooks, seem to be another attempt to stir the porridge in Australia and in England. The first argues forcibly that Australia should resist the temptation to introduce a version of the Phonics Screening Check (PSC). The second is one of a brigade of papers in a recent book edited by Margaret Clark, a long-standing critic of the Reading Review (Rose 2006), who seems to be stuck fast in an unreconstructed, Plowdenesque view of primary education.

Australia is debating the value of a Phonic Screening Check for their schools and is wisely drawing upon rich seams of national and international academic expertise and professional practice to inform their decisions. This paper therefore focuses upon the papers by Brooks and Clark in the case of England. In passing, however, it is perhaps worth saying the PSC is turning out to be an exceptional initiative, not least, by providing a very strong incentive for schools and teachers to verify their judgements and keep children’s progress in phonics under review.
Since it was published, I have spent much time reminding critics, first, about the remit of our 2006 Review and, secondly, on explaining what it did not say to those inclined to believe everything they read in the press, as well as those with vested interests be they ideological, or commercial.

I agree with Greg Brooks in that many who take issue with the 2006 Review have either not read it or have chosen to ignore its key recommendations which, for example, set phonics in the context of a powerfully enriched primary school curriculum that prioritises literacy, with serious attention given to developing spoken language and attentive listening alongside reading and writing. ‘If they can’t say it they can’t write it’ has always seemed to me to be one of several obvious reasons for fostering ‘oracy’ from birth, as a precursor for literacy and much else. How many times and ways does the message that: ‘high quality phonic work is essential but not sufficient for teaching children to read’, need to be parroted before it sinks in?
I part company with Greg Brooks when he takes issue with the Reading Review on the grounds that it overstates the case for synthetic phonics and conflates it with systematic phonics. So, what does the Review actually say on that score? It says:

‘‘Research, inspection and leading-edge work of settings and schools may inform best practice. However, findings from different research programmes are sometimes contradictory or inconclusive, and often call for further studies to test tentative findings. While robust research findings must not be ignored, developers of national strategies, much less schools and settings, cannot always wait for the results of long-term research studies. They must take decisions, based on as much firm evidence as is available from a range of sources at the time, especially from replicable and sustainable best practice”

Greg Brooks applies a sleight of hand by ignoring the first, specific remit for the Review, notably, to make a judgement about: ‘What best practice should be expected of early reading and synthetic phonics?’

Even though the research in 2006 may have been inconclusive the requirement was to make a judgement, not to sit on the fence. Ten years on, I would argue that the research is now far from inconclusive, rather it amounts to an even stronger case for synthetic phonics.

By any reasonable definition ‘synthetic phonics’ is systematic, that is to say, it must be taught directly, regularly and incrementally according to a planned progression that takes full account of children’s different but developing abilities.

Moreover, ‘inconclusive’ seems to be an outcome to which educational research is particularly prone. What are teachers expected to do when research accrued over years at considerable expense comes to no conclusion and they have to teach something as crucially important as reading? One obvious response to that question is to take ‘proven practice’ (R. Slavin 2016) into account and that, too, was written into my remit as ‘best practice’.

Greg Brooks and one of his colleagues, Carole Torgerson had a different answer. If memory serves, having themselves already conducted a review of research on phonics, they wanted to spend another four years at considerable expense on a randomised control trial designed to settle the matter on synthetic phonics. This was because their review had found in favour of systematic phonics but was ambivalent about the primacy of synthetic phonics over ‘analytic phonics’. In my view and that of other members of our Advisory Group so doing risked kicking the can down the road for another four years thus paralysing action in schools and teacher training.

Contrary to Greg’s reflections on the run up to my Review, we spent a great deal of time, especially in schools, observing the teaching of reading, including a very helpful visit to the famous Clackmannanshire Project. We saw most, if not all of the leading-edge, published reading programmes in action and attended teacher training events. We also had the benefit of an HMI survey designed to inform the Review, plus numerous meetings of stakeholders, such as, parents. Though unacknowledged by Clark and Brooks, all of this is set out in the Review.

Prior to the Review I had also taken part in HMI exercises reporting on what turned out to be a flawed ‘Searchlights’ model of reading in England’s National Literacy Strategy, as well as directly observing the teaching of reading in projects overseas, including the USA and Europe.
In consequence, we reported that:

‘Having considered a wide range of evidence, the review has concluded that that the case for systematic phonic work is overwhelming and much strengthened by a synthetic approach the key features of which are to teach beginner readers:

grapheme/phoneme (letter/sound) correspondences (the alphabetic principle) in a clearly defined, incremental sequence

to apply the highly important skill of blending (synthesising) phonemes in order all-through a word to read it

to apply the skills of segmenting words into their constituent phonemes to spell

that blending and segmenting are reversible processes.’

In the case of phonic work, it is very clear that for any programme to be successful, first and foremost, it must be systematic. That is ‘square one’. This much at least seems to be common ground with Greg Brooks but less so it seems with Margaret Clark.

Judgements about synthetic phonics therefore covered one, albeit hugely important, aspect of the remit.

Greg Brooks admits that he is theoretically disposed to accept synthetic phonics as the front runner when compared to ‘analytic phonics’. He writes:

‘I was convinced then, and still am, that theory suggests that synthetic phonics is more coherent than analytic phonics as a strategy for young learners working out unfamiliar words.’

So, the question seems to be: ‘Synthetic phonics works in practice but does it work in theory?’ Fair dues – Greg is working on it.

He will no doubt take on board the spectacular success of England shown in the latest PIRLS data as reported by the BBC: ‘Northern Ireland and England are in the top 10 of the world’s best primary school readers in global rankings.’

And, reflect on the comments about the Phonics Check in the DFE report – Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) National Report for England December 2016:

‘The present PIRLS findings provide additional support for the efficacy of phonics approaches, and in particular, the utility of the phonics check for flagging pupils’ potential for lower reading performance in their future schooling. Additionally, the correlation between the phonics check and PIRLS performance also potentially bodes well for England’s pupils’ average performance in future PIRLS cycles, as 58% of pupils met the phonics check expected standard in 2012, whereas this has increased to 81% in 2017. Pupils who met this standard in 2012 had an average PIRLS 2016 performance of 587, compared to the overall average of 559.’

Perhaps we should remind ourselves that wars have winners and losers and in this phoney battle over phonics; the risk is that the real losers will be children, especially those who struggle to learn to read and of whom much more needs to be said than can be covered in this paper.
Today, as I write, the BBC is commenting on this year’s imminent OFSTED Annual Report, as follows:

More than 100 schools have not improved in the last 10 years, education watchdog Ofsted is expected to say.

The annual report by the Chief Inspector of Schools being released on Wednesday is expected to show that 130 schools have failed to record a “good” inspection since 2005.

It is reported that of the 20,000 schools in the country, 500 of those for children of primary age and 200 for over-11s have failed to make the grade.

However, 90% of all primary schools and nearly 80% of all secondary schools are rated good or outstanding, the report will say.

Clearly the rising tide of reading success in England is a cause for rejoicing but it is not lifting a worrying minority of boats that are firmly stuck in the mud. We need to keep working at it. Given that we know so much about ‘what works’ to secure high standards of reading in schools – perhaps we should now pay more attention to that other crucial piece of the territory and ask: what works to best effect in teacher training?

Jim Rose
13.12.17

For further information and discussion, please visit the forum here.

“The future doesn’t have to be like the past” by Sir Jim Rose

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While England may not top PISA’s international league tables, we almost certainly surpass our international counterparts in the amount and pace of educational reform that governments of all stripes have generated since the Education Reform Act in 1988.* In a nutshell, the aim of these reforms has been ‘to raise standards and narrow gaps’ in pupil performance.

Headline news has recently focused yet again on falling standards of education as national examination results for 16 year-olds this year show that: ‘GCSE grades have seen the biggest ever fall in the overall pass rate in the history of the exams.’ These grades apply to schools in the state sector and stand in sharp contrast, to the independent, private sector where more than a third of the children achieved the highest grade of ‘A’ – nearly five times the national average.

The private sector in England now stands at around 7% of the school population and is way beyond the means of the great majority of parents. Lloyds Bank recently estimated the costs of sending one child to private school from reception to Year 13 as £156,653 – annual fees having nearly doubled from an average of £7,308 in 2003 to £13,341 in 2016.

In a speech, earlier this year, our Chief Inspector of Schools, Sir Michael Wilshaw, delivered a scathing attack on the ideologies of both left and right-wing politics, which he holds responsible for a woeful lack of progress on narrowing the achievement gap between socio-economic groups. He said that, despite a range of initiatives, including the Pupil Premium**, no real difference has been made over the last decade:

‘The needle has barely moved. In 2005, the attainment gap between free school meal and non-FSM pupils in secondary schools was 28 percentage points. It is still 28 percentage points now.’

‘Our failure to improve significantly the educational chances of the poor disfigures our school system. It scars our other achievements. It stands as a reproach to us all.’

It is hardly surprising, that this has prompted a resurgence of fierce debate about the stubborn obstacles in the way of boosting the attainment of children from low income families and narrowing the gap in educational performance between disadvantaged children and their more advantaged peers.

The debate has been further inflamed by recent government proposals to provide more selective, state grammar schools ‘to give parents a wider choice of schools’ irrespective of their background circumstances.

All of this has coincided with the latest national curriculum assessments for children in the final year of primary school (11yr-olds) showing that fewer pupils reached the expected standard in reading than in writing and mathematics. Moreover, evidence of lasting improvements from numerous targeted interventions to help struggling readers is rare. It seems that hard won, early gains from programmes designed to help them ‘catch-up’ tend to fade out as they fail to keep pace with the overall rate of progress of their year groups.

It is little comfort to know that some of these problems are not unique to England. However, some would say that we are the product of a historical past that has led to a more stratified society than many of our international counterparts, and that divisions between state and private education are at the root of these problems. One of our most visionary and dynamic erstwhile school ministers – now Lord Andrew Adonis – commented on the divide between state and private education:

‘Over the entire second half of the 20th century, these prejudices made it exceptionally hard to do more than fiddle around at the margins of state-private partnership. This, in turn, bred a deep fatalism which is with us still. Everyone knows that the status quo is terrible – rigid separation between most of the nation’s most privileged and powerful schools and the rest. Yet no-one has a credible plan or will to do much about it except say how bad it is, why it’s someone else’s fault, and why it will never change because, well, this is England, it’s deep and cultural, and it all began with Henry VIII. It’s the same fatalism which greeted gridlock in central London before the congestion charge, hospital waiting lists before patients’ rights, and rain stopping play at Wimbledon before the roof.

The call now is for activists not fatalists. The future doesn’t have to be like the past.’

In a bold attempt to achieve a strong ‘state-private partnership’, he paved the way for academising the school system – a major reform in England which, though not without criticism, remains a firm commitment of the present administration.

However, progress has been patchy. These radical systemic/organisational changes have yet to make the looked for impact on helping less well-off children scale the rock face of disadvantage. For them it is much like bicycling a ‘penny farthing’ uphill – the higher they get the harder it becomes. Well-off parents, it seems, are able to equip their children with an Olympic class bike in the shape of private schooling that boosts their rate of progress. So what might we do, or do differently to make sure all children have an educational super bike?

It is of first importance, not to lower our educational expectations for disadvantaged youngsters. There are some telling examples of those from the most unpromising background circumstances succeeding against the odds. Moreover, by no means all privately educated youngsters from prestigious schools ‘make it big’ – so caveat emptor.

Secondly, school inspections show that schools of all types vary in quality ranging, in OFSTED terms, from ‘outstanding’ to ‘in need of improvement’. This suggests that systemic change alone is unlikely to be the tide that lifts all boats. It is trite but true to say that to be successful such change must secure high quality teaching irrespective of school type or location – hence, we would do well to curb our appetite for systemic reform and put more effort into the professional development of teachers and training those who support them in the classroom.

While it ought to be a given that every school should endow all of its children with the advantage of high quality teaching, inspection reports show this not to be the case. Rather, the picture remains one of too much variation in the quality of teaching within and between schools. The well-worn mantra that no school can be better than its teachers needs more that a facelift. It needs a change of heart.

This part of the forest might also benefit from a clearer definition of what ‘high quality’ looks like. In other words, establish a common language for a discourse on optimal teaching (and learning). Some promising developments worth close attention have ‘moved the needle’ by encouraging schools to be ‘self-improving’. One recent piece of research points to a positive impact on narrowing the gap in the reading performance of disadvantaged primary children by means of cost effective, well-taught phonic programmes (Centre for Economic Performance Paper No.1425 April 2016).

We do not yet know how well these gains are sustained for example, when children move from primary to secondary education. However, OFSTED Annual Reports show that, in this respect at least, the primary sector is doing rather better than the secondary sector in narrowing the literacy gap – much to the credit of primary teachers. Given that we know far more about how to teach children to read and write than ever before there should be no excuses for poor teaching in this territory.

The future does not have to be like the past, nor ought the best we can do now be the best that we should hope for. All that said, if we are to secure high quality teaching for all children in England, reformers and policy makers would do well to heed the words of Alvin Toffler: “Future shock [is] the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.”

*The Education Reform Act 1988 is widely regarded as the most important single piece of education legislation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland since the ‘Butler’ Education Act 1944. (Wikipaedia).

**The pupil premium is additional funding for publicly funded schools in England to raise the attainment of disadvantaged pupils of all abilities and to close the gaps between them and their peers.

Jim Rose

9^th September 2016

The Dyslexia Debate and a Response by Sir Jim Rose

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IFERI is pleased to present a new paper by Sir Jim Rose, which was written as a response to Professor Julian Elliott’s recent presentation at Macquarie University, Australia.

Please click here to watch the presentation: The Dyslexia Debate

The Dyslexia Debate: A Response by Sir Jim Rose

The range and depth of enlightened thinking that DDOLL (Developmental Disorders of Language and Literacy Network) colleagues have brought to this discussion is riveting. It transcends historic wrangles over the term dyslexia that have done little to take us forward. Belatedly, I should like to add a couple of wild cards to this captivating exchange of views. The purpose in so doing is to explore further what might done to make sure far more of the children within the frame of so-called ‘instructional casualties’ receive consistently high quality teaching of reading and related aspects of literacy. Arguably, if schools could achieve this the benefits to children would be enormous and the need for costly intervention programmes reduced.

First, given that the education profession has access to a vastly greater knowledge of reading development than ever before, why is it that we continue to see confusion, not to say dissent, in schools and teacher training, about the teaching of reading, particularly in respect of phonics and dyslexia?

In the UK, although there has been considerable progress over the last decade, we still suffer from outbreaks of phonic phobia and tiresome tensions between fake opposites, such as, phonics v ‘reading for meaning’. Despite the enactment of a National Curriculum which makes such teaching mandatory, we have not yet achieved universal agreement in schools that teaching children how the alphabet works for reading and writing is crucially important.

The mantra ‘one size does not fit all’ is often chanted against phonics. This suggests that some continue to regard phonics as one of several ‘methods’ from which to select and match to discredited notions of ‘learning styles’, rather than a body of core knowledge and skills that has to be taught and practised. In the case of phonic work, if teachers are not convinced of the value of a regularly applied systematic approach it is hardly surprising that mediocre and poor practice persist. What more might be done to make plain what high quality teaching looks like in this domain?

As Alison Wolf (Review of Vocational Education 2011) said, ‘If assessing learning is hard, assessing the quality of teaching is harder’. Because the latter assessment brings with it concerns about ‘blaming teachers’ for children’s failures in reading it leads to reluctance to tackle what are often straightforward, improvable aspects of practice within the control of the teacher and the school.

England may not top the international league tables of pupil performance but we must be among world leaders in the amount of inspection and testing that takes place in our schools, starting in the primary years. Many years spent as a school inspector observing teaching in England and elsewhere convinced me that there is far more variation in the quality of teaching literacy, including reading, between and within schools than there ought to be. Further, we know the distance between leading and trailing edge teaching is associated with unacceptable variations in pupil performance, and that the impact of poor teaching on children who enter school already behind their peers amplifies their difficulties.

Is it beyond our capabilities to assess the quality teaching without blaming teachers?

My second wild card is to ask what we might learn from other professions. Anecdotes are sometimes useful so here goes…

Last year an unfriendly tree wrote off my car. I survived the crash due to the incredible expertise of the medical profession. This unwelcome event had an upside, however, in that it gave me an opportunity to compare the performance of two life changing professions: medicine and education. I had lots of time to catch up on reading about reading while experiencing our National Health Service at its best. Further, I was able to listen to the 2014 Reith lectures by the acclaimed surgeon Atul Gawande. He declared that he was in ‘the disturbance business’ and explored thorny issues, such as, ‘Why doctors fail’. I then read his book: ‘The Checklist Manifesto – How to get things right’ and watched with his TED talk: ‘How do we heal medicine?Many of Gawande’s insights apply to getting things right in education. As a frontline surgeon, he drew upon keenly observed and detailed analyses of medical practice. His concept of our ‘necessary infallibility’ has much to commend it should we dare to explore more forensically why teaching fails while making sure teachers know that the purpose of so doing is to work with them to improve the quality of teaching and achieve better outcomes for children.

Medicine and education are ‘person-to–person’ services subject to human fallibility and to human ingenuity for solving problems: success is won by learning from our mistakes. Both professions look to research for solutions. They also rely on knowledgeable and skilled practitioners to make sure that as far as possible decisions are ‘evidence-based’ and ‘proven’ in practice. Equally important, they must be capable of making sound judgements when faced with the hard question: ‘what should we do when research is inconclusive, evidence is lacking and doing nothing is not an option?’

Among other things, Gawande suggests that doctors fail through lack of knowledge and, or, ineptitude, that is to say, insufficient skill in applying knowledge. He counts himself among them in these respects. He sees mistakes as opportunities: ’we have an opportunity before us, not just in medicine but in virtually any endeavour. Even the most expert among us can gain from searching out the patterns of mistakes and failures and putting a few checks in place. But will we do it? Are we ready to grab onto the idea? It is far from clear’.

The notion that we should actively build a school and classroom culture that enables teachers and, equally important, enables children as learners, to learn from patterns of mistakes is an idea worth grabbing. Moreover, his ‘Manifesto’ embraces a set of ethical principles and expectations worth taking on board:

“First is an expectation of selflessness: that we who accept responsibility for others – whether we are doctors, lawyers, teachers, public authorities, soldiers or pilots – will place the needs and concerns of those who depend on us above our own. Second is an expectation of skill: that we will aim for excellence in our knowledge and expertise. Third is an expectation of trust-worthiness: that we will be responsible in our personal behaviour toward our charges.

Aviators, however, add a fourth dimension, discipline: discipline in following prudent procedure and in functioning with others.”

For Gawande professional ‘discipline’ is aided by a ‘checklist’ which transforms ‘cowboys into pit crews’. That is indeed a powerful idea – but you must Google his short TED talk to understand it. (Or click at the end of this post to watch it.)

I have rambled on long enough save to ask: is there anything to be said for embracing some of these ideas, including, perhaps, developing a ‘checklist’ for teaching systematic, synthetic phonics?

With special thanks to Macquarie University for allowing us to distribute and use the link to Professor Julian Elliott’s presentation.