John Bald/language and literacy

Welcome

For Parents.

I have almost forty years' experience of teaching people of all ages to read and write, to learn foreign languages, and to understand and use arithmetic. This website puts what I've learned along the way at your and your children's service, wherever you happen to be. It also keeps a critical eye on the activities of schools, examining boards and the government, with occasional notes on other things, including music. Please get in touch if you feel I can help.  The website has received over 55,000 visits. 

For Teachers and Assistants.

My teaching techniques are described in detail in the various sections below, and in my two books, Using Phonics to Teach Reading and Spelling (Sage) and The Literacy File (available from me). I have also written The Teaching Assistant's Edufax. This is the most economical way of distributing information, and the books are available in many libraries. Teachers and assistants are also welcome to observe me teaching, by appointment, usually on Saturday mornings.

For Local Authorities and schools.

I believe in the efficient delivery of public services in the interests of the people who depend on them, and do not hold left-wing views. I offer consultancy to local authorities and individual schools on all aspects of school management, including budgetary control and staff appointments. I was lead author for Policy Exchange's publication Faith Schools We Can Believe In, which was the subject of a Panorama programme, and have appeared on ITN Daybreak to discuss issues of school management.

I have extensive and highly successful experience of training teachers and assistants in literacy (including tackling dyslexia), languages and basic mathematics. All training is discussed in detail with you, as client, and closely matched to your needs.

I was an expert witness in the leading libel case, Bookbinder v Oppenheim, with the late George Carman QC, and have recently acted as an expert witness in a schools admission appeal for a firm of solicitors in the North of England.   

I am a member of the Department for Education's Ministerial Steering Group for Languages.

 

 

RTI (and an alternative), political correctness and behaviour.

Referred to Professor Jack Fletcher's work by Karina McLachlain, I find yet another conflict in language - I find the American habit of constructing long phrases and then reducing them to acronyms very irritating -and then this:

Instead, there was a branching off of children whose primary problem was behavioral (now called Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder [ADHD]) and children whose primary problem was achievement. 

So ADHD is simply policitally correct poor behaviour. I'd always thought so.

Professor Fletcher knows, however that there is a risk of people being assessed as having a learning disability when in fact they have not been properly taught. The US assessments try to tackle this by requiring documentation of the teaching the child has received, followed by assessments. The rub here lies in how much detail is given of this teaching. 

RTI stands for "response to intervention", and is very similar to the wave approach adopted by the last government to SEN. In plain English, if you're falling behind in class (first tier or wave), you get extra help in a group (second tier or wave) and then if that doesn't work, you get individual help (third tier or wave). I'd like to see some experimental work that compared a short injection of focused individual support - and I don't mean the formulaic approach of Reading Recovery, that wastes so much time at the beginning, and then uses an out of date framework to impose its approach on teachers. 

Specific Language Impairment, Professor Dorothy Bishop. RALLI

Speciflc language impairment, says Professor Bishop, is a common disability that is too little understood, and so rarely detected. A link to her campaign to improve matters is here, and I recommend it highly. 

Maths Made to Measure - top drawer HMI.

HMI's latest report on maths brings together the key points made, or sometimes hinted at, in their work over the past five years. The pattern emerging from their evidence is one of isolated examples of excellence in a sea of inconsistency in teaching, caused by staffing problems, poor national guidance and, above all, failure to match teaching to what children of all abilities most need to learn. 

Polite as ever, the criticisms are devastating. The national numeracy strategy has focused teachers attention on the topics required for each year, but not on the underlying concepts that are the foundation of progress in mathematics. Interim calculation methods rather than the more efficient traditional algorithms have a life of their own, leaving some children in secondary schools using multiple addition because they don't know  tables.  Some teachers simply don't know the subject well enough, and pupils not in top sets may well not see a qualified maths teacher at all. Schemes of work are taken off the shelf and not matched to the needs of pupils, even at GCSE and A level. Multiple resits are used to ensure C grades at examinations, and not enough pupils are reaching A and A*.

Read it and weep? No. In the words of the prayer book, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest. This report is the most important contribution to mathematics education I have seen since I started teaching in 1973, and should be used to rebuild the subject. Jane Jones and her specialist mathematics colleagues in Her Majesty's Inspectorate have done the nation an important service.

Guardian - Autism

Very interesting article in Guardian on a parent's experience of autism and dealing with the local authority, in particular on the conflict between assessment legally obliged to be based on the child's needs, and limited budgets. Soon after the Warnock idea of a statement was introduced - and the idea was that everyone with sen should have a statement - the director of education for Cumbria was removed for taking the law to mean what it said and running up a huge debt for the authority.

Autism and more particularly other conditions on the "spectrum" is particularly difficult as it is not fully understood in the way that other conditions are. This leads to misdiagnosis and consequent misunderstanding of cases which are correctly identified. Professor Sue Buckley and her colleagues at Portsmouth University have developed a model of sustained investigation in the context of Down Syndrome that should be repeated for autism. There are examples of good work - the Guardian picks out Applied Behaviour Analysis - that should be more widely known so that they can be included in mainstream school programmes without additional cost to parents.

Going backwards - Michael Rosen and Reading between the Lines.

"Reading Between the Lines " R4 was a good attempt at a balanced view of issues in reading teaching by the BBC, but Michael Rosen stretched credibility past breaking point with an analogy, not to driving a car, but to reversing it. When we're reversing, we can't see where we're going without either relying on mirrors or giving ourselves a sore neck. We do not read backwards, but move our eyes in the same direction as the developing meaning of the text.

Reversing might have been the first idea that occured to Mr Rosen - if so, he should have thought twice. Driving forwards and using all controls would have been a better analogy. But hey - Mr Rosen is a celebrity, so can say what he likes, whether it means anything or not. Where's that bear?

One of my key teaching ideas came from a similar source. I was not an easy driving pupil, and passed my test third time. The instructor before last said, "We believe everything the mirror tells us, but we don't believe the mirror tells us everything". I used this with pupils until I found they could not quite believe everything the letters told them, and changed it to "We use what the letters tell us, but we don't believe the letters tell us everything."  This fits the facts, and is very helpful.

Understanding the two times table.

It may appear that there is not much to understand, or that understanding doesn't matter, provided you know it. The first statement is true, and this is an advantage. We can (when we are young) climb stairs one at a time or two at a time. We tend to do the latter to save time. Counting in twos is faster than counting in ones - ten steps get us to 20 instead of 20. That is the most important thing to understand, and it applies to other tables - they enable us to get around faster, and, once we have learned them, to go straight to the top of the stairs. Zoom me up, Scottie! We can also jump straight back down again without breaking our neck, or stop anywhere inbetween, like a lift.

These things are not hard to understand, and are obvious once we've thought of them. Explaining things does not have to be conplicated, but it makes work meaningful rather than mindless. 

 

 

Interlude: Patrick Hemmerle at Wolfson College, 19th May 2012

Cambridge is blessed with some of the finest classical piano music in Europe in the person of Patrick Hemmerle, first prize winner at the Paris Conservatoire in 2002, and now, in his early thirties, showing a maturity of interpretation, delicacy and power that bring out the full meaning of pianoforte.

This concert consisted of Frank Martin's Eight Preludes (1947-8), Chopin's 24 precludes, and as encores, Gluck's Melodia (arr Scambati) and the final movement of Beethoven's Tempest sonata. Every element, from Martin's seismic base chords to the most delicate lyricism in the Chopin and Gluck, to the pace of the Beethoven, was brought out impeccable technique and timing, combined with studied passion. Other pianists are more famous than Patrick (for the present) but it is simply not possible to play this music better.

Liking or not liking the pieces is almost irrelevant - I'm not sure Martin, in what Mr Hemmerle described as his "Protestant austerity",  would have wanted his music to be liked. Even the Chopin, for all its ecstatic moments, reflects the dark side of life, including Chopin's own life, in a way that is not always enjoyable, and may not be intended to be so. As performance, however, Mr Hemmerle's is high art, and this was reflected, for once, in  high denomination notes in the retiring collection.  Chapeaux bas, mesdames et messieurs...

"A brilliant tip..."

...said the mother of a genuinely brilliant six year old - six years three months, to be precise, and already reading Alice in Wonderland, though having trouble with tables. Splitting up the twos into groups of five at a time, and coming back to reinforce hesitations after an interval knocked out the twos and then we worked on threes. Met the parents again ten days later - "Had those tables stuck?"  Yes.

And my pupil who had severely injured himself is now doing well, reading on his own, and tackling words like exhausted with no problem. Exhausted - have to know not to pronouce the h, unlike exhale, and to put the stress on the second syllable, unlike excellent. Also the slightly difficult au pattern. Nice to see him putting all three together. 

Another country - note from Japan

A Guardian commentator, Geisha 18, has posted this:

I taught for 3 years in Japan and it is true that discipline is strong and teachers are held in high regard. However, this has much to do with cultural norms, a system of rigorous examination for selective high schools and social shame about failure that no longer exist in our society. Japanese students rote-learn from a limited number of nationally approved textbooks and on any given day students of the same age will be on the same page of the same textbook. Intellectual enquiry and exploration are not encouraged - exam answers are right or wrong. I have never forgotten seeing an exam question for for 15 year olds which asked "what were the causes of the Sino-Japanese war?" and had a space of five lines for the reasons! When I was 15 that would have been an essay answer! 
In order to get into a good high school, Japanese children have to attend expensive cram schools, often until 10 or 11pm. Then they do their homework, and have to be in school as early as 7 am for compulsory sports club practice.
Instead of looking to Japan, why not look back to the time when Britain had a strong education system and reintroduce an element of selection? 
Incidentally, Japanese teachers work throughout the school holidays, when the teachers run compulsory sports clubs, and have no union. My colleagues would take less than two weeks holiday a year.

Interesting reflection on authoritarianism, which readers may have noticed is my pet hate - our system is riddled with it, and its basis is that the boss is right, whether or not the boss is wrong. Our main problem, though, is not selection, but the cult of mixed ability teaching.

Noël Janis-Norton

is a behavioural specialist whom I met when she was running seminars in Camden Town a long time ago. Noël has now written a stack of books  and had a slot on Woman's Hour today, 15th May 2012. Definitely worth getting to know, though of course nothing off the shelf will necessarily fit the needs of your own child. Tgraph review.

The Woman's Hour interview was a bit of a disappointment, and showed a very American approach. There are five strategies to obtain control in Janis's book, and she mentioned only one - descriptive praise - when it really was not the best or only solution to a question she'd been asked (about how to deal with boys shouting). Somewhat ungenerous, but I suppose we all have a living to earn. It's probably worth buying the book to find out the answer.

SEN scholarships for support staff.

Another good idea, and details here. I have more confidence in assistants than in most of the available courses, however.

Mrs Krabapple...

..  Special Needs Teacher, champion procrastinator, general scatterbrain and housework-phobic is here. And a very good thing too. Lots of pithy comments.

Parents to control SEN budgets - a great idea

For too long, parents have had to take whatever the local authority chooses to give them when their child has a problem, and for too long local authority ignorance has been a big part of the problem. Several examples are on this weblog:

1.  The boy who was assessed as having Asperger's syndrome when he was in fact sensitive to light.

2.  The boy assessed as dyslexic on the grounds that all of his test scores (not just some) were very low.

3.   The girl whose deafness was taken into account only to protect her in practical lessons, and not in consideration of her educational needs.

I could continue, particularly in the field of reading difficulties, where anyone with a problem is likely to be assessed as dyslexic, whether there is any evidence of this or not.

Putting parents in charge of these budgets is an excellent idea. Most local authority psychologists that I've met are worse than useless, carrying out local authority policies and not looking closely enough at the child in front of them. Most private ones are no better, carrying out formulaic tests that a teaching assistant could administer, and then interpreting them in the most obvious way, for a nice fee. There is no question that dyslexia for some people is an earner.

But how will this parental control be exercised? Parent governors, I imagine, will be a first route. But it seems a good idea, and I'd like to know whose idea it was. Parents will make mistakes, but at least what they do will be based on the needs of their own children, and not those of some ignocrat.

Le Français en Ecosse Comenius courses in France

This Edinburgh-based company has ten years' experience of running British Council-funded courses, first in France and now also in Spain. People who've been on these courses recommend them highly, and they are worth investigating as one of the few remaining sources of funding for training in primary languages. The British Council grants are very generous, and the company will help with the forms.  Next deadline for applications is Sept 17th.  Website.  Download April 2013 courses_Le Francais en Ecosse

Interlude: authoritarianism, taser guns and Alzheimers

Telegraph has an account of police using tasers to help them take person with Alzheimer's to hospital. You'd think that the authorities would at the very least wait until they had investigated the incident before saying anything, or even think before they spoke, but step forward Chief Superintendent David Hilditch:

'Our police officers and PCSOs have a variety of difficult situations to deal with on a day-to-day basis and are trained to tackle a variety of different situations.

''It's very sad that this gentleman had to be restrained through the use of a Taser but the officers were faced with a significant level of violence.

''It is to their credit that they successfully restrained the 59-year-old man without injury to himself and took him to a place of safety to be treated.''

No doubt it would have been sadder still if the three taser shots had killed the gentleman and safely delivered him to the undertaker's. But authority has to be proclaimed to be right, whether it is right or not.

Congratulations to Chief Superintendent Hilditch.

Linton Children's Book Festival - tremendous

This year's festival  has mobilised a wide range of resources and goodwill, with a non-fiction theme that should set a national trend. Events at the Village College over the weekend look particularly interesting.

A quick visit on Saturday showed a fantastic concentration of happy children and parents, with story-tellers, music and hands-on science from the new Cambridge science centre. More on Sunday. If you have children, take them!

 

Pie Corbett, story for young children

Can't resist this story from Pie Corbett's website. Talk about using what comes to hand!

 

Piano Practice - more speed, less haste.

But not too much more speed. Learning involves the formation of networks in the brain which organise, control and use our knowledge, skills and understanding in more ways than we can fully understand. Memory is crucial, and not only what is formally recognised as memory. It is behind what the Germans call Fingerspitzengefuhl, which depends on such intimate knowledge of something that the finest adjustments can be made so quickly that they appear instinctive, though they are in fact second nature rather than first.

I suspect that talent in music is used to refer to the ability to develop such control very quickly, and I. alas, am rather slow. I earn my living as a linguist and literacy teacher, and this slowness, according to my piano teacher, Patrick Hemmerle, has helped me to understand other people's problems, and so develop solutions to them. I learned French slowly too, having to take the book home and study each day over the Easter holidays in order to get to first base in the language. I had similar patterns of learning with German and Spanish, though with similar results. Definitely, and with perhaps too much regret, the tortoise rather than the hare. 

The Siloti arrangment of Bach's B minor prelude (here by Emil Gilels) is a case in point. It has variations on chords in the left hand that usually involve a stretch, as the chords either don't begin with their root note, or have an extension at the top beyond the octave. So we need to know the whole chord and the notes in it in order to understand what we are trying to do. Then there is usually just one step change between phrases, but this entails another change in a recurring pattern in the right hand. Why does one pattern fit and another not? Patrick then says, as always perfectly correctly, that I need to anticipate these changes, though I have started to do this. We can only anticipate something if we know it's coming, or likely to come. So, even more thorough knowledge - we need to know what we are doing, what we are about to do, and how to move from one to the other.

(He did say, though, on my second lesson, that my right hand phrasing was "très bien", which is about the highest praise given in French academic circles. This has taken a lot of work to relax the hand, which was tense because I was worried about hitting wrong notes. It was knowing exactly what the right notes were and being able to hit them that removed the tension. This took time. My wonderful French teacher, Frances Holmes, told me that he had never been able to lose the tension in his hands, despite reaching a high level on the piano. "It's in my  character," he said, and his character was one of extreme conscientiousness and meticulousness.)

In other words, for me to play anything, I have to know it, as the French say, like the inside of my pocket. So, I suspect, does everyone else. It's the path to this knowledge that causes the problem. The Siloti doesn't sound too bad, though. I wonder if Mr Gilels takes it just a shade more quickly than I'd like to...?

 

Down Syndrome Education International - new research on reading

Down Syndrome Education's latest results on targeted teaching for children with Down Syndrome is here. This organisation, founded by Professor Sue Buckley, has been leading in the field of literacy and language development for people with Down Syndrome for over thirty years, and all schools who have pupils with Down Syndrome should know about it and use its work. Excellent research design, inspiring work, and interesting to see the collaboration with Professors Margaret Snowling and Charles Hulme of York University.

"I just wanted to grow things..." Alan Titchmarsh

Alan Titchmarsh is to gardening as Jamie Oliver to cooking, and less of a commercial operation. He is excellent, here, on promoting gardens and horticulture in schools, and does equally well in Country Life, even admitting on occasion to an error. Titchmarsh was no academic in school, but he has the gift of clarity, and writes well. His work should be studied.

Whose history? A useful start

Exactly what the key moments in history in the UK are is debatable, but this list from Professor Robert Tombs of Cambridge is interesting. Professor Tombs is, incidentally, a professor of French history, not British. Here is his list:

500 Anglo-Saxon conquest

900 The Danelaw

1066 The Norman conquest

1170 Battle between Henry II and Church

1215 Battle between King John and barons

1258 Consultation of barons and townsmen

1314 Scottish and Welsh wars

1381 Peasants’ revolt

1415 Agincourt and 100 Years’ War

1485 Defeat of Yorkists

1535 Execution of Thomas More

1553 Catholic Restoration

1588 Defeat of Spanish Armada

1611 King James Bible

1649 Execution of Charles I and Cromwellian conquest of Ireland

1689 Glorious Revolution and Battle of the Boyne (1690)

1707 Union of England and Scotland

1721 Beginning of Walpole’s administration

1763 Treaty of Paris, securing Canada for Crown

1769 Spinning Mule invented: key moment in Industrial Revolution

1776 Loss of 13 Colonies

1805 Battle of Trafalgar

1825 Opening of first railway

1832 Reform Bill and 1833 Abolition of Slavery

1838 Chartists and 1846 Repeal of COrn Laws

1886 Irish Home Rule Bill

1904 Entente Cordiale

1919 Treaty of Versailles

1931 Statute of Westminster

1940 Churchill as Prime Minister

1945 Labour landslide

1947 Indian independence

1960 Wind of Change

1969 British troops deployed in Ulster

1973 UK joins EEC

1984-5 Miners’ strike

1997 Tony Blair elected to power

Nothing on the ancient Romans or the ancient Britons other than Boadicea, who was a loser and less important than the two thousand years that preceded her.  I'm not at all sure I'd have included Robert Walpole or the Entente Cordiale, which was less important than WW1. There should have been a place, too, for the Battle of Britain. We were very fortunate that Hitler started to make mistakes just when he could probably have finished us off.

Nick Gibb - Catalogue of Phonics Resources and Training. A Good Start

Schools Minister Nick Gibb has brought together a range of organisations to construct a comprehensive catalogue of phonics resources and training, details here, Any school with Key Stage 1 pupils (infants) can spend up to £6k on these resources, and will receive half of its spend in matched funding. The catalogue is bright, well illustrated and comprehensive, and definitely worth reading. My favourite remains Ruth Miskin's books and ditties, as much for their excellent questions and guidance to parents as for their phonics content.

But - the wordbuilding approach to phonics that is the basis of learning to read needs to be extended beyond the initial stages represented here. There is a "second wind" to phonics as children meet more complex words in junior school (Key Stage 2), most of which are phonically regular, but in which the information contained in letters needs to be interpreted, for example so that children know which part of a word to stress. Some schemes do not tackle what I call second level phonic patterns, such as the softening effects of i, y and e on g and c - city, centre, cycle, gin, George, gyro. Once basic phonics are established, there is a need for schools to tackle more advanced word skills, as these are essential to secondary education.

Word history and teaching English

I almost always ask new pupils how table comes to be spelled as it is. None has ever known the reason, which is that it is a French spelling - if we say the word in French, we can hear the l before the e. It's important as it unlocks and  explains the spelling of a large number of words - cable, stable, staple etc. 

Does that mean that we need to learn French to teach people to read? a teacher asked. 

It doesn't, but it does mean that teachers need to know enough of the history of words to be able to explain to pupils why language is not always logical, and to point out patterns in the irregular words that will enable pupils to make connections between them and learn by analogy. No reading scheme does this and, as far as I know, no teacher-training programme does either. The result is that even schemes that give children a good understanding of phonics do not fully equip them to read in English, as they have to work out irregular words for themselves, and have no basis on which to do this.

It's not that children can't understand this idea - I've never met one that can't, provided it is explained in terms that make sense to them. If I  say to them that the language is a thousand years old, and that if we were a thousand years old we'd have a few wrinkles, this makes perfect sense. If I say letters don't always behave perfectly, they understand this because they don't behave perfectly eiither. If I say that We use what the letters tell us, but we don't believe the letters tell us everything, they begin to understand the system they are dealing with, and adjust their thinking accordingly.

Unfortunately, people who base their thinking about literacy on dogma and politics - the latest contribution of the Left is a professor of education at Greenwhich who has coined the term Conservative Neoliberal Phonics - have either pretended that irregularity can be ignored, or have used it as a reason to dream up various guessing game theories of reading that do not give childre the skills they need. 

The truth is different, and it is time for the truth to form the basis of literacy teaching.

Tania Tirraoro

Tania read my piece on dx on Conservative Home, and asked me to write an explanatory version for parents, which she has posted here. Tania's site is very strong on autism, with a very extensive network of parents and lists of contacts.

What makes a difference? Professor John Hattie.

An interesting call from a training company led me to check the work of Professor John Hattie, of Melbourne, some of which is summarised here. The first three factors he identifies, the quality of feedback to pupils, the quality of instruction, and pupils' "prior cognitive ability" - in inverted commas, as this is hard to pin down - are interesting. I see feeding back to pupils as part of teaching, and can't separate it from instruction - in fact, instruction without careful feedback and targetting is not effective. The other factors he lists are equally interesting - pupils' disposition to learn, for example, is important, but not as important as the quality of teaching, probably because good teaching improves pupils' disposition to learn by giving them success. I'm doubtful about the equation of a factor of 1 with a year's progress or with GCSE grades, as the GCSE grades themselves are so unreliable, and I also have a problem with research methodology that seeks to draw conclusions from a large number of studies that don't provide conclusive evidence themselves. The technique rests on a supposition that errors may cancel each other out, whereas they may just as easily compound each other. Still, this is an interesting analysis for school leaders, and I'll read more of Professor Hattie's work.

The Dyslexia Racket and the Alternative.

I posted the piece below on Conservative Home (here, to include comments from the site), not because I think reading and literacy difficulties should be a party issue, but because of the ways in which dyslexia has been handled by other parties, and particularly by New Labour's partisan civil service. An anti-social superstructure has been allowed to develop which we would all be better off without. The text, with apologies if you've read the key ideas on earlier postings, is as follows:

The dyslexia racket and the alternative

John Bald on the "Special Educational Needs" industry that thrives on failure

Shortly after I started teaching in a secondary school, in the early seventies, I had a conversation with an eleven year old who had “bunked off” my English class, and who, I discovered, could not read. No-one had told me about this when I took over the class – a colleague asked me if I didn’t believe in “self-fulfilling prophecies” – and the deputy head told me with equanimity that “lots of boys in the first year can’t read”.

My response was to become a reading teacher, and from that time onward, I’ve been doing all I can to teach reading and other aspects of literacy as effectively as possible so that people will be able to read, with their problems either knocked out or severely cut down. After a few years, a certain amount of success and a couple of articles, I was introduced to an American book written during World War Two, with the educationally unfashionable title Remedial Techniques in Basic School Subjects, whose author, Grace Fernald, had developed simple and effective approaches to serious reading difficulties, including some caused by brain damage. She had done equally good work on basic arithmetic, and her insights into foreign languages coincided with work I’d done with children who had been failing in French (my degree subject).

While some updating was needed from the state of the work as Fernald left it, her key ideas seemed to me to be right, and the transformation of one child’s life an inspiration – he had been knocked off his bike by a car, suffered loss of brain substance, and was medically pronounced incapable of becoming a self-sustaining member of society. By the time Fernald had finished with him, he was making college entrance grades, and the only remarkable thing about him was that he tended to use more advanced vocabulary than was usual for his age. That, I thought, was the way to do it, and I remain grateful to the late Dr Margaret Peters of Cambridge Institute of Education for recommending the book.

But not everyone agreed then, and still more don’t agree now. Knocking problems out, or “remedial work” might be acceptable in cases of accident, but the approach promoted since Baroness Warnock’s committee coined the term special educational needs is based much more on the idea of accepting differences rather than trying to overcome problems. This is the main thrust of the policies of the voluntary bodies that were placed in charge of the issue by the last government, and which, like many large charities in New Labour’s “third sector” see themselves much more as agents of political change rather than providers of services to those in need. And with this has come a superstructure of expensive reports and assessments, leading to elaborate examination concessions and a complete, self-sustaining carbuncle of a bureaucracy that does very well for itself out of the problem while making very little impact on it.

When I sent evidence of this, and of the alternative, to Sir James Rose’s inquiry into dyslexia , New Labour’s civil service first lost it, then decided they had located it in a folder, and did not bother either to read it or to pass it to him. Whether they really found it or did not want to admit to having lost it, I leave to your judgement. Sir James, to his credit, has apologised for this – though it was obviously not his fault – and is taking a personal interest in the alternative.

Here it is:

1. If the problem is part of a severe general learning difficulty, refer to the techniques developed by Professor Sue Buckley of the Down’s Education Trust. These are very effective for a range of learning difficulties, and can supplement phonic work where children are capable of this.

2. If not, ask two questions:

What is it in this person's thinking that is preventing them from using the information conveyed by letters in order to read?

and 

How do I help them to adjust their thinking so that they can read successfully?

These questions ensure that the teacher or psychologist focuses on the person sitting before them, and not on some programme designed by someone else who has never seen this pupil.

3. Design and carry out a teaching programme that answers question 2.

There is plenty of source material for this, but a principle should be that everything a child does not understand should be unpacked, and explained so that they do understand it. This means that teachers need to know the spelling system inside out, both in its regular and irregular features – very few do, as the irregular features are rarely explained in training. Psychologists should no longer be allowed to write reports without making an impact on the problem. At the moment, they are basing reports on tests that any teaching assistant could administer, and most make no contribution to solving the problem. Of course, in the politically correct scheme of things, there is not a problem in the first place, so they need not concern themselves with a solution.

4. Anyone offering advice in this area must be able to walk the talk. As each case is different, Sir James and I agree that case studies should be the basis of the work. My own latest case study is of a ten year old who had become so upset at not being able to read that he seriously injured himself, nearly died and suffered brain damage. He is now making excellent progress with his reading, and has read over 100 pages of Danny The Champion of the World. Like my heroine Grace Fernald, I’ll be happy when the job is done and he is at university.

I don’t charge for this teaching. Please get in touch if you think I can help.

 

Truancy, fines and parents.

Guardian, here, has a report, followed by a lot of comments, on proposals to deduct truancy fines from benefits. Not in itself a bad idea - if a fine is imposed, it must be paid. But there is a real snag where parents do all they can to ensure that a child attends school, only for the child to refuse to go, or run away once they arrive. Fines should only be imposed where there is evidence that a parent has not done all he or she reasonably can do in order to ensure attendance - and punctuality should be part of this. Otherwise, they will just give more power to Jobsworths. 

Phonics, Reading and Language Development - a note from a parent, and serendipity.

The basis of reading in English, as in any language that uses an alphabetic system, is the information conveyed in the letters, which we learn to use by blending sounds and building words. This is all that synthetic phonics means.

The mother of the very bright pupil I saw last week noticed that I moved quickly from very short words such as his name, or cat, to much longer words that had similar phonic components - catastrophe, catastrophic. I do this both to show that phonics can tell us most of what we need to know in order to read long words - I call this phonics' "second wind" - and what it won't tell us, which is how to pronounce them, and in particular where to place the stress. There is almost always just one stress point in an English word, and it is movable - see photograph, photography, photographic. 

Where a child has the ability to understand more complex vocabulary, as Derek clearly had, I spend a lot of time unpacking and discussing the words, explaining what letters do and don't tell us, and using frequent flashbacks, asking them to read words I pick out from the set, so that they learn to use all of the information contained in the letters, and not just to sound words out.

One of the key features in learning to read in English is that information contained in letters has to be interpreted - eg the difference between can and can't, which caused Derek more trouble than the difference between catastrophe and catastrophic. The only way to deal with this is to explain, discuss and practise. For example, after explaining that some letters give us information about other letters, and once Derek was confident with this on mad and made, I wrote late and plate, both of which he read with ease. Then template, which he read more hesitantly, but could explain to me. Then contemplate, which we discussed, and which Derek told me applied to his brother, a mathematician. We spend similar amounts of time on the origin of the illustrate, in lighting up a text, then illustrated, illustration.

There is probably no alternative, in this aspect of reading and language development, to relaxed but focused conversation with an interested and educated adult, who knows the language well enough to pick out key words to illustrate ideas or patterns, and how can provide Jerome Bruner's "courteous translation" of the adult concepts they contain, so that the child can understand and enjoy them. 

A key element in my teaching is not to teach a word a child has got wrong, but another with the same pattern, almost always the pattern at the end of the word rather than at the beginning. I then explain the pattern clearly, and practise it with other words that share the pattern. Once the child has the pattern clear in their mind, I throw in the word that caused the problem, and they usually get it right. I started using this little technique in the first reading lesson I ever taught at Beaufoy School, when someone could not read round, and I got a pound of of my pocket - still  notes in those off days - and taught the boy to read that. Round was then easy. Since then, the value of this approach has been confirmed and extended in the work of Professor Usha Goswami. Its relevance here is that similar letter patterns can lead us almost anywhere in terms of meaning. As everythinlg must be explained so that it is clear to the child, every esson is therefore different, and more likely to sustain interest.

I'm grateful to Derek's mother for pointing this out so clearly.

New approach to French - Ella Linton

I've been teaching Ella Linton's class at St Matthias Primary School in Hackney for half an hour after lunch over the past two terms. It is a mixed Years 1 and 2 class, and Ella works with me in each lesson. Here is Ella's note on what we have achieved:

Children have learnt that words in French and English have a lot of similarities, especially longer words. They also started to look at which letters differed between the two languages and noticed letters with 'hats' on top of them.

Children have learnt and understood the personal pronouns, and could relate them to each other - hands up if you're il/elle etc. This is due to repetition in every lesson and then practice between lessons 

Due to repetition we have 100% success rate with male and female words and a 90% success rate when hearing if the sentence is a negative or not. Children could identify that 'pas' made the sentence negative. Reading 'Pas maintenant, Bernard' was very helpful for this.

Children were then given five common classroom words to learn. Some found this more difficult because of the lack of repetition as opposed to the pronouns that were taught and heard in almost every part of the lesson. 

You were also able to teach the children as young as 5 years old the difference between singular and plural on instructions, which is quite extraordinary. Lastly it was definitely clear that the children remembered and enjoyed learning French through song and rhymes. 

Overall it has definitely given the school a fantastic base of French and I and the other teachers will be continuing this with the classes.

 

 

Another difficult case turned round in one session.

The best friend of the pupil referred to in this posting came to see me yesterday with his mother and Karina McLachlain. A bright boy approaching nine years old, who was failing in reading, and who benefited from the clear explanation of what letters do and don't tell us in English, followed by practice. The different sounds represented by a in can and can't took as much work as the pronunciation of longer words such as catastrophe, catastrophic - and we had to work quite hard on memory too once Derek, as we will call him, had understood how he needed to adjust his thinking.

Derek's mother's verdict was "brilliant", and Derek left in as cheerful a mood as he had arrived, having read a page of his Horrid Henry book, and joined in with me on General Jack Seeley's Warrior. Highlights of this reading were his self-correction of Isaac, and reading episode correctly.

Wordbuilding is the basis of learning to read, as it takes accout of the irregular as well as the regular features of English. It is therefore a more accurate as well as a more compact term than synthetic phonics,though the blending involved in synthetic phonics is the core of it. 

In the afternoon, saw a charming girl of 11 whose spelling was phonically accurate, but who had not understood variations such as double letters and groups of letters, and so was reaching very low scores in her school's spelling test, which could have been designed to have children fail, including words such as onomatopoeia, typical and mystery, without any explanation of their tricky features, which come from Greek and, in mystery, from our indistinct pronunciation of some vowels - mystery was spelled like history. Siobhan did very well during the lesson, but will need to practise using groups of letters and y (not for nothing known to the French as Greek i), and to use extra letters in words only when she's learned she needs them. Another happy, smiling child, and we enjoyed some French at the end, using Zim Zam Zoum (Taught by Song, and wonderful.)

Siobhan is expected to learn to spell, but without any explanation of why things are as they are. The basic problem with Derek is the need for a flexible explanation of English as it is, and not as it appears when chopped up in to "phoneme-grapheme correspondences" which are not always reliable. The very phrase is a fudge - what we need is not correspondence, but a clear indication from the letters of what we need to say. Usually, letters give us this, but not always, and they don't always tell the full story.

The NUT's attacks on phonics are part of an international folly that sees phonics as a way of making children fail rather than as the key to success. The British Left is equally hostile to the idea of formal English as the basis of education - its view is summed up in the National Association for the Teaching of English's pamplet Made Tongue Tied by Authority. There is no basis for such views in fact, but to win the argument we need to understand and present English as it is, including the underlying difficulty of accurately representing voice sounds in letters, which accounts for the partial information conveyed by  a in can and can't. The information conveyed by letters in English has to be interpreted as we read, and not taken at face value, and the brains of English speakers adapt themselves to do this. Some need more detailed explanation, and more practice, than others. 

Another racket exposed - academic journals and parasitic publishers

Guardian, here, on the outrageous racket of publishers putting their own copyright on academic journals and charging huge fees for access. In the field of science in particulary, "peer-reviewed" journals have become the key to up to date knowledge, and access to their own work a scandalous rip-off. Steven Pinker made the same point about social sciences when I interviewed him for The Guardian some years ago. A stop needs to be put to this. Unfortunately, in the field of literacy, peer group review is meaningless because there is no peer group, only factions.

CQD Titanic

On a good day, you learn something. Len Goodman on Titanic pointed out that the distress signal was CQD, but did not explain. CQ was short for sécu(rité). D for détresse. All shared words between French and English, and a reminder that telegraphs were a forerunner to texting. Those with a detailed knowledge of French might see CQ as a precedent for PQ. 

Woman's Hour, You and Yours, Michael Rosen and Dorothy Bishop on phonics.

I was against the use of non-words for six year old testing, as it would be attacked as nonsense. I still don't know if it will be accepted, but it was better received in the pilots than I expected, and it undoubtedly tells teachers whether children are using the information contained in letters, rather than guessing. So, the information will be useful, and will help ensure that phonics are more thoroughly taught.

Greg Wallace, a pro-phonics executive headteacher, won the argument on Woman's Hour with  NUT executive member Hazel Danson with some ease, and did well against slightly better opposition on You and Yours. However, losing an argument won't put these people off. Michael Rosen has lost plenty, including one on BBC2 a couple of years ago, but persists in thinking he's right about reading, even though his work does not involve the practical, day to day business of ensuring that people can read. The range of views on reading teaching within the NUT is vast, as I know from talking to members, and Hazel Danson does not and cannot represent them.  She might have added to her remarks the fact that phonics was the preferred method of the last government as well as of this one.

Professor Dorothy Bishop, here, makes the simple point that you can't read for pleasure if you can't decode the words. Rosen's reply is not convincing - he accuses Bishop of a mechanistic approach to the brain that shows he has not read much of her work - but he cites a 7 year old reading The Broons, a Scottish comic strip, as evidence that phonics are not necessary. He couldn't be more wrong.  I grew up with The Broons and Oor Wullie, and their Glasgow dialect is conveyed by turning it into phonically regular script - see the oo in the titles as an example. The child's reconstruction of the dialect from the script shows that phonics work on this occasion, even if they don't always.

Which is why I keep coming back to my central point, without which the good done by more phonics teaching will be severely limited. Until phonics proponents accept that they need to do more than just assert that phonics work, and explain how children should be taught to tackle the irregular as well as the regular features of language, they will leave many children confused and perpetuate the reading problems of people who believe literally in what the teacher says. The solution is contained in this weblog. It  really does work.

"You don't like schools, do you...?

... asked one of Her Majesty's Inspectors. I was a rookie inspector, allocated as her team member to inspect a small school in the West Country, and this was a loaded question. If I'd said I did, it would have been a transparent lie, and she'd have said it certainly didn't look as if I liked schools. If I'd said I didn't, she would have sent me home. I managed to find a truthful answer - "I like to see good work," and we got on after I'd given a good grade to a teacher she'd given the same rating. We got on, of course, on her terms - she made me drive 600 miles for a pre-inspection meeting, and again to sit in on a feedback - but her terms were good, and I learned a great deal.

Suzanne Moore, here, did not like school, and complains about policy being made by those who did. She complains about much more besides, and I don't agree with her on most of it. For example, the sheer lack of knowledge of many young people about the world is a good reason for making both history and geography compulsory to 16, and not just one of them. But she has a point about people not liking school, and being entitled to their opinion.

Schools can be petty-minded, pettifogging places, and the reason I could not give my senior colleague a straight answer to her question was that I had not seen enough good work. This is still the case. The negative attitudes of many parents and pupils give teachers a very difficult time, and are in some cases beyond endurance, but too many children are not getting the right balance of challenge and support, and too many senior staff, particularly in secondary schools, do not understand teaching and learning, and are downright authoritarian. 

Towards the end of our small inspection, there was a rounders match. A high ball went up. "Catch that!" shouted HMI, and it was duly caught. She smiled at me - "That's what it's all about," she said. 

 

Framwellgate School, Durham - read it and weep. (Or laugh)

Framwellgate School, Durham, is adertising, here, for a "director of corporate services", at £55k (ie roughly £65 with NI and pension costs). Read the details of this unbelievable piece of bureaucracy and ask yourself just how much money is being blown away on top heavy administration. The school was last inspected in 2008, for two days (it has 1250 pupils), and rated good overall, with the sixth form rated satisfactory. We don't know how many lessons were seen on this visit - David Bell made sure this information was not included in reports. The school's 2000 inspection involved 15 inspectors over 5 days, and provided a detailed report on each subject.. A visit to assess maths provision in 2011 found it satisfactory.  But since when is a school a corporation? And is a school with only satisfactory provision for maths and in its sixth form not due for a proper inspection? 

How to tackle serious reading and spelling difficulties, 1.

For problems stemming from general learning difficulties, I recommend the techniques developed by Professor Sue Buckley of the Down Syndrome Education Trust/Sarah Duffen Centre, here. 

Otherwise, literacy skills can be brought up to a person's intellectual capacity using the principles described here. Each case is different, and average progress or age-equivalent test scores will not relieve the frustration of a person who should be achieving much more than this. The goal of this work is to knock problems out.

1. The teacher needs a clear understanding of English spelling and grammmar. This means knowing its regular and irregular features, and how they have come about, so that they can be explained clearly. English is not completely regular, and much distress is caused by teachers pretending to children that it is, and then telling them just to learn the irregular features as "sight words". By grammar, I mean the principles of sentence construction in English. Everything should be understood and explained using normal English words, with specific terms introduced only when normal language will not do the job. A phoneme, for example, is a sound, and there is no benefit in replacing a perfectly good English word with a longer Greek one. Anything not clear to the learner needs to be explained in terms he or she can understand - Jerome Bruner's principle of "courteous translation" applies.

2. After gathering as much evidence as possible about the person's reading - test scores can be informative, but should be supplemented by hearing them read and seeing them write, teachers need to ask two questions:

What is it in this person's thinking that is preventing them from using the information conveyed by letters in order to read?

and

How do I help them to adjust their thinking so that they can read successfully?

These questions ensure that the teacher focuses on the person sitting before them, and not on some programme designed by someone else who has never seen this pupil.  The answers will not be the same in every case, but there are patterns to them, often reflecting the teaching the person has received. Some people may be guessing at words from the first letter, some may be trying to sound them out one letter at a time, and so failing if the words are irregular, or b some may take shortcuts in longer words,  some may be sensitive to light, which can cause extreme discomfort and symptoms similar to those of dyslexia, and some may have present or earlier hearing difficulties, which prevent them from receiving the whole of the sounds in a word, usually at the beginning or end. 

3. Explain English spelling, using the principles set out in my books and in other postings below. It is essential to explain that letters, like people, do not always behave as they should. For reading, there are four main features - in very weak readers, these may not all be explained at once, but usually I do, with plenty of examples and encouragement to the learner to ask questions:

• Sounds. Most of the time, letters indicate a sound. Sometimes this tells us all we need to know, and sometimes part of what we need to know. Longer words usually have one stress point, and the letters won't tell us this, so we need to learn it - eg photograph, photographer, photographic.
• Information. Sometimes letters give us information that alters the sound normally indicated by another letter. Egs, centre,  e softening the c.  gin, i softening the g. made, e stretching the a.
• Groups of letters. Sometimes letters need to work in groups, especially vowel (voice) letters. Some groups are fairly obvious -sh in ship. Others require a big shift from the original letter - ti in station, patient.
• History. The language is 1000 years old, and if we were that old we'd have wrinkles too. Explain the French connection (eg how table makes perfect phonic sense in French, where we can hear the l before the e), changes in pronunciatin over time (was) and how printers and Dr Johnson made life more difficult by tidying spelling up.

5. Have the learner read to you from a suitable text - for young, complete beginners, I now usually use Ruth Miskin's Ditties (from ReadWriteInc), as these are completely regular and quite funny. For older children or adults I usually pick a text that they will be interested in. A typical choice for an eight to ten year old is Roald Dahl's Danny The Champion of the World, and for an adult a local newspaper. For children under seven, the other books in Ruth Miskin's series are very good, and I also have a set of an out of print series, Supersonics, which are funny. 

6. When the learner makes a mistake, don't teach that word, but move to another that is like it - ie has the same feature that has caused the error. Unpack and teach that carefully. Once the learner is clear about it, add some more examples with the same feature - in practice, this will often involve changing the beginning, and is a technique developed from the onset-rime work (Bradley, Bryant and Goswami). Once the pattern is clear in the learner's mind, put in the word that caused the problem - they will usually get it right, but explain further if necessary. Then go back to the text from the beginning of the sentence and re-read. If there is any hesitation, reread again, if necessary, modelling and going back to the explanation, which I always note on paper. Overall, the approach is very similar to a music lesson, where instant sightreading is not usually expected.

7. Practice is as important here as it is in learning music.  Flash back to words you've taught at later points in the lesson. Scatter them in a grid for the learner to read as you call out co-ordinates. Have them sleep on it and look again at the words in the morning. Make sure the learner practises every day, with a parent if a child. Check the previous lesson's words at the start of the new lesson, and explain again if necessary. Praise correct reading very liberally.

8. Keep going. With experience - and teachers' training rarely gives them this type of experience - you will find that you instinctively know the next step for pupils, selecting texts to match their interests as well as their development. The work is finished when they can read whatever they want to or need to, without stress, even if they occasionally have to work on a new word or revisit an old one. 

The latest case in which these techniques have worked is of a ten year old who had become so distressed at not being able to read that he had deliberately injured himself and nearly died. He is now a confident reader, able to read long and difficult words quite easily, phrasing his reading, and remembering what he has learned. This took one lesson per week for two terms, with breaks for holidays and some nasty colds. His best friend is coming to see me this week. 

Spelling will be discussed in part 2.

The consequences of unmarked books - King's College's contribution to illiteracy.

Chris is 15, and is taking GCSE English, where he has predicted grades of D. This seemed a great improvement on his previous prediction of F, so I was keen to see his work.

It did not meet the National Curriculum criteria for Level 2. Chris, as we will call him, did not begin sentences with a capital letter, used capital letters at the beginning of several words that did not need them, did not join his writing, and used and eight times in a piece of writing eight lines long. It ended with a full stop, but contained four or five separate sentences. The remainder of his work was of similar quality. If the school was correct in its assessment – and Chris assured me the work had been checked with the moderator – then Grade D is of a lower standard than national curriculum level 2, which even I found hard to believe. However, boards can do as they please, and if they can award marks for telling examiners to f off they can get away with this.

Chris’s book has not been marked at all. I mean, at all. Not once since the start of the school year. No comment – praise or criticism. No correction. Above all no guidance on how to develop the basic skills he will need to communicate once beyond the protection of progressive English teaching in all its forms.

The people who have discouraged teachers from marking books did not intend this – the King’s College guidance, which has contributed most to the decline in marking, recommends a comment instead of grades, and there was no comment here at all. However, King’s has started a trend of lack of attention to detail in assessment that has led to many pupils being denied the guidance they need. It is time its work received detailed and critical scrutiny. Not marking books is not a good idea, unless you wish to make work for the adult literacy services.

Clicker 6 - the magic bridge between spoken and written language.

Clicker 6 is the latest version of John Crick's multi-award winning software, and is the most amazing and brilliant tool ever placed in the hands of language teachers. Very simply, you put any combination of words and variations you wish to teach onto a grid, and then click on the words to form sentences. As you don't have to write each word by hand, all of your or the child's attention can be focused on choosing the correct words for your purpose, hopefully (with thanks to Eric Morcambe) in the right order. Enter a full stop, and the sentence is read back to you. Add pictures, stories, animations and books and you have a versatile multimedia package of unrivalled scope, which is invaluable for teaching virtually anything and which, for my purposes at least, knocks the big standard whiteboard programs into a cocked hat.

For languages teachers, though, the big feature is the ability to have children compose, edit and extend sentences, which are then read back to them, and which they practise saying. The read back uses Acapalo voices, which have been improved so that they are now disarmingly realistic in French and Spanish, and very good in English, so that the benefits of near-native - the French and Spanish are so close to natural speech that this is an understatement - pronunciation, with the flexibility of saying what you want to, are now within the reach of every languages teacher. 

When I showed Clicker to the late Michel Thomas, who made a fortune out of teaching languages to adults, his response was immediate and unqualified - "This is good. This is very good. You are a great teacher."  All I had done, though, was use John Crick's software in a way that matched Thomas's approach to spoken language, with similar benefits. The great teacher here is John Crick, and it is time for the languages community to make full use of his work.

Association for Language Learning, Powerpoint and some conference points.

Powerpoint to illustrate presentation on Modernising Grammar, A Study in Brain Activity, for Association for Language Learning, Friday 30th April:

Download ALL Grammar 2012

Two related points were raised during the conference:

1. I was asked if I should not have included Chomsky as a major influence on our understanding of language. I thought this might be sensible, although I do not see that he has added anything to Saussure's work on linguistics. On reflection, though, I was wrong to agree. Chomsky's complete disregard for the need to support his theories with evidence, and his dismissive, ill-considered approach to evidence presented by his critics have harmed language studies rather than advance them.

2. The issue of a "paradigm" of language learning arose in discussion, but I'm not sure that our present state of knowledge allows anything so settled as this. All of our learning involves the formation of neural networks. Whatever promotes these is good, and whatever interferes with them - egs copying, going too fast, presenting too much at one, oversimplification - is negative to some degree. I'll be interested in more detail on the proposed model, but can't at the moment see how it might work.  I continue to argue, on the basis of my observations of children learning, that they need to understand fully each aspect of their work, and that they should not be told that not understanding something doesn't matter. It usually does. 

The Association might consider running its conference on Saturday and Sunday in future, as it is so difficult for teachers to be released from the classroom. The ILIC conferences on Sundays attract nearly as many people as this conference with that format, and do not have the same national base. 

But, as always, some very useful conversations and new contacts. Steve Glover has produced what looks like an excellent set of new resources for A level literature, which he is going to let me check out. I'll review these, and John Crick's excellent new version of Clicker, over the next couple of weeks. Clicker 6, though, is an unequivocal best buy already, chiefly because of the versatility offered by its association with Acapela's new English voice recognition. This makes it an ideal tool for EAL as well as for languages, and a unique bridge between written and spoken language.

 

 

Grammar Update - French in Years 1 and 2.

A very good lesson yesterday with a mixed Y1-2 Hackney class, managed by their class teacher, who knows them very well, and uses the school's "stay on green" system to good effect. This class had had a half-hour lesson each week, with the emphasis on understanding pronouns and relating them to themselves, understanding gender an identifying it from the articles preceeding nouns - la bouteille, le livre, etc - understanding positive and negative forms of être in present tense, fully conjugated , understanding and responding accurately to singular and plural classroom instructions - lève or levez la main   lève-toi or levez-vous - and combining these with pronouns, eg   lève la main si tu es "il", lève la main si tu es "elle", and positive and negative opinions, J'aime, Je n'aime pas.

The questioning technique, adapted from Ruth Miskin, is to give two or three alternatives, for all of the pupils to raise their hand, so that no-one can hide. The rate of accurate responses on all of the above, which had had light practice between lessons by the class teacher, was 100% or very close to it on all areas, and was recorded by the class teacher, who was free to observe responses without being directly involved in the teaching.  The only lapses this week were from one pupil who was not paying proper attention.

New material in this lesson was going from je suis / je ne suis pas, to je sais, je ne sais pas. After practising, and emphasising the pas, I presented a series of simple and mildly humorous statements, and indicated with a thumbs up if they were to say je sais and a gallic shrug for je ne sais pas. Typical positives were I know which school I go to, I know what I had for breakfast, I know when my birthday is, and typical negative statements I know when everyone in the school's birthday is, I know how much water is in the river/how many stars in the sky/fish in the sea/cars parked in the road outside. The children did not repeat the answers after me, but answered themselves, with increasing confidence, during this lesson. This was also highly successful.

We did not write things with finger on our sleeve in this lesson, but have done so before, and will do so again. The teacher and I both noticed that children were much quicker at  noticing these grammatical points than at learning vocabulary, where many were still not sure of days of the week, despite frequent singing and questions, and where even a list of five simple words, la fenêtre, la porte, la table, la chaise, le livre, which we had been working on for three weeks, were recognised by almost all pupils, but not recalled. So, while we are pleased, there is work to do. The class management issue is crucial, and in this case benefited by an excellent intervention from the deputy headteacher the previous week, who had developed a behaviour plan for a pupil whose misbehaviour was causing serious disruption. This pupil was fully attentive this week, and quick to answer all questions accurately.

The outcome of this lesson is part of the supporting evidence for the presentation on grammar at the ALL conference on Friday 30th March.

Ebacc - list of languages and subjects

The list of languages that can count for Ebacc, the new basket of qualifications in England, is here. I had to check it myself, so thought other people might like to know where it can be found. One imbalance in Ebacc, is the need for two sciences rather than one - because single science GCSE has been dumbed down to the point at which it is not a qualification at all.

New Approach to Spanish

At the request of a Hackney school, I've put together my notes on a new approach to Spanish, here:

Download New approach to Spanish2

We have had success in these areas with children from Year 3 onwards:

Understanding and identifying masculine/feminine words

Understanding and using positive and negative verb forms

Understanding the differences between Spanish and English sound-letter correspondences

Writing simple, accurate sentences about self and family without copying (from Y5 onwards)

Basic vocabulary, weather, colours, counting, days, telling time etc.

The first four elements seem crucial to success in secondary school. As always, correspondence welcome.

 

The court interpreting scandal.

No interpreter will work under the new contractual arrangements by ALS, and quite right too. This is an outrageous scam, in which a greedy "entrepreneur" has, at great profit to himself, destroyed the interpreting service.  My wife has just pointed out that in any other country, defendants have to provide their own translator. Unfortunately, that would go on legal aid as well, so we'd still end up paying for it.

Court intepreting is in some respects more demanding than conference interpreting. The interpreter does not receive speeches or briefing in advance, and has to translate both ways - a conference interpreter works towards his or her first language at all times. Not work that can be done on the cheap, at the behest of some ignoramus out to make a fast buck.

Sir M Wilshaw, Ofsted and Literacy. Quite right, and high time.

Guardian has report of Sir M Wilshaw HMCI on literacy, here. Sir Michael is quite right. Too little attention is being paid to handwriting and spelling, because these have been deliberately wrecked by the leftist National Association for the Teaching of English and its associates in high places. It is no surprise that its annual conference this year was sponsored by one of our "examining" boards. English teacher training is almost entirely under the NATE thumb, and hence a further major contributor to the problem. As a result of this combination of subversion, ignorance and dereliction of duty, most teachers do not know how to teach spelling and handwriting, particularly to children for whom these skills are not straightforward - eg clumsy boys such as myself.

Level 4, though, would be fine as a baseline for secondary education if it meant what it said. Unfortunately, the tests have been fiddled to the extent that Level 4 usually means Level 3, so our current level 4 is fraudulent. 

The Ofsted report is here, and it raises interesting questions.

70% of teaching, and up to 78% of schools' curricula, are rated good or outstanding. And yet too little attention is paid to handwriting and spelling, and much of the work in Years 7 to 9 is criticised for being poorly organised and related to GCSE and not the immediate needs of the pupils. How can the curriculum and teaching be rated so highly with this imbalance?  If the commentary is correct, then HMI have not been evalating teaching and the curriculum properly. This may be because they have looked at paperwork rather than what is really happening, or becuase some of them have bought into the "progressive" English agenda themselves. Whatever the reason - see paragraphs 43 and 47 in particular - what HMI have chosen to say is out of step with their inspection evidence.

Boys are behind girls in langauge development at 5, and further behind by GCSE. A curriculum that does not meet the needs of boys as well as those of girls is not good enough, though the conversion of GCSE English into an English literature examination, to meet the leftist agenda of the National Association for the Teaching of English - I first heard the mantra "teach the language through the literature" in 1980 - is also a major problem.

Then there is what Ofsted describes as a "myth" that it requires lessonsto be planned in a particular way. This is no myth. It is a creation of New Labour's deeply flawed national strategies, that imposed a Cromwellian structure - we might call it the New Model Lesson - and of David Bell's Ofsted juggernaut that focused on paperwork rather than teaching. Ofsted might disown the myth, but it helped create it.

Where Ofsted has a point is that headteachers have too often bought into this mind-set themselves, and have imposed over-rigorous planning on staff for their own purposes. Anything bullying or unreasonable, as so much is, can then be blamed on Ofsted. This paragraph sums up the outcome:

125. It is not unusual for inspectors to be presented with a three- or four-page lesson plan. A typical example might ask teachers to identify: learning aims and outcomes; resources; references to the National Curriculum and National Strategy objectives; links to a programme of learning skills; assessment opportunities; differentiation strategies, and so on. Lesson plans frequently expect teachers to refer to particular whole-school topics such as numeracy, information and communication technology or citizenship. Furthermore, the plan will include a detailed breakdown of the lesson, sometimes in five- or 10-minute chunks. It is not uncommon to find a lesson plan that includes (in addition to the features listed above) up to 500 words describing the lesson activities. This level of detail is counter-productive and does not necessarily lead to teaching that is clearly enough focused on specific learning outcomes for pupils. Previous English reports have commented that learning objectives were frequently over-ambitious for single lessons. Lesson plans should be simplified to encourage teachers to consider the central question: what is the key learning for pupils in this lesson and how can I bring it about?

The highlighted points are crucial. Paperwork has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished. We might add that all planning does not need to be written down.

 

 

Roddy Doyle, Fighting Words - updated.

Interesting Guardian piece here on Roddy Doyle's writing campaign. Won't say too much about it, as it needs to be followed in its own right. But will also recommend once again Jill Pirrie's brilliant On Common Ground, out of print, but last published by World Wildlife Fund, for its key point in focusing children's attention on what is important. 

Update. Roddy Doyle's work is interesting, but some of the stories on his website are very ordinary. Jill Pirrie's work is much better. 

Good School Story - pity about the school. Amanda Craig and Bedales.

Amanda Craig's A Secret Place is not the easiest book to find, but I located a copy at about £6 on E-bay, and was delighted. This is a superbly-observed account of life at a "liberal" boarding school, and really gets inside the minds of the boys as well as the girls. Ms Craig was not happy, and it is pretty clear why - bullying, bourgeois-bohemian snobbery, ignorance, idleness and sheer lack of respect abound - they call their evening assembly "Jaw" - among the staff as well as students. Better than If or Lord of The Flies, a million miles from Mr Chips and To Serve them All My Days, this is the best novel about school life I've ever read, and the handful of good teachers add to the realism.  Amanda Craig's own account of her time at Bedales is here, and her revenge is complete, hot and cold, boiled and fried. Well done indeed.

I found this on Mumsnet.

I left Bedales recently and can whole-heartedly say going there was the best decision I have ever made in my life. Having been to a few schools beforehand that I didn't particularly mesh well with, it was quite a surprise to actually looking forward to going back when the holidays ended. Saying this, you may have to be a certain sort of person; Bedales puts a huge emphasis on working as a team and respecting 'thy neighbour', and if you're more of a every-man-for-himself sorta person, you probably won't prosper there. 
The majority of Bedalians are intelligent, funny and chilled. My family sent me there as a horrible teen intent on rebellion, and I returned with an army of loyal friends offering to do the dishes. Quite simply, it makes you better.
The whole 'drugs' thing happens in every co-educational school in England, it's just that the whole 'laid back' ethos seems to allow people to make presumptions that it's worse than anywhere else. Obviously some people decide they want to do drugs, but some people don't; there's no 'peer pressure' or any of that nonsense. You can do whatever you want, and as long as you can hold your own people will respect you for that. There's certainly no compulsory nude swimming now, though if you want to sneak off with a couple of friends to sample the wonders of the lake, you might as well.

You pays your money, and you takes your choice. 

National Numeracy - a solution, or perpetuating the problem?

I became involved with numeracy at the request of people who had trouble with it. My approach was to identify what they were having trouble with, think about why they were having the problem, and explain it to them so that they could do it. The problem was almost always with how to carry out a calculation, and the solution was to unpack the base-10 system, explain it and practise. I have a high success rate, though as all of my work is with individuals and as I don't have millions from a mega-charity, the work can be dismissed in various ways by people who have never seen it, most recently Derek Haylock.

Progressive maths teachers told me that the problem was not with doing the sum, but with finding the right sum to do. My students patently could not do the sum, and I believed them and not my maths colleagues. I still do.

National Numeracy, set up with more millions from a  mega charity, part of the pseudo-governmental "fourth sector",  is repeating the old argument, saying that the problem is with the emphasis on computation in schools, which requires people to pay attention but not to think. 

This is as wrong now as it was in the early eighties. Computation, calculation, sums, however they are termed, are not being over-taught, but are not taught well enough. The key systems, recognised by HMI as the most efficient, work perfectly well provided they are clearly explained so that children know what they are doing and above all don't lose their place. The progressives' error has been to take the problems  people find with calculation as an excuse to abandon teaching them, rather than to rethink teaching and tackle the problem. This is why the previous government's numeracy strategy was still having to put out materials to teach the 2 times table to 10 year olds, who should have been taught it three years earlier.

The solution begins with practising addition combinations of single digit numbers, so that they become automatic, and then the two-times table, which must be taught very carefully to establish a pattern for the others. At this stage in particular, we do not move to the next step before the one we are teaching is fully understood and secure. Then other tables are relatively straightforward, and we can proceed to multiplication and division. Once these are in place, the remainder of numeracy up to GCSE is very simple indeed, as much of it has been designed to compensate for weaknesses in calculation skills. The alternative is to leave people with their fingers and thumbs, and to hope they press the right button on a calculator.

Modern maths and Derek Haylock. Jargon versus progress. Updated

Stanislas Dehaene, in The Number Sense, argues that infants have a primitive sense of number, which is reflected in undeveloped societies. He focuses very strongly on numbers 1 to 3, which seem virtually universal in ancient notation and even in their origins in arabic numerals - 2 is two horizontal lines joined, 3 is three horizontal lines joined, see the comparable Chinese notation.

Whatever goes beyond this is cultural, and the issue for schools is how to maximise this development. Numicon helps by consolidating the initial idea of numbers as something to be counted up into units themselves, so that 3 becomes recognised as 3 and not just as the third number as we count. This criterion of help to the learner should be the touchstone against which all teaching is judged. One of Dehaene's comments is that school "plays a crucial role not just because it teaches children new arithmetic techniques, but because it helps them to draw links between the mechanics of calculation and their meaning".

So far, perhaps, no argument. But the rub comes when we consider the techniques presented to teachers to enable them to do this. Very few primary teachers are graduate mathematicians, and mathematical terminology can either help or confuse them. Even the term algorithm, to denote a method, is not part of normal language - I've never heard a teacher use the word, though I've heard it often from specialist advisers. The distributive law, which allows calculations to be split up and carried out piecemeal, is the basis of much of arithmetic, but I've not yet known of success or failure in teaching calculation to be affected by knowledge of it or ignorance. To explain things clearly to children, we need first to explain them clearly to teachers, and blinding them with science does not do this.

So, I find myself somewhat indignant at the arrogance of Derek Haylock, author of the bestselling and overly influential Mathematics Explained for Primary Teachers, dismissing the efforts of "non-mathematicians such as Bald" to help children tackle problems that are making their lives difficult, and which can be solved with a little careful teaching. I was not born with a vocation to teach the two tmes table to ten year olds, or to teach adults to do basic arithmetic so that they could pass the police entrance examination. I started on the work, and will continue with it, because they need help and no-one else was prepared to provide it.

Mr Haylock complains at the following quotation comes from what he calls "an old edition" of his book

I do not intend…to explain long division. In my view it is a method that could well be laid to rest in the twenty-first century. To be honest, this is mainly because I have been singularly unsuccessful myself when I have attempted to teach the method. (3rd edition, P101)

His complaint is somewhat economical with the truth. This edition was replaced last year, and all of Cambridge University Education Department's ten copies of it are out on loan (it has four of the new one, also all out).  Mr Haylock has now included one example of long division in his new edition, and has, withdrawn the confession that he can't teach it.  His alternative, continued subtraction, takes 13 lines instead of 6 and then leaves a sum to do at the end. It also breaks down once he has to move into decimals, whereas the compact version does not.

In fact, all of his alternative calculation methods are longer than the original. If you don't know that 6 x 8 = 48, he suggests starting with 6 x 2, doubling it and doubling it again. Three steps - provided of course that the child has been taught the 2 times table, which we cannot assume. Mr Haylock pays lip service to tables, and says everyone should learn them, but his guidance on the matter is skimpy to put it mildly. If a child does not know what 6 x 8 are, at an age when he or she should know this, then they need to be taught their tables, and not to make do and mend with 2s.

Mr Haylock points out that he is a mathematician, and I am not. Neither am I going to defer to someone whose solution is more complicated than the problem it seeks to solve.  The neglect of calculation by progressive education needs to be put right. Developing an alternative to these parts of Mr Haylock's book would be a good start.

An insider's view of Oxford entrance.

Daniel Knowles, here, with some really interesting insights into the ways of Oxford's admissions procedures, and how they set out to find the person behind the grades. Worth reading, and not just because of his own credentials (he got in).

Meantime, Dr Sir Leslie Colin Ebdon-Patterson has been confirmed in his appointment as equalities officer for Britain's further eduation system - higher education is so last year - and can be relied on to take a firm hold on his prominent post. Bit of a comedown after the Court of St James' and the London School of Australian Studies? Sir Les tells me he felt duty calling him to help the mother country, and that he needed to keep some distance between himself and Dame Edna, who's becoming a bit dominant downunder. Perhaps we should send his alter ego to sort her out.

Holidays in school time.

Katharine Birbalsingh is right on the money in Telegraph on the reasons parents take children out of school for holidays:

...parents...have learnt through years of experience that the last week of school at the end of term is often filled with games and movies, and that little actual learning takes place. A parent who is faced with the choice of paying double the plane fare for a family of four so that their children can spend their science lessons watching Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor comes to an easy conclusion.

This is often true of the whole of the summer term. Part of the problem is having exams set too early in the summer term for the convenience of exam boards. No exam or test should take place before the second half of the summer term. Why send your child to school if he or she is not being taught?