John Bald/language and literacy

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.

"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.

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.

"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.

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.