To Hackney, for a short professional development session on French with some of my thoughtful, determined and well-organised colleagues who are holding the line for civilisation. A quick reorganisation of my main slide on suggestions for the very first lesson, and we are away, just twenty minutes to discuss what we have achieved in our first term - introducing pronouns, positive and negative sentences with être and avoir, identifying masculine and feminine, songs and practice with Languagenut, and beginning to say anything we wish to. French is not a bolt on to the school's work, but fundamental to its core values of helping children to make the right choices, and to see that hard work and concentration will pay off. A very happy atmosphere, and I am rewarded with a warm round of applause. This will not make it any less tough when the children return next week. Bon courage à tous.
Then across London to work with a ten year old whose reading problems have not been completely resolved by synthetic phonics. The basic techniques outlined by Sue Palmer in her description of work with her daughter, slightly reorganised so that the same guidance can be used for reading and spelling, produce their usual effect, and the observing parent describes the outcome as "fantastic". A colleague has observed the whole lesson, from the time I greeted the young man to the time I left his home, and will send an account to Sir James Rose, who did not receive the evidence I sent him about this teaching, and who is now very interested in it.
On the way back to the tube, I bump into a very senior figure in the education world, whose name I can't give here. He had also had dealings with the last government on a range of issues, and said that civil servants had become so close to ministers that they simply excluded anything that was not in the party line. They were no longer behaving as civil servants. The ministry says that my work may have been lost en route to a researcher. I can't believe this. Someone must have made a note of it, and, if it had been sent to an (unnamed) researcher, someone must have expected a response, and would have chased it if none had been received. This would have shown the loss, and I would have been asked for an other copy. It's embarrassing to lose things, but this is what I and newspapers I've worked with have done when it happens - the penalty has usually been a sarcastic comment from the sender, followed by a new copy.
My own belief is that the work was deliberately suppressed by someone in the ministry, or by someone else connected with the inquiry, as it goes against both the government line and the views of the voluntary organisations that have been given a disproportionate role in public provision for dyslexia. This is the way New Labour did things. As Mandelson once said, it involves the creation of truth. He later retracted this statement, saying you can't create truth. But he was right the first time. The price of artificial truth in this instance is tens of millions of pounds wasted on training and provision that is not based on full assessment of the available evidence, and much puffed up self importance from what New Labour termed third sector organisations that don't know as much as they think they do. The whole truth, or as close to it as current evidence will take us, is now available, and it is not too late to put right the mistake.