John Bald/language and literacy

Proverbs and new languages.

I've argued that there are three main strands to learning a new language - grammar, which teaches us how the language puts words together to make sense, vocabulary, which gives us the words, and usage, which tunes us in to how speakers of the language use the first two. The Guardian has an excellent selection of proverbs, here, which illustrate the value of the third part. The French do not, as far as I know, whip cats, and the Spanish do not give people pumpkins. Neither do I know how far a German cat can jump. Good fun, all the same. Pictures by Marcus Oakley and Matt Lindley for the website Hotel Club.

Tell the truth, get the sack.

 

Katharine Birbalsingh's experience should have warned everyone that telling the truth about behaviour in UK schools is a risky business. The latest one to get the sack is Mike Stuchberry, for complaining that banter was being used as an excuse for bullying. The head said she agreed with him, but never mind, he got the sack anyway. Or, rather, an invitation to try a fresh start somewhere else. A good BBC report here.

Irritating nonsense in The Guardian, and the solution to reading problems in English.

Readers will know that the response from parents and teachers to the approach to reading on this site is overwhelmingly positive, because it puts their children and pupils in a position to understand what they are doing from the start and so to learn without confusion or stress. Scroll down for the latest results, which are among the best I or anyone else has ever had. 

However, commentators on the Guardian's admirable Comment is Free website, where I am Quaestor, persist in a fifties, whole word v phonics approach to reading that is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of English spelling and who it came to be as it is. The errors persist on both sides of the debate, and I am determined to root them out. Here is my latest posting:

I'm yet again coming in on this point, as I have the solution to the problem - see recent comments from parents and teachers on johnbald.typepad. com.

First, phonics are the basis of learning to read for two reasons. The first is that any alphabetic system relies on the representation of sounds by letters to make it work. The alternative system, ideograms, can become even more convoluted in its written form, but also relies on consistency to make it intelligible, so that there is, for example, a pretty consistent sign in Chinese writing to indicate femininity. If you don't use phonics as a base, you have to use some form of guesswork, and guesswork is the least reliable approach of all.

Second, the reason for the long tail of underachievement in English-speaking countries is that the language has irregularities that are not explained to learners because most teachers have never been taught to think of them. I was 40 before I understood that a vowel was a voice sound first and then a letter or group of letters representing it, a fact that has widespread consequences for the presentation of vowels to children - it is the reason why every word needs a vowel, and why the letter y is a vowel - sky, my. Do most people know why th represents the sound it normally does in English? Printing the word the in red letters for children to guess at is no subsitute for this explanation. Why are fruitand biscuit spelled similarly but pronounced differently? French. Why do we spell table as we do? Say it in French and the l comes before the e.

There is no substitute for explanation and understanding. My latest free lessons by skype to Yorkshire and Falkirk have produced feedback of amazing, instant respect, and life-changing breakthrough from parents and teachers and I am happy to demonstrate the approach, free, to anyone else. These problems are unnecessary if language is properly understood, and David Crystal's Spell It Out is a good place to start if you don't believe me.

Ofsted's betrayal of evidence-based inspection in English schools.

Last Friday, Ofsted published reports on six private Islamic schools in East London that were among the most critical and well-argued I’ve ever read. The schools were described as “inadequate”, and the reports listed failings ranging from low achievement to the promotion of social attitudes incompatible with modern society.

In some schools, huge chunks of a curriculum most people would see as essential were simply left out – no art, no music, and a view of history dictated by a single religious viewpoint. The Guardiancarried an article condemning the reports by the former pupil of one school (Jamiatal Ummah) who had proceeded to the physics department of Kings College. He would have slim chances of getting there now – the school’s data dashboard shows no pupils with ABB grades at A level, and an average A level grade of D+.

Published on the same date were two reports on state schools, Globe Ark Academy near the Elephant and Castle in South London, and Sir John Cass School, in the East End. The Globe report, like those on the independent schools, is a first-class piece of work by the inspectors.

The school’s work is given a fair and balanced analysis, with due weight to strengths and aspects of improvement, and its overall rating is good, with outstanding features in management, behaviour and, perhaps most important of all, achievement in the primary school, showing that the approach pioneered at Mossbourne can be both exported and extended.

The school has been open for two years only, and this is what excellent work in progress looks like. It is also a huge improvement from the situation in that part of London when I worked there in the seventies.

Sir John Cass, by contrast, is entitled to feel it has had a raw deal. The report does not conclude, as it rightly does with the six private schools, that “the school is inadequate”, as the evidence of pupils’ work in the main school and the sixth form clearly shows that it is not.

Teaching and achievement across the whole range of the school’s pupils are good, GCSE results are above national averages and outstanding in English and maths, with outstanding provision in vocational courses in the sixth form – a key issue for improvement nationally. Pupils behave well, work hard, and have above-average attendance. This from the East End, and the neighbouring school to the one I happened also to work at in the seventies. Once again, the improvement is remarkable.

Sir John Cass had two shortcomings. It did not monitor the Facebook site of a sixth form society that was promoting extremism, and did not ensure that children in the main school mixed freely in the playground. Both of these are serious and required immediate attention from the governors and headteacher. Inspectors could have made this crystal-clear, listed it as a point for urgent action, and promised that they would be back very shortly to check that the necessary steps had been taken.

Instead, they – or someone in Ofsted’s central office, as the report was published six weeks after the inspection – swung the sledgehammer, downgrading the school from Outstanding (2011) to Inadequate, and, in effect, wiping out its good work. This is, to use Ofsted’s own terminology, a seriously misleading report. The judgement does not properly reflect the inspection evidence, and puts a conscientious school in the same category as those which were clearly failing to educate children properly. It is unfair.

The problem is rooted in the changes Labour made to Ofsted in 2005, which have still not been put right. In pursuit of Blair’s notion of joined-up government, Ofsted was made to inspect social services as well as education, and the inspection of schools was slashed to the point at which inspectors did not have time to do their work properly. As one retired HMI has put it to me “they couldn’t find the evidence to substantiate their judgements.”

The only way to make this system appear to work was to use data instead of first-hand evidence, and data under the Labour régime were full of perverse incentives either to cheat or to exercise discretion in a way that made your school look better than it should.

So, results in stand-alone infant schools tended to be better than those in primary schools, which had an incentive to keep the infant results low to make it look as if the juniors were making good progress. If they didn’t, some data-minded inspector would come and fail the junior school without looking at its work. Or praise it on the same basis. Sir John Cass School was not visited at all when Ofsted rated it outstanding in 2011, and had only one day’s inspection, by one inspector, in 2008. Its last full inspection, under a properly comprehensive framework, dates from 2005.

In the same week as the reports that made the headlines, Ofsted published just under 250 reports on the work of individual childminders and dozens of reports on other childcare, including fostering agencies and children’s homes. Such inspections are necessary, but it makes no sense whatsoever to visit every childminder in the country while sending a large secondary school like Sir John Cass a nice letter without setting foot in the place.

To use plain language, you can’t inspect a bus ticket without looking at it, and we have, since Labour’s sectarian decision to force Sir Mike Tomlinson to resign the minute he was sixty, had a succession of chief inspectors whose experience of the work of inspecting schools has been close to zero.

Leadership roles in education are not interchangeable, and Sir Mike remains the only professional inspector to have held the top job. There is, unfortunately, only one of him to go round. Now in his seventies, he has been asked to try to improve matters in Birmingham.

The issue is made more urgent by calls in some quarters to reduce inspection still further. Inspectors, according to a comment in The Guardian by a former staffer for Gordon Brown, should not be “food critics” – an excuse for reducing direct observation still further and leaving everything in the hands of school managers, who may have a conflict of interest and who have not been trained to observe fairly.

Senior leadership in Ofsted has abandoned the HMI tradition of expertise in subjects, so that specialist reports on subjects have been discontinued, and retiring subject leaders are not being replaced. This is Labour’s agenda, and deeply damaging to standards. It must be reversed.

The extremist threat to British education has left Ofsted, and those who have made it as it is, so seriously embarrassed as to threaten the credibility of the entire system of school inspection.  Ofsted has responded to this embarrassment by using inspection to make the point that it still has teeth. In doing so, it has put to one side the principles of basing all judgements on evidence, of having sufficient evidence to substantiate each judgement, and of treating teachers well and fairly. These principles need to be restored, and quickly.

Professor Greg Brooks: What Works for Children and Young People with Literacy Difficulties?

Greg Brooks' analysis of current research evidence on a range of intervention strategies, published by the Dyslexia/SpLD Trust,  is exemplary. Each piece of evidence is analysed clearly and fairly, with a succinct and accurate conclusion that should make this work a reference point for new research, both to ensure good design, and to avoid errors.  

It includes this study by the OU of the Easyread scheme, a new approach to phonic processing that has enabled pupils to make accelerated progress over a period of four months.   

The Open University has been collecting data, using a randomized control trial (RCT), on the Easyread System in six London schools between October 2011 and June 2013. The trial has been managed by Professor David Messer with the assistance of Dr Gilly Nash.

100 children were assigned randomly to an Easyread Group and a Control Group.

During the trial some of the most challenged readers in the Control Group left their respective schools (perhaps in frustration of not being included in the first wave of Easyread intervention!). Meanwhile some of the best readers from the Easyread group also left their schools. So the two groups ended up showing a different average start point, despite being originally equal.

Over the first 12 months, this is what happened:

 

The Easyread Group actually reached a normal reading level for their age after doing around 120 lessons. Meanwhile the majority of the Control Group continued to fall behind.

The trial continued and in January 2013 the children of the Control Group were also put on the Easyread System. By June 2013 the Control group had done around 50 Easyread lessons:

 

These figures present a preliminary analysis of the data by Professor David Messer. He has commented “these findings although only a first analysis of the data are very encouraging. The two groups of children were identified by their schools as being in need of help with their reading and each group had below average scores on a reading test. After taking part in Easyread lessons the reading of the two groups had improved and the average scores of the two groups were just above what would be expected for children of this age. Over the coming months a full analysis will be made prior to publication in an academic journal."

Copyright Morgan Learning Solutions Ltd 2013.

 

(JB again) While there remains more than one way to approach this issue, the evidence here is both impressive and independent. The one element lacking is what Bradley and Bryant referred to as the "taught control group", which was used to check that it was not just additional attention and practice that was making a difference, rather than the new scheme itself. It's surprising that the OU missed this point. Nevertheless, the rapid progress made by Easyread children after moving to the scheme at a late stage is another very impressive feature. I recommend clicking on the full version here

Professor Brooks' analysis of research on Reading Recovery once again shows the problem that has dogged this scheme from the outset - pupils are shown making well above average progress during their time on the scheme, and building on these gains a year later, but are not able to be followed through to Year 4, so that the much-repeated claim of sustained average progress cannot be substantiated. RR has had decades to address this point.

 

 

A French lesson by Skype, and progress in reading in Yorkshire.

I gave a French lesson to the 10 year old girl from Falkirk last week, and we moved to a first Clicker demonstration this week. The young lady had read Utopia in a little over a week, and we had a discussion on positive and negative points she had picked out. Her sister was ill. Here is her mother's comment on the French.

John

 

Thank you for another inspiring lesson.

 

Going through these fundamentals of French with S. has been really useful.  Surprisingly, I had never thought to mention to her that the French like their language to flow and so will use apostrophes and silent letters at the ends of words to allow that flow to happen more easily and naturally.  Somehow it was so obvious that it didn't occur to me to think about it - until you pointed it out.  Actually, without this grasp of the basics - what makes French a language distinct from English, it is impossible to progress beyond a certain point.  I found this out myself when attending French university and struggling to understand this 'flow' when engaging in conversations.  It made life much harder than it had to be.  So for that, and your continued development of my daughters' intellects, I am wholly grateful.  

 

Here is the first Clicker 6 grid I used with S. After the pupil has composed a sentence, an excellent French speech engine says it back to them.

 

 

Here is an extension suggested by a very bright eight year old in a Hackney school.

 

 

 

Reading Update.

 

The seven year old pupil from Kettlewell had another very successful lesson, lasting just 18 minutes. He reread everything he had previously read, without any errors he did not correct himself, and two further pages with several unfamiliar words. His sharpness in working out words he did not know already, and in correcting errors - he made only one error on plurals in the whole lesson, and corrected it after a prompt - indicate that he is changing the way he thinks, and reading much more effectively as a result. We now need to work on his writing, but progress so far is exceptional.

Robert Coe, Daisy Christodoulou and Doug Lemov. Reviews.

Commercial pressures have virtually elminated book reviews from educational journalism, which is a pity. Teachers have too little time to research new books for themselves, and most journalism amounts to a fist-fight between competing views of the purpose of education. I used to review books for The Times Educational Supplement and The Guardian. Occasional reviews will appear here. 

Click on titles or illustrations for a link to Amazon, which is usually the fastest way to obtain a book. Though I share reservations about the company's practices, there is no point in spending half a day going to a bookshop and then finding they haven't got what you want. Commercial pressures again.

Professor Robert Coe’s What Makes Teaching Great, sponsored by the Sutton Trust, is an interesting piece of work, and its main conclusion, that traditional methods of teaching are more effective than leaving child to work things out for themselves (akas constructivism and FOFO – find out for yourself), is entirely in line with the government’s programme of reform.  It raised a storm in The Guardian.   

However, progressives pointed out his endorsement of the Sutton Trust’s line that ability grouping, or setting, has a negative effect, a point that requires examination of Professor Coe’s methodology.  To put it bluntly, his paper does not contain any research at all.  It is merely a survey of many other papers, with the unspoken assumption that any shortcomings will cancel each other out.  This is a mistake.  Birds of a feather flock together in the academic world, and shared assumptions and shared errors sustain and reinforce each other, much as they did with astronomy before Galileo.

In the case of setting, the only UK study that can be called recent was published in 1999, with a follow up in 2005.  Although it  found consistently higher scores from schools that used setting, the regression analysis technique, that strips out correlations with various factors, allowed the authors to claim that it made no difference whether schools set or not.

The finding that children made better progress in set groups in English and maths up to the age of 14 was misrepresented in the summary of the first study, and then ignored. The data also are out of date. Mossbourne Community Academy was not even open when it was collected, and its success, repeated in other ARK and Harris academies, is due in large measure to setting and banding.  Accuracy, though, does not greatly matter in reports whose main aim is to media coverage, and it is no accident that a Blairite is in charge of the Sutton Trust’s publicity.

Seven Myths About Education, by Daisy Christodoulou, ARK’s R&D manager, covers similar territory, but gets to the heart of the matter more quickly, and with less jargon – pedagogy, for example, does not even appear in the index.  The first myth – that facts prevent understanding – is the most important. Without facts, and without memory to organise them and enable us to retrieve them, we can’t think.

Ms Christodoulou’s argument that much of what teachers are taught about education is wrong, and they are encouraged to teach in ineffective ways is at the heart of the present government's challenge to progressivism. Her approach is based on close analysis of real examples, from Rousseau onwards – give your scholar no verbal lessons; he should be taught by experience alone – and of their practical consequences. She does not argue against analysis and understanding, but points out that they are only possible if children have something to bring to the task. I’m not sure quite what to make of Hirsch’s idea that the relationship between knowledge and skills is “like a scrambled egg”, perhaps because I don't like scrambled eggs.

Doug Lemov’s Teach Like A Champion, based on analysis of videos of very successful teachers, is packed with ideas for getting and holding children’s interest and managing classes. These range from subtle ways of bringing children back when their attention wavers, to faster ways of giving out books. Each idea is presented in full detail, with a superb accompanying video, and is in this respect better than Ofsted’s (alas, discarded) practice of including cameos of excellent teaching in inspection reports.  We see teachers picking up on points of detail  in a way that encourages pupils while helping them to understand and correct their own mistakes, for example,  just by repeating something they say in a way that makes them think about it, so that It gots to is willingly changed by the pupil to It has to. The principle that praise has to be genuine should be applied throughout education, and is worth the price of the book in itself.

The downside is that this video evidence is occasionally taken at face value. For example, a unit on note-taking compares a detailed copied note with a much sketchier version a pupil wrote for himself, and concludes that the former is better.   An HMI report of 1979 examined the same issue, and found that copying could mask a very serious literacy problem that only appeared once the pupil had to write independently. The snapshot does not always tell the whole story.  That said, this book can be recommended to any education student or newly qualified teacher as an unrivalled source of practical ideas.

Reading Recovery: an international quango in urgent need of reform. (Revised and updated)

The late Dame Marie Clay's contribution to education is based on extensive research and published work, beginning with  Observing Young Readers (1982) and ending with Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals, (2005, Heinemann US and NZ). The first showed that failing six year olds not only read roughly a twentieth as much as successful readers, but were making far more mistakes in what they did read, and correcting far fewer of their errors themselves. They were thinking differently, and less effectively, and so needed different teaching. The techniques used by successful teachers in Auckland were collected, and formed the basis of the manual for Reading Recovery, a scheme designed to improve their thinking so that they could make similar progress to other pupils. The latest book is an update to the manual, and follows criticism that it had not been kept up to date. It has still not been published in the UK, but is available via Amazon, here.

The main change is Dame Marie's acceptance of "phonemic awareness" - conscious knowledge of patterns of sound - (TES, Connecting Patterns, 1.3.88), otherwise known as "onset and rime" - as a key element in relating sounds to letters. The best feature, and one that I recommend wholeheartedly, is the section on getting these children whom she describes, accurately enough, as "hard to teach" to begin to write. This section alone makes the book worth buying, and I've already prestented it to teachers on a training course, alongside Clicker 6, which will make it easier to use.

Phonics, though, remains a blind spot for Dame Marie, who still associates it with the presenting to children the idea that a letter can represent only one sound. She sees a research finding by Kaye (2002) that young fluent readers tend to use letters in clusters rather than one at a time as somehow contradicting the value of phonics, whereas the truth is that it is fast, accurate, application of phonic knowledge that enables them to do this.  Dame Marie approves of "word-breaking" - aka analytic phonics - but not "word building" and, while she includes several put-downs of phonics, there is no mention of it in the index. RR has avoided the issue for the whole of its existence, and continues to do so. As a result, it is not eligible for federal funding in the US, much to the organisation's fury. Thanks to Karina Mclachlain for this information. 

So, where does this leave Reading Recovery?

First, we need to distinguish between teaching techniques, some of which are very useful in themselves, and their use as a manual. Teaching conscious attention to sounds and their links to letters enables children to proceed to use word-building as well as word-breaking, and RR's refusal to include this, aka synthetic phonics, in its manual, is pure obstinacy. There is a hidden element of look and say in its approach to new words that, at best, slows down the process of learning to read and at worst prevents it. Reading Recovery has a considerable and predictable failure rate that is both expensive and distressing - click for my successful work with a child who had previously had RR to no avail.

Next, the timing and structure of the scheme are inflexible, bureaucratic and wasteful. We know by the time they are five which children are likely to have difficulty in learning to read, and should not let them fail for two years before doing something about it. The best schools tackle the problem by building the necessary understanding from nursery onwards. If schools know their children, spending two weeks "roaming round the known" is a waste of time and money.  A skilled teacher can find out what a weak reader already knows in minutes, rather than weeks, and can make an impact on the problem - in most cases, turn it round - in the first lesson.  In the Foundation Lesson, the teacher inspires immediate confidence, backed by the fact that the child will immediately begin to get things right and continue to do so. See the examples below.  

Picking the weakest six children in a class for RR is also arbitrary - in some classes, fewer than six children will need help, and in others the whole class will. Similarly, the criterion of subsequent average progress for the class is meaningless - in a high-attaining class, a child could be doing well, but still be behind the others. In a class where most of the pupils are failing, doing as well as they are is of no benefit.

The National Foundation for Educational Research found in 1988 that RR pupils in London started secondary school with a reading age of 8.4. Better than zero, but nothing to shout about. RR's response to this finding was a propagandist article in The Guardian saying I should have been pleased with the result. They are easily pleased. They have, unfortunately, succeeded in conning a lot of politicians with their mantra of "accelerated progress first, sustained average progress later". This is salesmanship rather than education, and needs to be resisted.

Reading Recovery gives children who need it the undivided, trained attention of an adult who understands children of their age, and gives them work they can do, rather than forcing them into a pace they can't match. It has, however, become fossilised  and needs urgent reform. Until this happens, it should be treated like any other quango, and receive no more public money. Big charities investing in it should ensure that the outcome is evaluated independently, and in particular should track children's progress carefully, at least until the age of 11.

 

Reading Reform Foundation: a note

Following a link from the RRF forum to my recent posting on Reading Recovery, I posted this on their site:

Recent links from RRF to my comments on Reading Recovery have prompted me to offer this account of my personal journey in reading teaching in the hope that it might interest forum members

Shortly after I started teaching, a colleague introduced phonics to a class as "the science of reading and writing." I was taken by this and began turning the idea over in my mind. I like science, and had already seen too much guesswork. Moving to a school with a reading unit, under the redoubtable Mike Burton - not the rugby player, but in the same mould, only a bit bigger - I found that phonics helped me to make an immediate impact on reading problems, but in an unusual way.

Shortly after I started teaching, a colleague introduced phonics to a class as "the science of reading and writing."   I was taken by this and began turning the idea over in my mind. I like science, and had already seen too much guesswork. Moving to a school with a reading unit, under the redoubtable Mike Burton - not the rugby player, but in the same mould, only a bit bigger - I found that phonics helped me to make an immediate impact on reading problems, but in an unusual way.

A 13 year old couldn't read the word "round".  I took a pound note out of my pocket - that's how old I am - and the pupil of course knew what it was. I carefully explained the combination of letters ound, changed the first letter a couple of times and worked on some other words with the ou combination. We then went back to the book and he read the word without difficulty. I was mildly surprised, but quite pleased. Mike was a fan of Bevé Hornsby, and I got a copy of Alpha To Omega, developing a great series of sets of words written on blank playing cards that I would use whenever pupils stumbled on a word. This book is organised in terms of letter combinations, and was one of the first to include soft c and g and the idea of a letter as a wall, either to keep two vowels apart so that the first one stayed short (stopping, sloping) or to stop a the softening in plague.

Bevé had, in short, catalogued most of the features of English that are not the most common phonic patterns and grouped them together. I found this very helpful, particularly in getting pupils's reading ages up from around 8 to 10 or 11. I used flash cards and games for reinforcement, but always explained everything in as much detail as I was able. I never used look and say, and I mean never, not "hardly ever."

Fast forward 40 years. to the brain research summarised in Blakemore and Frith's The Learning Brain, which remains I think, the clearest introduction to this field for teachers. We find in it a comparison of brain activity in reading aloud in English and Italian, which shows an area of the brain that is active in English, and that the authors call the "word form" area. It is used to interpret the information from letters so that we know, for example, the difference between to and go. Its implication is that, in Italian, the letters tell us what we need to know all the time, but that in English, we need to interpret what they tell us - we need, in short, to know what they are telling us in a particular word.

Somewhere in the middle of this journey, I was teaching a sixteen year old non-reader in Clacton - more accurately, trying to teach him - when my colleague, the late Avril Lofthouse, pointed out that my instruction to the student to sound out an awkward word couldn't work, because the letters did not correspond exactly to the spoken word. She was quite right, and this again made me think over several days. If the information indicated by letters was not reliable, what could we do?

The guessing game people were clearly wrong, as their approach had led to wholesale illiteracy, on a scale worse than we have not - at Beaufoy in the seventies, we would frequently have children starting secondary school unable to read anything at all, and we don't have quite so much of that these days. The answer came to me from my days of swotting my way to a decent degree in French - I am a slow learner, which my piano teacher says has probably helped me to understand people with learning difficulties. If we look at the words fruit and biscuit, they are pronounced in exactly the same way in French, but differently in English. We spell table as we do because it is a French word, and in French the l is pronounced before the e. If children were to read these words - and I mean those who were not confident enough to play around with letters, sounds and context until they found a fit - they had to be explained.

This, though, is what Bevé Hornsby did not do. She listed very nearly every variation in spelling, but did not explain why things are as they are, probably because she did not know. The full picture, in fact, has only become clear following the computerisation of the full Oxford English Dictionary, which allows all of its copious (an understatement) examples to be analysed so that we can track and explain changes. I have found that this explanation, and making it clear to children, is the key to teaching reading in English, and an essential adjunct to synthetic phonics. David Crystal's explanation of how it happened in history almost mirrors the development of this understanding in a child. Anglo Saxon English had around 50,000 words and was very regular - Queen was spelled cwen, and they had their own letter, þ, to indicate th , so that our the was written þe. William the Conqueror and his scribes did not like anything Anglo-Saxon, and so replaced the "thorn" letter with th.

At a recent inset course, an assistant said that it could take her up to a year to teach a child to read the, as they persisted in trying to sound out the word one letter at a time. I showed a video in which I taught a 7 year old with this problem - he had been assessed as dyslexic and had already had two years of individual private teaching - how to read this and similar words in around 8 minutes. I do things like this all the time, and have been doing so since the mid-nineties. Google my name and Sue Palmer's for one parent's view, and see my site for the latest feedback from parents, which sounds too good to be true, except that it is true.

Explanation of the language as it is, and how it has come to be as it is, unlocks reading block - one parent, an army colonel with three daughters who are now all graduates, described it as "turning a key" - and enables children to approach blending and word building as something that will help them most of the time, but not always. Once they understand why this is so - I explain it with simple analogies between language and other human foibles - they can learn to read remarkably quickly. As long ago as the early nineties, when I'd just finished my battle against Essex Education Department's ignorant guessing game approach to reading, the local paper recorded a two year gain in reading age, independently tested, after seven lessons. The most recent feedback on my site is even better.

Reading Reform was necessary when this organisation was founded, and remains so. It is, though, not to be achieved by a presentation of language as purely phonic, loading teaching with unnecessary adult terminology, and printing some words in different colours in an attempt to get children to suspend the rules that the teacher has just carefully taught. Synthetic phonics is the basis of learning to read. No one presents it any more as the whole story - the "science of reading and writing" - but what is needed is not a combination of phonics and guesswork. We need to give children the full picture, clearly explained in terms they understand, and turn the fuzzy logic of English spelling into an object of curiosity and pleasure, rather than an obstacle.

Having reached the age of 64, immortalised in song, I'm happy to show anyone how this works free, gratis and for nothing, either here or via skype. So, if you have pupils for whom everything is working as well as you'd like, ignore this. If there are any who are stuck, sit in and see what you think.

Seaham Harbour Heroes - The George Elmy Lifeboat

 

In 1962, the Seaham Harbour lifeboat, the George Elmy, set out in the mountainous seas we regualarly see crashing over the top of the lighthouse on a rescue mission that failed at the last moment, as the boat was hit by a huge wave just outside the harbour. Only one of the rescued people survived - the whole crew was lost, and my wife and her mother still remember the eerie silence of the town on the following morning as they delivered milk.  

The boat was unsinkable, but not self-righting. As self-righting boats had been available since the 1890s, this seemed stupid, but the issue turns out not to be as simple as it appears, as self-righting boats were less stable, which brought different dangers. Following the Seaham disaster, the RNLI developed a new type of self-righting boat that worked by taking on a ton and a half of sea water when it was launched, and using the movement of this floating ballast to right the boat. Not an obvious solution, and the disaster can't be ascribed to the pure folly that we might imagine. 

Repaired and retired, the George Elmy - named after the donor's brother, not from the North-East - was used as a fishing boat, and purchased by local people from Ebay.  After £100k of restoration, half of it from the Heritage Lottery Fund, it is now on proud display at Seaham and entered on the register of historic ships. The exhibition of local life alongside the George Elmy is well worth a visit, and Sir Thomas Allen, the unofficial first citizen of the North-East, is patron of the organisation.