John Bald/language and literacy

November 17, 2023

Why we still have reading problems - and how to solve them.

My boyhood hero, Bobby Charlton, used to say that a footballer was as good as his last match. So it was good to hear that my new 11 year old pupil last week told his mother on the way home that it had been the best English lesson he’d ever had. He had been assessed as dyslexic, wrote by putting together a rough approximation of the sounds needed to represent each word, and read similarly, using some, but not all, of the information conveyed by the letters, with guessing from context. As usual, this caused hesitation and frequent breakdown, as he tried to make sense of an error by misreading the words that followed it.

Why was I not surprised? The pattern is repeated hundreds and thousands of times over, the legacy of the reading wars, failed strategies, and the version of phonics endorsed by both major parties over the past 20 years. Labour’s review, by the late Sir James Rose, was followed by appointing the leader of a pressure group, the Reading Reform Foundation, as lead of a group designing national guidance, when they had no experience of teaching people to read. Conservatives made it worse by enforcing the same approach, whole phonics rather than real phonics, across the country. It helped in the earliest stages of reading by orienting children towards print rather than guessing, but then caused confusion as the variations in spelling, caused by our history, were not explained, chiefly because those in charge did not understand them. Five years after his review, Sir James understood and endorsed my approach. Politicians, across the spectrum, ignored it.

Simon, as we shall call him, did not fall into the trap of using another word if he could not spell the one he wanted, and the school responded by circling the errors rather than correcting them. Or, rather, most of them, as almost one word in two was misspelled. I’m teaching a girl a year older, who has almost exactly the same problem, and has just done very well in a science test because her teacher had time to go through what she had actually written to get at what she meant to write. As the teacher said, that is not something she can count on in real life.

The solution, for these children and everyone else I’ve helped since the 90s, is to help the person adjust their thinking to take account of the way the alphabet is really used in English, including what can be done with 26 letters, when the language has a substantially greater number of sounds. I’ve described the approach in detail in my article for the Chartered College of Teaching . It usually starts with the letters in the person’s name, and moves quickly to the Norman conquest, which made just as big an impact on the language as it did on the landscape. Explaining this, starting with the simple example of “table” – say it in French and you can hear the le in the correct order – unlocks large numbers of words that cannot be read by “decoding” them from left to right. Computerised dictionaries put the proportion as just under a third of the language, including the large number of words of Latin and Greek origin that are shared between English and French.

A couple (shared word) of simple questions and maxims make the whole picture clear. The language is 1000 years old, and if we were 1000 years old, we’d have a few wrinkles. Languages, like children – and adults – do not behave perfectly all the time, and we need to be ready for that. The letters will always help us, but will not always tell us everything we need to know. This includes the English phenomenon of emphasising one syllable in words containing more than one, which the letters will rarely tell us. So, we use what the letters tell us, but don’t believe the letters tell us everything. We then practise what we’ve learned. Brain research tells us that this results in myelin being put onto the new neural connections, speeding things up so that we no longer need to build words from scratch.

The reading lesson comes to resemble a music lesson, with each new element carefully introduced and explained, taking care to match the work to the developing knowledge and understanding of the learner. The adaptation for spelling – where just four elements need to be borne in mind – uses the same principle. A Hackney deputy head, who had watched me teach a lot, summed it up thus – “Make it perfectly clear, then practise”. More examples and comments from parents and teachers, who have seen the work at first hand, are on this website. It is much harder to make an impact on organisations, whether the Department for Education or voluntary associations and pressure groups. Organisations synthesise beliefs and knowledge in order to form and promote policies. They do not explore in sufficient depth to ensure that knowledge, beliefs and policies are soundly based. At the moment, they are not, and lives are blighted as a result.

Sir James told me that he believed the other members of his review had been too quick to discard research evidence, but the issue is, rather, that they have not scrutinised enough of it, or it closely enough. Castles et al have shown that the key contribution of phonics is to establish the principle of using the alphabet to read. Perera (1989) that fast accurate word identification is the basis of phrasing. Wilkins, Evans and Irlen that sensitivity to light, especially fluorescent light, makes reading more difficult for a significant minority. Bradley and Bryant that conscious awareness of patterns in sound is important in using phonic connections. Crystal that letter patterns in English often represent the sounds of other languages. Snowling that early hearing problems, including glue ear often cause difficulty withnreading. Each of these issues can affect learning to read, and can be expressed and explained in plain English. But power dictates policy for good or ill, and power plus error makes an irresistible combination. Unless those in power can be made to see sense, the misery will continue.

Posted at 08:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 14, 2023

Evidence to the House of Commons Education Select Committee Enquiry on School Inspection. October 2023

The Select Committee, @CommonsEd, has been very selective about the written evidence it has published, while asking people not to publish their own. As they have not published my evidence, it is here.

I began teaching in inner London in 1973, and benefited greatly from the advice and support of heads of department and inspectors, who helped me to develop skills, corrected errors, and encouraged my interest in the teaching of reading. In 1980, I moved to the Essex advisory service as a reading specialist, and became an Ofsted inspector in September 1994, successively in secondary, primary, and special schools, following assessment and training by HMI in each sector. After over 60 team inspections, I was assessed and accredited by HMCI to lead inspections of primary and secondary schools. I led over 100 inspections, and worked as a report quality reader, trainer to new inspectors, and mentor to new lead inspectors. I qualified as an inspector under the 2006 legislation, and was accredited to lead inspections, following which I stopped inspecting and worked as a consultant for Sir Michael Tomlinson in The Learning Trust, the education authority for Hackney.

The impact of Ofsted on inspection, management and governance.

The Introduction of Grading.

From the late 1960s to foundation of Ofsted in 1992, inspection of schools was chiefly carried out by local authorities (LAs). HMI provided a strategic overview, could be called in where a LA gave cause for concern, and inpsected teacher training and non-university higher education.

Local Authority inspectors exercised authority well beyond school inspection, and had de facto control of teachers’ careers, and of school policy. Those in Essex took as little notice of HMI as possible – one inspector’s comment was, “Who the hell takes any notice of them?” and a Chief Inspector of a London LA said he would give them a v-sign as soon as they’d left his office. Essex’s Principal Primary Inspector’s response to Sheila Browne’s 1979 Primary Survey (which pointed to serious weaknesses in science teaching), was “We’re not going along with this,” and he did not. The cordial, fair but strong picture of inspection in Gervaise Phinn’s novels represents the way LA inspection ought to have operated, but rarely did.

The quality of HMI’s reports, including their surveys of Primary and Secondary Education and subject reports, nevertheless earned them a strong reputation among the profession. They did not use numerical grading in any part of its work, and if they could not find sufficient evidence to make a judgement on any aspect of education, they did not make it. Neither, as far as I can tell, did any LA Inspectorate. When HMI were given oversight of Ofsted, they developed a complex system of numerical grading in each subject and aspect of the inspection, to give them a means of ensuring consistency in inspection procedure among inspectors and inspection providers, which could be contractors or LAs.

This crucial change in inspection practice is at the root of many of our current problems. There were originally five grades, very good, good, satisfactory, unsatisfactory and poor. “Excellent” and “Very Poor” were added in the late 1990s, and the grades reduced to 4 in 2006. Grades were soon linked to government policy. A school in which 10% of lessons were graded unsatisfactory or poor would be placed in special measures, a judgement that headteachers and staff came to dread, as it often meant the end of their career. The lesser judgement of “serious weaknesses” – as if a school with serious weaknesses could be said to be providing a satisfactory education – often had similar consequences. While schools recognised the good work of individual inspectors, inspection itself was seen as a threat, and with good reason.

There was pressure on inspectors to manipulate grades to avoid this happening. On one primary inspection in the mid-90s, the lead inspector opened a team meeting by asking “Do you want to fail this school? Because if you keep giving 4s at this rate, that’s what’s going to happen.” Inspectors would sometimes cut a lesson observation short in order to avoid giving a 4, and a lead inspector could not accept the evidence form, as happened to one of mine when I judged that reading comics was not a good use of a library lesson. Headteachers would receive feedback on teachers’ grades, either formally or informally, and one secondary headteacher informed me that he had sacked anyone with more than one unsatisfactory during the previous inspection. Inspectors were, understandably,reluctant to make a judgement that would end a career.

All of these factors made the 3-4 borderline a crucial area, and led to distortion. The system designed to ensure consistency and quality in inspection quickly came to dominate it, creating stress and acres of needless paperwork as schools attempted to keep above the line. Despite some improvements, particularly “Excellent”, which allowed the best teaching to be celebrated with a short paragraph in the report, and helped the careers of some teachers whose skills had been overlooked by management, and “Very Poor”, which identified the need for the most urgent action, grading became a straitjacket for all involved, leading to formulaic judgements and stilted writing.

Party Political Appointments of Chief Inspector.

Prior to Ofsted, HMI was a collegiate organisation, with chief inspectors for each division. The overall head was designated “Senior Chief Inspector”. There was always a political element to these appointments, particularly following the Plowden Report (1965), and selection was primarily in the hands of the Department. An SCI who had political affiliations was expected to act neutrally, much like Mr Speaker, and I know of no occasion on which this was challenged. The first HMCI, Sir Stewart (later Lord) Sutherland was in this tradition, and he based his work on existing HMI practice, which he codified in the first Inspection Handbook.

His successor, Sir Christopher Woodhead, was the personal choice of the Secretary of State, and closely aligned with government policy, as he had previously been as head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. He soon broke with the HMI tradition of basing his comments on evidence, stating that there were too many incompetent teachers at a time when inspection evidence was showing a slight improvement. I was attending an assessment session with a large number of HMI on the day this happened, and witnessed the shock and immediate loss of confidence among them.at his disregard of their evidence. He never regained it.

Woodhead was succeeded by his deputy, Sir Michael Tomlinson, a professional HMI who said on his appointment, “From now on, all judgements will be based on evidence, and the evidence must be sufficient to substantiate each judgement,” a return to HMI principles. The government, however, required Tomlinson’s retirement at the age of 60 – to install its own political choice, Sir David Bell, who had held senior posts in a number of Labour-controlle authorities, and was reported by The Sunday Times to have attended Tony Blair’s victory part7 in 1997. Bell’s tenure co-incided with the retitling of the DfE as the “Department of Children, Schools and Families, and two education acts, which merged education and children’s social services, and changed the nature of inspection.He later became Permanent Secretary atthe DCSF. All subsequent appointments to HMCI have been political appointments, without regard to the person’s experience of inspection. The damage this has done to the quality of inspection, and to Ofsted’s reputation within the teaching profession, is incalculable.

Inspection Procedures, Frameworks and Handbooks.

Sutherland’s first Handbook was written in close consultation with HMI, and included everything they might do on an inspection. It was an outsized ring binder, and daunting to all who came into contact with it, including the educational commentator Professor EC Wragg. It was supplemented by published Updates, which included instructions that inspectors had to follow, though not all did so. This was a particular problem with inexperienced inspectors, usually seconded Head Teachers or Deputies, and led to inconsistency.

Inspectors were expected to follow the Handbook and Updates in minute detail, and were monitored to ensure that they did so. This process could be gruelling, with lead inspectors at risk of losing their registration if they did not ask the right questions at the right time in team meetings – for example, it was compulsory to raise the issue of potential special measures in the first meeting, whether or not there was any sign of this arising.

Inspectors were expected to keep a notebook for each subject, plus a completed record of inspection evidence, in addition to their evidence forms and draft reports, a process which duplicated work and at times made it nearly impossible. One notebook could make sense, three or four were excessive. Meetings could be unreasonably long. One HMI, acting as lead inspector, thought nothing of telephoning after 11 at night, and expected a meeting at seven the next morning. This reflected a culture of overwork among HMI themselves – on HMI inspections, the reporting inspector would be expected to work through the night in order to have a report word-perfect for presentation to the school next morning.

In 1999, the ring-binder was replaced by three slimmed down handbooks, for primary, secondary and special schools respectively. These set out requirements much more clearly, and included straightforward guidance and extracts from well-written reports. Pre-inspection forms All allincluded a school’s self-evaluation, Form S4, which became the model for the current school evaluation form. These are the only Handbooks to have been produced specifically for each sector. I recommend that they be closely studied as part of the process of redesigning inspection. These Handbooks included instructions for a new short inspection.

Inspection procedures, 1992 to 2006.

Inspectors could nominate up to 3 specialist areas, and teams were organised to ensure coverage of of all National Curriculum subjects, and other key aspects, including pupils’ personal development. Each team would include a lay inspector, usually a person with experience of business or of public service other than education. Inspections would typically last five days (later 4) in a secondary school, and three or four in a primary school. Inspection teams would typically have six or seven members for a primary school, and 11 or 12 for a secondary school, though schools with six forms could have teams of up to 17 inspectors. The inspection would be proceeded by preparatory work by the lead inspector, who would visit the school in advance, usually with the lay inspector, and would meet the Head Teacher, staff, governors and parents. Parents’ meetings were rarely well attended, but could provide an important channel of communication on serious issues.

The report would include sections for each subject (from 2000, with separate reports on sixth form subjects), leadership and management the overall quality of teaching and learning, standards and achievement, pupils’ personal (social, moral, spiritual and cultural) development, and there would be overall judgements on the quality of education and of value for money. Reports would be preceded by a summary listing main findings, with bullets on strengths and areas for improvement.

Notes.

https: leadership and management,//www.tes.com/magazine/archive/part-2-theyre-herehttps://www.theguardian.com/education/1999/apr/22/schools.ofsted

Posted at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 10, 2023

Some Principles of Small-Scale Research Design.

The weaknesses of randomised controlled trials are described in several postings, beginning here. These large-scale studies are outside the scope of teachers, and indeed of individual university researchers, even at doctoral level. Thses notes, which take account of the experience of reading researchers over several decades, are intended to help colleagues plan practical and effective approaches to research in their own context I welcome correspondence, and am happy to help pro bono. I am a Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching.

The aim is not to establish absolute truth using the methods of the physical sciences, but to apply the principles of John Locke to establish the best available evidence, and where possible to answer the classic teacher's question "What can I do on Monday morning?" though on a longer time-scale. The closest medical parallel is not the randomised controlled trial, but the development of surgery, which has been based on individual observations, including the papers published in The Lancet by Joseph Lister in 1867. It is also impossible to have a blind trial in an educational context, as the teacher needs to know what he or she is doing. There is no scientific basis for a partially-sighted trial, and many recent oncology trials are open, rather than blind. The idea of a single, gold-standard research method in education is supported by assertion rather than evidence, and is an illusion.
The limitations of each study need to be identified as part of the planning, in something akin to a risk assessment. Some issues, such as follow-up to ensure that results are sustained and not washed out, need to be considered in all studies. Others reflect the methodology and goals of individual studies. There is no single correct answer.
Sampling may be:

A class taught by a teacher, compared with a similar class taught by the same teacher, either in the same or a previous year. Any differences between the classes should be noted and taken into account in evaluation. If there is a need to compare classes taught by different teachers, this should be carefully considered, as other factors than the issue under investigation may be very important, and indeed invalidate results.
A year group, compared with earlier year groups. Again, differences in teaching staff should be noted.
A small group, compared with a similar small group given a different form of additional provision, and a third given no additional provision. Differences in teachers should be noted, and more than one experimental group used if possible.
A case study. Comparison in this case may be to pupils with similar patterns of learning, or to the same pupil's earlier work.

Timing needs to be long enough to allow teaching to have the desired effect. I suggest an interim review after half a term, and a term and a year as likely to give a useful result. Follow-up should be planned after one, two and five years. This allows us to detect both short-term washout, and long-term benefits.
Assessment needs a clear measurement of starting and finishing points. It may take any form appropriate to the issue investigated. Standardised tests are not available in the field of languages, and existing frameworks may need to be defined more precisely for research purposes. It is therefore essential that assessment should be a key part of research planning, and that it should be described and explained as part of the research report. Assessment needs to be carried out in "clean" conditions - pupils must not have access to extraneous material from which they might copy or which might give them hints that would not be available to other pupils in the study.

An approach to assessing writing that I have used is to have pupils write all they can, from memory, words, phrases or sentences, in five minutes in a clean room, before and after. The work can then be scored on the basis, of words recognisable, words accurate, meaningful groups and sentences.

For listening, the system used in the British Picture Vocabulary Scale could be applied directly in French. The pupil has to pick the correct picture from four, and the test stops after six errors. It may be possible to use the original pictures, or we might need new ones.

Speaking could involve responses to set, open questions, presented in context and related to the work the pupils have been doing. I have not yet tried to assess this.

Reading assessment is perhaps better established, and could involve picking correct responses in English (or the new language - discuss!) from a range.

Note: Problems that have arisen in the field of reading research include:

short-term gains that are not sustained
no follow-up, or inconsistent follow-up, of results beyond an intervention period
unfair comparisons (eg by comparing the effect of extra provision solely against the work of pupils who have had no extra help)
biased samples and poorly-matched control or comparison groups (eg gender-imbalance, unequal starting points)
intervention periods that are too short to show any results
samples that are too small to show statistical gains, but lack the detail to show qualitative ones ( Very small samples require an unrealistically large effect size to reach statistical significance.)
assessment systems that do not test gains fairly, or that over-generalise benefits
statistical manipulation in such samples that disguises the effect of the results of one or two pupils
descriptions of teaching methods that are too vague to be used as evidence
grouping together the results of large numbers of studies, in the hope that this compensates for flaws rather than accumulating them, then presenting the results as authoritative
variations in the quality of teaching, either in areas studied, or in other areas (eg class management) that are not accounted for
statements of principle that are not substantiated by evidence and are not capable of investigation
leaving negative findings unpublished
bias in editorial panels and peer review

In foreign language research it is also unfair to compare

pupils learning English as a second language with that from learners of other languages, as English is so widely available to the first group, who also have stronger economic motives
adult learners with children

and

evidence from people learning a second language as residents in the country speaking it with evidence from those learning a language in school only.

Contact.

[email protected]

References will be added prior to publication.

Posted at 12:20 PM in Educational Policy, Eliminating Failure in Language Learning, German | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 18, 2023

Sara's first lesson, with updates.

Sara is 11 and has an assessment of dyslexia for which her parents paid £2000. Her main problem is in spelling, and this lesson aimed to show her how to spell using Slimmed Down Spelling. This technique combines phonics with other properties of letters, including groups of letters that cannot be read one letter at a time, extra letters, and “awkward” letters and groups, derived either from foreign languages, or the result of shortcuts in speech. I did not asked to film the lesson, as Sara was very nervous at first, but some filmed examples are on this site, and I’m happy to demonstrate further pro bono. The lesson started at 5.30, after a school day, as it was the only time available that week. Sara’s mother sat on her left, and I on her right, at right angles to her.

We started with Sara’s name, and agreed that it had one sound for each letter. I explained that, if we heard a sound we said a word carefully, we had to have a letter for it. This clearly works with Sara’s name, and is the basis of nearly all initial phonics schemes.

I then asked if Sara could spell table. She couldn’t, so I wrote it for her. Why did she think table was spelt with the l before the e? She didn’t know. I said the word carefully and slowly in French, and asked if she could hear the l before the e. She could. I then explained that we had been invaded by William the Conqueror around a thousand years ago, and that he did not speak English, but a kind of French. I embroidered the story a little, talking about William’s misdeeds, and getting across the idea that things tended to be done his way.

After a quick check that Sara could spell a simple three letter word – cat – I explained that sometimes single letters did not tell us all we needed to know in order to read a word, and that sometimes that has worked in groups. I asked to spell station. She wrote down sta n. The letters she used were correct, but she did not know the tion group. I wrote tion on a piece of paper, asked her to look at it, then put my hand on it, and asked what the four letters were. She remembered it accurately. I then added tion to sta, asked Sara to look at it, then put my hand over it again, and asked her to spell the word while I wrote it. She got it right. Much praise, and mother clearly very pleased. Sara then wrote the word herself, accurately, but in poor handwriting which we will deal with another time.

I then explained that our brain works by making connections between cells, the fingers of our hands might touch, though of course a brain cell has many more connections. As we practise, specialist brain cells deposit a substance called myelin, which works a little like the insulation on a cable, and speed things up. As we learn more words with similar structures, they form a network in our brain, and each reinforces the others in the group. So, looking again at station, how much she spell nation? I covered station, and she wrote nation correctly. I extended the idea to situation, which has one sound for each letter, followed by the group. This took two attempts, but Sara wrote the word correctly, without copying it. One of the principles of this technique is that the learner does not copy, but holds information in their mind, and writes without looking at any prompt. If they do not get it right first time, I praise the parts that are right and draw attention to the part that needs to be improved. They try again. Each extension requires careful judgement, so that the child is challenged, but can succeed if they try.

The next stage is to explain that some words have an extra letter. This doesn’t represent a sound in itself, but usually changes the sound of another letter. I wrote mat, which Sara read, followed by mate, which she could not read. I explained the principle, in simple English, then wrote hat, followed by hate, both of which Sara read accurately. With an older pupil, or earlier in the day, I would probably have gone on to the softening effect if e, i and y after c and g (face, city, cycle, gentle, gin, energy), but at this stage I just wanted to introduce the idea, without overloading her. I did, though, explain that some extra letters show that the word comes from Greek. Asking Sara to spell chaos, she wrote caos. Very good - all of the letter sound correspondences were in place. Showed her the h, and explained why. Sara then wrote chaos without copying.

Finally, we returned to table and William. The language, I reminded her, was about 1000 years old, and if we were 1000 years old, we’d have a few wrinkles. But once we knew what the wrinkles were, we could use them. For example, we agreed that you only saw the same letter three times in a row in cartoon strips. Thinking about table, how would she spell cable? Correct. Did she like horses? Yes, she used to enjoy riding. Where did horses sleep? In a shed. (Served me right for asking the question in that way.) Did she know if the shed had a special name? No. I explained that it was a stable, and like the other words. Sara wrote stable.

How do we spell was? Sara got it right. Why do we spell it like that, and not wos. I explained that the people that William defeated with Anglo-Saxons, that Saxony was a part of Germany, and that their language was a lot like German. I pronounced it in a Germanic way, and we worked on water, and warm (a word completely sharing spelling and meaning with German), and we noticed that the a in these spellings followed a w. This let us build up a group.

Did Sara think she was well-behaved? Yes. Did that mean she was perfectly behaved all of the time, some of the time or nearly all the time? We settled on nearly all. Letters, I said, were a bit like that. They do as we expect most of the time, but we need to be ready for when they don’t. We use what the letters tell us, but don’t believe they tell us everything. Some things we need to know.

Oh, and was Sara learning a language? No, as she was dyslexic. I pointed out that several of the words we’d been working on were French – nearly every word in tion is shared, though not always with exactly the same meaning – and we practised saying the words we’d worked on in French. Sara adapted her pronunciation remarkably easily. Did she feel she’d learned something this afternoon? Yes. Did she feel she would learn a lot more with me? Yes. We’ll meet again next week, and perhaps do a little more French. Sara and her mother were laughing and joking as they walked home. Apart from two tries at situation, this severely dyslexic girl had got everthing I’d taught her right at the first attempt.This is the first lesson. I'll post on progress next week.

Update 1. Sara's second lesson had to be postponed because of a birthday party. However, her mother sent me a message saying she had "remembered all I'd taught her, and found it very helpful. Further updates will follow.

Posted at 04:18 PM in Dyslexia, Educational Policy | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 23, 2023

What Phonics will, and won't do, to help people learning to read and spell.

Introduction

Controversy over methods of teaching reading and spelling began with the spread
of state primary education in the nineteenth century, and soon occupied similar
ground to that of today (Parker, 2021). Should children be taught to recognise
whole words, or should they build them by blending the sounds indicated by letters
(phonics, now generally known as synthetic phonics)? These issues dominated
professional discussion until the late 1960s, when two American writers, Professor
Kenneth Goodman (1968), and the magazine journalist Frank Smith (1973),
developed an approach using the new academic discipline of psycholinguistics, in
which they argued that readers do not pay attention to individual words as they
read, but lightly sampled the text, checking that they were making sense, and
using clues (or cues) from context in order to identify words. I will argue that all of
these approaches are based on misconceptions and misunderstanding of the
operation of the alphabetic system, and will offer another, based on accurate
presentation of the use of letters, and of phonic correspondences, in English.

The Alphabet and the English language

The key feature of alphabetic writing, developed in ancient Greek and Latin, is the
representation of sounds by letters. This distinguishes it from pictographic
systems. The movement from left to right as we write probably also reflects the
fact that most people are right-handed, so that the hand holding the pen or stylus
does not obscure the writing, and people can see what they are doing. Latin and
Greek have, as far as can be determined without recordings of ancient speech, a
high degree of phonic regularity, which is reflected in the direct letter-sound
correspondences in most longer words derived from them, a feature that I called
phonics’ “second wind” in my first book, The Literacy File (1997).
The use of the Latin alphabet in English is, however, complicated by our history. In
the 300 years following the Norman Conquest, English was flooded with French.
This has continued over centuries. The computerisation of the Collins-Robert
French-English dictionary showed that around thirty per cent of English words,
many of them very common - table, fruit, garage, centre - are either identical to
French or very nearly so, though their pronunciation is different. These words are
phonically regular in French, but not in English. I discussed the issue with the
Finnish ambassador at a conference last October. He asked me if I thought English
would be regular, as Finnish is, without the Norman Conquest. An excellent
question. David Crystal (2012) has shown that old English writing has a high degree
of phonic regularity, but there are also influences from Northern European
languages, in words like ‘answer’, that show that English spelling is, and always
has been, a hybrid. The thread of sound-symbol correspondence runs through it,
but with significant variations.

Handling this has dogged the teaching of reading and spelling since the late
nineteenth century. Earlier practice had been simply to present the material
without explanation and have children learn it by heart, with rewards for
successful memorisation and punishment for failure. An early protest against this
approach was appropriately titled, “The Futility of the Spelling Grind” (Rice,
1908). In the 1920s, whole word recognition approaches emerged, with the idea
that children might learn to read through its shape – e.g., in French, écureuil,
squirrel, has an unusual shape and could be supported by a picture. Whole word
approaches, supported by flash cards, became widespread in the fifties, notably, in
the UK, with Ladybird Key Words and the Janet and John series. The most recent
challenge to phonics has come from “psycholinguistic” theories (Goodman, 1968,
Smith, 1973), which presented reading as a “guessing game,” in which readers
made predictions based on light sampling of text, rather than paying attention to
each word. Variations on these are “multicue” and “Searchlights” theories, in
which children are encouraged to guess at words from “cues” in context and
pictures.

These theories were shown to be erroneous by research, beginning with Schatz and
Baldwin’s (1986) demonstration that context clues did not help accurate word
identification, continuing with the Clackmannanshire research (Johnston and
Watson, 2005) that proved the benefits of early phonics, and perhaps culminating
in Castles et al (2018), showing the importance of early phonics in establishing
the “alphabetic principle” - that we read by using the information contained in
letters, and not by guessing.

A final point is a personal observation by Ruth Miskin that around half of all
children are likely to learn to read, whatever approach is taken. My experience
supports this view, and research (notably, but not only, Clay (1965) has shown that
some children who read early see patterns for themselves with minimal support,
and quickly learn to spot and correct their own errors. Others require much more
explicit instruction before they can do this.

Initial Phonics and Whole phonics.

Initial phonics teaches children to blend the sounds of individual letters from left
to right in order to read words. This is essential, and the Ditties in Read Write Inc
(Miskin, 2016) provide an excellent introduction, as their construction ensures that
the approach works with them all the time. Problems begin when it doesn’t work –
eg, that t no longer represents the sound t, as in top, when followed by h, or
table, where the last two letters represent the order of sounds in French, rather
than English. We also have around 25 voice (vowel) sounds in English, and only
seven letters – aeiou, y (an alternative to i, known as “Greek i” in European
languages) and w, which can operate as a companion vowel. Whole phonics lists
the alternative ways of representing a sound – e.g. sum, come – and expects the
child to learn these.

this is unless they’ve already learned the word. Home and come – words children
will hear every day - use the same combination. Only by learning which applies can
the child learn the word, or they are in two minds, and hence lost.
This diagram, from Blakemore, SJ and Frith U (FRS) (2007) shows what is
happening. Left - all areas of the brain active in reading aloud in English and
Italian. Centre – the phonic processing area is sufficient for Italian, which is
phonically regular. Right the “wordform” area of the brain, dedicated to
interpreting the information contained in letters as we read is active in English,
where it is needed. Put simply, reading in English puts particular demands on the
brain, which it develops in order to meet them. To understand the information
contained in letters when reading in English, we must know how they are used in
English. This requires knowledge of language, as well as – not instead of -
phonics. The wordform area is less active in people assessed as dyslexic, which will
be the subject of a later paper.

Explaining English spelling and grammar without jargon

There is very wide variation in the language knowledge and experience of children
starting school. Some can handle new technical vocabulary, such as grapheme,
phoneme, correspondence, with little difficulty, while others have almost no
spoken language at all. All need to learn to read. It is easy to explain to children,
in terms of their own experience, that letters sometimes operate on their own,
and sometimes work in groups. They know that they are likely to behave
themselves most of the time, but not all the time. This is human. Letters are
human constructs, and similarly do not always behave as we might expect. Saying
that letters help us most of the time is accurate. Saying, or implying, that they
always tell us all we need to know is not. Simple qualifications such as this allow
us to teach initial phonics without setting up a false expectations. They enable
children who are already having difficulty with reading to adjust their thinking so
as to handle variations in spelling in the same way that they adapt to variations in
people. I have extensive case study evidence of the effectiveness of this approach
in reading and spelling, including a 16-year-old girl, assessed as dyslexic, for whom
it removed a writing block that was preventing her from expressing herself
properly in English. After two telephone lessons, this student’s English grades
improved to A* in English language and literature. I used this case as evidence for
my fellowship of the Chartered College of Teaching, and have many more.

While this paper is concerned with phonics, similar considerations apply to the
teaching of grammar. The principles of sentence construction can be explained
with a very few technical terms, and without the language of academic linguistics,
which is completely foreign to the experience of most children, and indeed most
teachers.

Conclusion.

Making phonics the basis of teaching initial reading, backed by the phonics check,
has improved provision and reduced the numbers of children unable to read.This is
the evidence on which current and previous government initiatives has been
based, and is summarised in Castles et Al (2018). Phonics, on the other hand, must
be presented in a way that is clear and understandable to children. Teaching
children to blend from left to right, as every intial scheme must, needs to be
accompanied by telling them, right from the start, that this works most of the
time, but not always. Children don’t behave perfectly all the time, and neither do
letters.

I have been making this point for almost thirty years – see Sue Palmer’s TES article
on teaching her daughter (1996), and Slimmed Down Spelling (2002), but it has
made no impression on either of the two opposing camps, which cling to their
respective views that phonics are the whole story, or next to useless. The outcome
of this conflict, which now spans a century and a half, is that learning to read is
more difficult than it should be, and for a significant minority of pupils almost
impossible. These pupils’ difficulties, whether or not they are assessed as dyslexia,
affect the whole of their school work, causing anxiety at best, truancy – why go to
school if you can’t learn – and, at worst, serious psychological and behavioural
problems.

The two TES articles (Palmer, 1996, Bald 2003), and material on my website,
www.johnbald.typepad.com, show how to make immediate and significant impact
on such problems by means of clear and simple explanation of the way the
alphabet operates in English, and the reasons for its variations. Doing this from the
beginning, teaching children that they should not expect the language to be
perfectly consistent, but should use its consistent features, while being ready for
them not to work all the time, would conserve the benefits of the phonics first
policy, and avoid some of the problems it has encountered.
Note. This paper was originally written for presentation to the UK Department for
Education, under the title: Technical Paper: Whole Phonics, or Phonics +
Knowledge and Understanding of Language?

A full version of this paper, with references to all source material, will appear in My College, the online journal of the Chartered College of Teaching.

Posted at 10:35 AM in Educational Policy | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 21, 2023

Simple Gifts, consolidated. Grammar, spelling and two case studies.

Simple Gifts. Part 1, Grammar.

"What can be said at all, can be said simply." Wittgenstein.

"'Tis the gift to be simple." Simple Gifts, Joseph Brackett.

Three key points.

Sentence. We organise written English in sentences so that readers can understand it from its printed form alone, without the personal touches and feedback that people exchange when they are talking. A sentence begins with a capital letter and ends with a full stop.

Verb. Verbs indicate an action, a feeling or state of mind, or a state of things. Most verbs "do" things, but not all. Some are composed of more than one word - I have done my homework. I am doing my homework. It is essential to take time to practise identifying verbs, particularly the verbs to be - am, are, is, was, were and to have, as they link words or ideas together, but do not "do" anything. It is possible to have a sentence without a verb (see the opening paragraphs of Dickens' Bleak House), but it is very unusual. Verbs are the most important words, and there is little or no hope of progress in understanding and using grammar if the learner does not recognise verbs and know how they are used.

Subject. Very nearly all sentences have a subject and verb. This is a tricky idea, as the subject of a sentence is not, as in everyday life, what it is about, but whoever or whatever is doing what the verb does (or feels, or is). Grasping the idea of subject is, for many, the most difficult single element of grammar, and one that needs to be revisited and practised.

It is important because a change in the subject, or even a repetition of it as we are writing, almost always requires us to insert link words or punctuation so that we do not run two sentences together by mistake. It often helps to point out that the subject usually comes immediately before the verb. Questions such as "whodunit?" or "what is it?" can also help identify it

Grammar on the Menu

1. Main. Most of us like eating out, and most meals have a main course. In grammar, a main course (or clause) has a subject and verb.

The dog barks.

subject verb.

We don't usually have two mains when we eat out - one parent told her daughter that "Daddy might, if he thought he could get away with it" - and we don't usually have two mains in a sentence. To avoid this as we write, we use a simple technique - when we repeat or change the subject, we add strong punctuation or a link word.

The dog barks and it chases the postman.

using a link word

The dog barks. It chases the postman.

using strong punctuation, in this case a full stop

Strong punctuation contains a dot - . ? ! : ; or a dash - . A comma is weak punctuation. It can be used to group, or phrase, words within a sentence, but not to end one. Knowing where to use strong punctuation or a link word is the most important single factor in writing an accurate sentence. It can be helpful to have learners think of a punctuation mark as the word it represents - this gives a better sense of its importance than the mark itself.

2. Main + dessert. Link words let us add something to the main, without creating confusion over what comes first or is more important.

The postman ran away because the dog was barking.

The bus can't get through if you park there

The postman wasn't scared, although the dog had barked at him.

Link words have different purposes, as we may wish to say different things, and these can be learned later. The most important point at this stage is to learn when they are needed.

3. Starter + main. (and the abominable "fronted adverbial".) We often insert a word or phrase before the subject of a sentence, in order to set the scene. Here are examples:

Today, I got up early.

Because I'm usually late, I'm going to go to bed early tonight.

If we use a starter word or phrase, we usually insert a comma to mark off the main clause. This is a bit like removing a starter plate before serving the main - we don't actually leave the table and start again. These starters can be single words, or phrases, and there can be more than one of them

Early one morning, just as the sun was rising, Two starter phrases

I heard a maiden singing in the valley below. Main

(Interlude) Because a starter word adds some information to the verb - usually telling us when something happened - traditional grammar called them adverbs. Because they could be in the form of a phrase rather than a word, professors of linguistics, aping real scientists, decided to shorten "adverb or adverbial phrase" into "adverbial", saving themselves time, and imposing a layer of confusion on the general public. Because an adverb often follows the verb

Arsenal won easily

Mill Reef won at a canter

they decided to call a starter a "fronted adverbial", as it was placed before the verb. Suits you, sir, but this sesquipedalian verbiage does not help a ten year old.

4. Starter + main + dessert. The starter plus main can be followed by a dessert using the rules above - that is, we insert strong punctuation or a link word after the main.

There are other ways of extending sentences, which can be added to the learner's personal repertoire as the teacher decides they are ready for them. We can, for example, add a aperitif through two starter phrases, or a coffee, if we don't mind paying the restaurant's markup. These, though, are the main principles of sentence construction, and the overriding one is that we can't have two mains in one sentence.

Time Zones. (draft)

When we speak, time is shared between ourselves and person or people we are talking to, and so is obvious. When we write, the other person is not there, and so we must make issues of time explicit. We do this by means of time zones, each of which gives us a range of options that we can use without moving out of it, and so losing track of time.

The main time zones are the present, the past and the future. As we don't know what will happen in the future, we tend not to stay there for long. As stories tell us what has already happened, they tend to be written in the past ("Rosie the hen went for a walk."). Much public discussion, including politics and news, comes to us as it happens, in the present.

The old French word for time was le tens. English added e, to give us the word tense. This broke the link with time in normal English usage, and linguistics has taken this further by limiting the word to occasions where it uses a different form, as in the above quotation from Rosie's Walk. Other European languages have kept the link with time - Les temps, Die Zeiten, Los tiempos. We need to restore it, as it is the link between grammar and human experience.

We have three main ways of indicating a time zone.

A word or phrase related to time. Once upon a time...
The form of a verb - Marley was dead, to begin with. (Dickens, A Christmas Carol)
Context. O'Dowd goes in command. (Thackeray, Vanity Fair.)

Once we are in a time zone, we can use different forms to indicate shades of meaning. These are the forms that have been given the name of tenses, but if they are simply forms, I suggest staying with that for the moment.

Present. Simple form I play the piano.

Continuous form I am playing the piano.

Past. Simple form I played the piano

Composed form I have had my breakfast.

Continuous form I was playing the piano

Double form I had played the piano

Future. Composed form I will play the piano later today.

Once we are in a time zone, we need to give our reader a signpost, usually a short phrase, if we move out of it. Remembering the zone we are in, and ways of moving out of it, is an important stage in developing control in writing, and takes practice. Roz Wilson's and Alan Peat's work on sentence construction can be very helpful in this. The main additional features of verbs, the passive voice and forms indicating a degree of uncertainty, can be introduced and explained as the need arises, which it certainly will in the course of writing. Traditional terminology here is only partly helpful. "Conditional" is ok, as "on condition that" can sometimes be substituted for "if". "Subjunctive" is an obscurity, and rarely used in English outside a command form - "Let it be".

The key point, at each stage, is to explain each form in a way that makes sense to the person learning, and then to have them practise.

Simple Gifts Part 2. Slimmed Down Spelling.

Part 1 of Simple Gifts shows how the essential features of English grammar can be taught in ways that children and adult learners find easy to understand. This second part, Slimmed Down Spelling, is the outcome of practical work with people learning to spell. I have been working on it since 1996, initially as a development from the approach to reading that appeard in The Literacy File.

Key points:

We use plain English. No technical terms are needed.

We understand and explain that English spelling, because of its history, is an example of fuzzy logic. The letters tell us broadly what we need to know, but not always precisely. The history of English spelling is set out in David Crystal's Spell It Out. This book should be required reading in all initial and in-service training.

The result of this fuzzy logic is that information from letters in English needs to be interpreted, for example to see the difference between should and shoulder. An area of the brain, described by Professors Blakemore and Frith in The Learning Brain as the "word form area" is activated in order to do this. It is not needed in highly regular languages such as Italian.

I have found that these two maxims help children and adults to learn to read and spell in a language based on fuzzy logic:

We use what the letters tell us, but we don't believe the letters tell us everything.

and

The language is a thousand years old. If we were a thousand years old, we'd have a few wrinkles.

The second point is based on the influx of French into English following the Norman conquest. I illustrate this by showing this excellent animation of the Bayeux tapestry, discussing the character of William I - children understand bullies - and saying the word table, slowly, in French, so that children can hear the l before the e. Many other words have the same origin, and spelling pattern.

Because of the large number of words in English, and the small number of letters in the alphabet, letters can't always represent one sound each, as in cat, hat etc. Sometimes they work in groups, sometimes words have an extra letter that changes the sound of another (in face, the e indicates a change from the most frequent sound indicated by a, and softens c). Most words in which this happens are also shared with French. Most words with an extra letter have only one. Sometimes the extra letter is a double letter, usually to act as a wall and keep a voice (vowel) sound short. The good news is that we don't have triple letters, other than in joke words such as Aaaaargh!

The outcome is that spelling can be explained in these four principles of Slimmed Down Spelling:

If we hear a sound when we say a word carefully - without taking any shortcuts - we need at least one letter for it. We use a letter to represent a sound because we hear it. This covers roughly three-quarters of spelling.
Sometimes letters work in groups –eg, station has one sound per letter for the first three letters then the group tion. We use a group when we’ve learned we need it – this way, we don’t guess at what group we might need.
Some words have an extra letter, eg made, chaos. We use an extra letter when we’ve learned we need it. Sometimes there is a function for the extra letter – eg plague where the u stops the e from softening the g, as it would in page.
Sometimes, because of shortcuts in speech, or changes in the way people speak, the letter we need is not the one we think we need. These letters are awkward, and we only use them when we’ve learned we need them. The easiest example is probably was rather than woz. This is Germanic, and wa is found in a range of shared words with German, including warm and Wasser (Water), both of which, in German, have the normal short sound of a. Once again, we use an awkward letter only when we’ve learned we need it.

Once we’ve learned to spell a word – and we never copy – we find at least one other that is like it. This helps us build up our understanding of patterns, and is especially useful to people who do not find learning to spell straightforward.

It usually takes children and adults six weeks to three months to learn to apply these principles. They work. But they are designed to teach people to spell and not to promote a political agenda. Slimmed Down Spelling was originally published in The Times Educational Supplement, and there is more detailed discussion of word patterns in my book, Using Phonics to Teach Reading and Spelling. It works.

Simple Gifts, Part 3. Brief case notes from two pupils.

"Do you still think you have a reading problem?" No.

"Do you still think you're dyslexic?" No.

Six weeks and four lessons earlier, the answers would have been different. Sheila, as we will call her, is 14, and attends an English school in Spain. Until our first lesson, her reading had been hesitant and inaccurate, and she didn't enjoy it. She had never been able to learn multiplication tables, despite assistance from a highly-qualified family member. Sheila had been assessed as dyslexic by a British educational psychologist, and the examinations clock had begun to tick.

How Sheila, and her younger schoolmate Rachel, turned this situation round in a short time provides some insights into the particular issues of learning to read in English, as well as the outdated and unreliable techniques used to assess people who don't find it straightforward as "dyslexic".

Sheila was reading the David Walliams novel "Mr Stink," and had reached Chapter 6. Reading it to me, she soon met words in which the letters did not indicate their most frequent sounds - giant, pulled, emblazoned, jewel-encrusted - and which she could not work out using the regular sound to letter correspondence that worked for her in Spanish. I explained to her why we could not always rely on what letters told us to read every word, and that, as has been known for almost twenty years, there is an area of the brain that interprets the information from letters in English, so that we can distinguish "please" from "bread", and "should" from "shoulder".

Put simply, in order to read fluently in English, we need not only to use the information contained in the letters, but to know what they are actually indicating in each word. Children can be helped to learn to blend information from letters in the early stages of reading by giving them highly regular texts, but this is of no value to a fourteen year old who has to handle the full range of the language in her school work.

The operation of letters in English is based on four main functions. Around two-thirds of the time, a letter indicates its most frequent sound - cat, hat, rat, etc. Sometimes, a letter gives us information about another letter, changing its most frequent sound. In "giant", the i has a softening effect on the g - this happens a lot of the time but not always, as in "girl" and "get". Sometimes, because we have only 26 letters and over half a million words, letters work in groups. "Station", for example, has a sound for each letter, then the group "tion". Finally, we have variations in pronunciation for historical reasons, beginning with the Norman conquest, which flooded English with French for around 200 years.

The consolation - that reversing the process makes it relatively easy to learn French - comes later. The immediate task is to explain why things as they are and to engage the area of the brain, described by Professors Blakemore and Firth (The Learning Brain, 2005) as the "word form area" that enables them to interpret the full range of information conveyed by letters, and so read whatever text they have before them. My technique is to treat the text as if it were a new piece of music, perhaps with some unfamiliar flats and sharps, and not to expect perfect reading at sight first time round. Instead, each new pattern is explained by moving to another word with the same pattern, discussing it, adding more examples, and inserting the word that has caused the problem once the pupil is confident with it. Once the pattern behind the error is secure in the child's mind, we return to the text and read it again, as with a piece of music that has been practised. The whole process builds and reinforces the key skill of blending the information contained in the letters to build up words by giving intensive and constructive practice with each individual example.

The government, in the National Curriculum, has come very close to endorsing an extreme form of phonics, in which the whole of language is reduced to "phoneme" (sound) and "grapheme" (letter or group of letters) correspondence, with no explanation of the other factors in reading, including phrasing and the development of spelling outlined by David Crystal in Spell It Out. The one thing that has prevented this is that the glossary of terminology is "non-statutory" - ie, there is no obligation to use it in teaching, provided the material is taught. The terminology, like that of grammar, is included in the Key Stage 2 tests, but can be added as an extra after the material is taught, at which point it is much less likely to do damage.

To return to the two cases. Sheila, after six lessons, had read the whole of Mr Stink, and found it progressively easier. She read to me a science test she had just taken, with perfect understanding an no errors. As a teenager rather than a saint, she had not practised tables, but could say 2,3 and 4x with only one error, which was encouraging as she had previously not got beyond 2x2 without hesitation and error. Sheila could also apply the principles of Slimmed Down Spelling to spell chaos, infatuation and chaotic. Rachel, who had chosen The Vet Fairy, had to work very hard to read even the first few words in her first lesson, but in the second, on Monday, was brimming with confidence and managed a paragraph with full understanding. Her parents' comment - "It was amazing to see the way you work...you've given us hope."

Posted at 05:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 09, 2023

Ofsted - 1. The Road To Caversham. 2. The Beginning of the End for Sir David Bell's model of inspection.

1. The road to Caversham.

To understand the tragic and avoidable death of Ruth Perry, headteacher of Caversham Primary School, we need to trace the history of school inspection in England and Wales, and the way it has changed in response to political pressures.

Inspection began in the first year of Queen Victoria’s reign, with two inspectors appointed to oversee a government grant to schools. There was little controversy over education at the time, and Dickens had yet to expose the ignorance and cruelty of Gradgrind and Mr M’Choakumchild. Later in the Victorian era, the first of three great inspectors, Matthew Arnold, had the idea of putting himself in the teacher’s place, introducing a human touch to inspection that encompassed all factors, and became the hallmark of Her Majesty’s Inspectors. HMI was appointed by Order in Council, and became a “non-ministerial government department”. Parliamentary questions about inspection are answered by the Chief Inspector, not a Minister.

Shortly before World War Two, the London County Council became the first local authority (LA) to set up its own inspection service. Unlike HMI, this was under direct political control, and over time became an instrument of policy and a lever of power. In the 1960s, Anthony Crosland gave all LAs power to appoint inspectors, who became enforcers of progressive education, and ruled the roost, often in opposition to central government policy. HMI was shut out.

As one LA inspector put it:

“Who the hell takes any notice of them?”

John Major’s remedy was an independent inspectorate, Ofsted, rushed into law before the 1992 election. Controlled by HMI, it was headed by Stewart Sutherland, a professor of religious philosophy, who was rightly seen as an honest broker. Sutherland consulted HMI, and collated everything they did on inspection into an enormous handbook. To monitor its use by newly-trained inspectors, a scoring system was set up for each section, requiring inspectors to make around 1000 scored judgements during their visit. Before this, HMI had never used scores at all, but relied on clarity and good writing, an approach that reached a height under the second of our three great inspectors, Sheila Browne.

Scoring soon became the tail that wagged the dog. Inspectors who saw poor teaching would be asked by the lead inspector if they intended to fail the school, as more than ten per cent of unsatisfactory judgements would trigger that judgement. Honest Stewart Sutherland left to run Edinburgh University, to be replaced by Chris Woodhead. This was an overtly political appointment, setting a precedent that made it easy for Labour to appoint Sir David Bell, who had attended Blair’s victory party after the 1997 election.

Bell threw away the HMI insistence on evidence-based judgements, slashed the time inspectors spent in schools, removed their independence by issuing all reports under his own name, and appointed a new generation of HMI, mostly middle managers who would do as they were told. The grades of “excellent“– so good that we could all learn from it – and “very good”, multiplying the proportion of schools in the top grade by 5 – while judgements that schools were failing to provide satisfactory education, often because of staff shortages that embarrassed the government, began to be overturned. Subjects were no longer inspected and formulaic judgements became the norm. One school was failed on attendance for keeping two pupils with cancer on its roll, although they were no longer able to attend regularly. Retaining them as part of the community was less important than applying the rules.

I had hoped that David Cameron’s government would reverse these changes, but provision was cut further, leaving many schools and colleges uninspected for over a decade. Where weaknesses are self-evident, the system worked. Where there was a need to corroborate evidence, as in, say, one playground incident, it didn’t.

Legisilation requires HMCI to have regard to such aspects of government policy as the Secretary of State may direct. These directives are not published and may not even be written down. One consequence, developed under Labour, is the “limiting judgement” in which failure in one area overrides everything else. This is what happened at Caversham. A failure in paperwork on child protection – teachers knew what to do, but did not write everything down, and there were unspecified lapses in DBS checks. This led to safeguarding being graded inadequate, and triggered a chain reaction. Despite its other strengths, leadership and management were also declared inadequate, and, so in turn was the school, despite a report that was often glowing in other respects.

This is disproportionate. This evidence of the report shows this to be a good school, and well led and managed. The children were not actually in danger – there were just some lapses in paperwork. It was also unnecessary. I do not believe that HMCI was legally required to make this judgement – having regard to a policy is not an instruction to enforce it come what may. The use of discretion would probably have fixed the issue before the inspectors left, and the necessary changes were in place before the report was issued. But no, the sledgehammer did its work. The chain reaction ended a life and nearly finished another headteacher’s career when she threatened to refuse an inspection. The limiting judgement is the greatest weakness in an inspection framework that is not fit for purpose. It should be dropped, and inspection returned to the HMI standard established and refined by Sir Michael Tomlinson – our third great HMI, and still with us. It would be good to see him involved the appointment of Amanda Spielman’s successor.

2. The Beginning of the End for Sir David Bell's model of inspection.

It often takes a single case to concentrate public attention on a greater wrong. So it was with Peter Connelly, Stephen Lawrence – and Frederick White who died after a military flogging in 1846. White’s case, the beginning of the end for flogging, came to light when an alert coroner (Thomas Wakely, founder of The Lancet) refused to accept the Army’s cover-up. For cover-up in our present context, read confidentiality.

Ruth Perry’s case must be the beginning of the end for Sir David Bell’s Ofsted model, which began in 2005 and has changed little. Bell was a New Labour place-man, who attended Blair’s victory celebration in 1997. His task was to make inspection part of Blair’s attempt to mould society, and was made easier by the precedent of Sir Chris Woodhead, another blatantly political appointment. Neither had much experience of inspection and both overrode a century and a half of HMI experience in pursuit of a political agenda.

Woodhead’s impulses were kept in check by his deputy, Sir Michael Tomlinson, but there was no such check on Bell, who took control over everything “done in my name”. Labour had been advised by Professor John White, of the London Institute of Education (where else?) that the only subject that mattered was citizenship. So, subjects, even English and maths, were not inspected at all, Labour’s “Every Child Matters” took pride of place, and inspection time was cut to a day, or a day and a half for a large school, with feedback given after lunch. Ofsted’s remit was extended to bring all areas of education and care into the grand plan, and individual childminders inspected to the same level as schools.

All of this spread resources so thinly that nothing could be done properly. To save money, new HMI were recruited from middle managers, who would do as they were told, and salaries frozen, so that an HMI was paid less than a deputy headteacher. Any inspector was empowered to inspect anything, whether or not they knew the first thing about it. Much inspection work was shifted onto the schools themselves, with neither training nor resources. So headteachers were empowered to observe their colleagues, with the power of immediate sanction under the guise of competency proceedings, and no appeal. Some exceptional headteachers could handle this. Most could not. As one leading figure in the new regime put it to me, “We haven’t got enough good people.”

The crunch came with Ed Balls’ heavy-footed system of child protection, which shifted responsibility for excluding unsuitable people from the DfE to heads, who were then punished severely, through the “limiting judgement” for the small errors that inevitably arose. Ruth Perry’s family told The Guardian that she was told the school would be rated inadequate on the first day of the inspection. If this is true – and the inspector was not just indicating an area of concern – it belies Sir Michael Wilshaw’s statement on Radio 4 that inspectors would make a balanced judgement. The overall judgement of the report is unbalanced to the point of distortion, and seriously misleading.

Amanda Spielman admitted many of Ofsted’s weaknesses at this year’s Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) conference, but added that no-one was “beating our door down” for a return to week-long inspections. True enough, and Ruth Perry is unfortunately not the first person to have taken their own life as a result of an inspection. But the solution has been hiding in plain sight. Tomlinson designed a short format as chief inspector, and it was working well until Labour forced him into retirement at 60 to make way for Bell.

Tomlinson’s short inspections typically lasted two days, and inspectors were banned from asking for extra paperwork, though this was not always enforced. Inspectors prepared in the same way as for a full inspection, and the school could nominate areas for the team to consider. Short inspections were only used where a school was not an obvious cause for concern. Any serious issue that arose would trigger further investigation by HMI, so that a school could not fail on inadequate and uncorroborated evidence.

It is quite clear that, while inspection must continue in the interests of children, the present format must not. One headteacher’s anonymised account of an overbearing and unfair inspection last week was followed by the resignation of another as an inspector, clearly concerned that Ofsted had taken a turn for the worse. Both articles are well worth reading.

In the first, an inspector had ordered the head to fix one of her records “by midday”, only to be shown that there was nothing wrong with it, then began to ask searching questions about female genital mutilation, which, once again, the school was handling appropriately. Education did not seem to be of great concern.

In the second, Andy Webster, headteacher of Park View School, Tottenham, talks about a toxic atmosphere, with inexperienced inspectors throwing their weight about in a way that closely matches both the other headteacher’s, and Ruth Perry’s family’s, account.

So far, while Ofsted has expressed regret, it has not admitted that change is a matter of urgency. I said last week that it should remove the concept of a limiting judgement. It should also accept ASCL’s suggestion that safeguarding should no longer be part of a school inspection, a move that would allow inspectors to focus on education, which is the overwhelming concern of headteachers. It should also remove the link between inspection and the government policy of forced academisation, as bad an example of weaponised inspection as Bell’s was in the first place, and an incentive to dishonesty.

Although she began with scant experience of inspection, Amanda Spielman has shown more understanding of the work than anyone since Tomlinson, and has begun to improve matters by appointing good subject specialist HMI, and restoring an element of proper inspection in her “deep dives,” which many teachers appreciate. She now needs to get rid of the sledgehammer – and enforce this – and to restore to inspection reports the good clear English of her other two great predecessors, Matthew Arnold and Sheila Browne.

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Ofsted - the beginning of the end for Sir David Bell's Inspection Model?

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April 08, 2023

The decline of reading teaching for pupils with SEND, or who learn more slowly than others, needs to be reversed.

“You become a teacher,” said the kindly deputy head to a younger me, “to change the world.” I hadn’t. I had become a teacher in order to teach people to read, which I saw, then as now, as a basic human right. So I was disappointed, though not entirely surprised, when the Government’s Action Plan to tackle the disastrous, miserable and ruinous situation that has developed in the provision for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) said nothing whatsoever about ensuring that everyone who can learn to read, does so. The omission reflects a deep-rooted division, amounting to a schism, over the purposes of education that has set academic activists and local authorities against central governments of both parties, and the views of most parents, throughout my 50 years in the state system.

The story begins with the Warnock Report of 1978, the principles of which were made law by the 1981 Education Act. Baroness Warnock’s experience of education was at the other end of the spectrum, as headteacher of Oxford High School for Girls, and she had great confidence in the ability of philosophy, “Queen of Disciplines”, to solve problems. Her committee’s solution was simple. Children whose difficulties were “significantly greater” than those of most children of their age should have a formal Statement of these, and provision to meet them, prepared by local authorities (LAs). Simple? The one LA that tried to do this, Cumbria, quickly ran out of money and sacked its Chief Education Officer for implementing an Act of Parliament.

Warnock and her colleagues had set LAs a task they were not equipped to carry out, and written a blank cheque for someone else to sign. The signature was not forthcoming. Most Statements were replaced by staged assessments in schools, and individual education plans written by special educational needs coordinators (SENCOs), whose work moved from specialised teaching of reading to completing dozens, or even hundreds, of paper plans for less skilled teachers and assistants to carry out. LAs’ interpretation of Warnock reinforced this trend by requiring support to be provided in mixed-ability classes, whether or not the children were learning anything as a result. Many special schools were closed. Failure to attend to the children’s intellectual needs became endemic. On inspection, a colleague saw a deaf child in distress for a whole afternoon when she did not understand anything that was going on, and I observed a child with Down Syndrome being spoken to in English in a French class by a teaching assistant and distracting all of the other children. The child had no idea of what French, or indeed France, was.

The Lib Dem minister, Sarah Teather, extended the utopian principle to include health and support for young adults. Alas, LAs could no more produce good Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) than they could Statements, and the result was even more formulaic paperwork that left parents and schools in the impossible position described in the government’s SEND Review. Minister Teather renamed SENCOs as SENDCOs. She achieved nothing else. The inclusion principle that followed Warnock left teachers stressed out, at times to the point of mental breakdown or leaving teaching, by having to cope with extreme behaviour while teaching a class, denied children the closely-focused teaching they need if they are to make progress, and drove parents to distraction and litigation in their attempts to get some kind of education for their children. The Review notes that over half have had to give up their jobs in order to do so.

The Action Plan, the result of several years’ hard work and genuine (for once) consultation, is pragmatic, and takes important steps forward. The first is “integrated provision” – specialised, school-based units that allow children, whose behaviour prevents learning, to be removed from the classroom to a place where they can no longer harm others, and can be taught. Next, off-site provision, badly run down since Warnock, is to be extended. The preferred system of special MATs rather than LAs will prevent local ideologues from determining policy, as will a national qualification for SENDCOs, though it is not clear where the expertise to run either is going to come from. Funding helps, but improvement will take time.

Which brings us back to that long-ago conversation with the deputy head of the often-rebadged Beaufoy School in Lambeth, and the teaching of reading. A child who can’t read knows that they can’t achieve success and satisfaction in most of their school work, and this is a major, unrecognised, cause of frustration, misbehaviour, and bullying of other pupils and of teachers, which gives an alternative feeling of success. As one pupil put it in the BBC series Tough Young Teachers, “It’s about the power of winning.” The conveyer belt to prison begins with failure to learn to read, via truancy – why go to school if you can’t learn anything? – and crime. I told this to Labour’s Jack Straw in the early 90s, and the drugs trade makes it still more true today.

Yet the prevalent view of teacher trainers and academic activists is the comment of Professor Becky Francis that grouping children according to their learning needs and abilities is “symbolically violent”. This reflects an unsupported remark by the Warnock Committee that children learn as much incidentally as from teaching. What they will not learn in this way is how to read, write and carry out the basic mathematical activities that are essential to modern life. The truth is that the teaching of reading has been sacrificed to this goal of inclusion throughout the educational establishment, so that there is almost no expertise in teacher training, professional and voluntary organisations, the DfE, the EEF, or anywhere else on the teaching of reading to children for whom it is not a straightforward process.

Phonics are fundamental, but enabling these children to move beyond associating one letter to each sound – essential, as some letter patterns in English are based on the sounds of other languages – requires closely-focused, bespoke teaching that has almost disappeared. A child who can’t read knows better than anyone else that they can’t achieve success and satisfaction in most of their school work, and this is a major, unrecognised, cause of the extreme behaviour that is making teachers’ lives a misery. This paper that I’ve submitted to the DfE and the Chartered College of Teaching, offers one effective way of tackling the problem.

Posted at 08:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 15, 2022

A level German, supplementary sessions. End of term report.

These pro bono - ie, free - supplementary sessions have run fortnightly on Saturday mornings from 9.30 to 10.30 during the term. It has been an interesting experience. Students who have attended have found the sessions useful – in some cases very useful – but have tended to dip in and out of them, usually because of other commitments, but sometimes because of connection problems. I have also been less than perfect in recording and posting sessions online. I can only apologise for that – I tend to get so absorbed in the teaching that I forget to press buttons.

Some students are not getting enough teaching hours at A level - two are having to get by on an hour a week! I'll add that current GCSE is not preparing students for A level. This is, of course, not the teachers' fault, and I hope - we'll see - that the reformed GCSE content will improve matters. If I were moving higher-attaining students on to A level, I'd want to try to provide supplementary teaching, esp on grammar, immediately after GCSE and before the end of the summer term. Otherwise, much of Y12 is spent doing what those of us old enough to remember, did at O-level.

The following points have emerged

· Students are not confident in their use of the case system. Dative is the prime candidate, but some need to practise the accusative. This may reflect the fact that German tends to start a year later than French in many schools, giving students less time to adjust their thinking. Students have appreciated the opportunity to discuss these issues, think them through and practise constructing sentences.

· Deepl is a very useful tool. It gives an immediate, and generally accurate, indication of the way that something would be said in German. Students can then build sentences with similar constructions. I advise them, whenever they say something in English, to think how they would say it in German and and check to see what Deepl would say, without taking the Deepl version as gospel. Going to Germany in one’s mind every day helps reinforce new neural networks.

· Deutsche Welle’s slow news site is extremely useful. The pace can be varied to suit the student, and each item can be used with or without a transcript. Anything not understood can be cut-and-pasted into Deepl, saving much of the time that I used to spend with my thumb in a dictionary in my first year of A-level French.

· Students enjoy the light relief from songs in German and Internet sites such as Jetzt geht’s um die Wurst and MFL clips with subtitles.

· 8x5 cards are an extremely useful way of making and storing notes. The card is big enough to contain a useful amount of information and examples, but small enough to slip into a book to be glanced at in spare moments. The cards make it easy to organise notes in all subjects, especially if the student has a card index box. I was recommended them by a history lecturer at University, and have used them extensively ever since.

· The award-winning Herr Gröttrup Setzt Sich Hin, by Sharon Dodua Ottoo, is an excellent resource for Year 12. It is presented in short sections, with two parallel translations on each page, and is free at this link. Some students have downloaded it and found it very useful for practice. A student on Saturday, for example, found it interesting to spot datives in the first paragraph. https://stillmagazine.org/.../STILL_Herr-Gro%CC%88ttrup... This is, incidentally, the full version of the story and not a sample. Sharon is a visiting Fellow of Jesus College, and there is more of her work on Youtube. Thanks to Professor Sarah Colvin for introducing me to it.

Sessions will resume on January 14 at 9.30. New and returning students are welcome. In the past I’ve often been asked for help around January of Year 13. It’s obviously much better to start earlier than that. The existing link will work, but please DM if you’d like to join or don’t have it to hand.

Posted at 06:41 AM in German | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 19, 2022

National Languages Conference 2022. Introduction to panel comments, extended version.

This is a more detailed version of my introductory remarks to the panel presetation, 19t Oct 2022.

Download National Languages Conference 2022

Posted at 06:22 AM in Brain research, Consultancy Services, Languages | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 10, 2022

Supplementary school, German A-level. Recordings.

Each session will be recorded, and made available here. Links to the live sessions will be provided to teachers on receipt of an email address by message.

Session 1 Download Video1947570114

Session 2. Download Video1265047629

Session 3 Ver - Zer and German wordbuilding. Download A Level German 3 ver zer

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August 30, 2022

Pathological Demand Avoidance - cause and effect?

“Would you like some help?” “Yes.” This was the first surprise. Alice is almost ten, and her mother was convinced that she would not interact with me at all, as she was refusing to go to school, or to do anything connected with schoolwork. Such cases are rare, but increasingly frequent, reflected in an OBE this summer for Paula Webb, a Trustee of the Pathological Demand Avoidance Society. The Society sees PDA as a form of autism, but autism is so widely defined as to tell us little or nothing about its causes. The cases I’ve seen have all been affected, and sometime clearly caused, by inability to complete schoolwork and the certainty of facing this situation day after day, with no relief and no hope.

Using Zoom, with the promise of ice cream if she spoke to me, Alice asked for help with maths. As I had not met a 10-year-old who did not know 2×2 I asked her that. She immediately started to work it out using her fingers. “Look at my fingers,” I said, and put up two lots of two fingers. “Four.” “Good,” I said, and changed the subject to what she felt about school. When I was quite sure that 2×2 was no longer in her mind, I flashback to the question again, and receive the correct reply. We proceeded, slowly and carefully, to work in the first half of the 2× table. Alice then showed me the book she had been reading, but would not read it to me, turning her head away when I asked. I said I would order a copy and we might talk about it next time. I asked if I’d earned some ice cream too? Alice agreed, and said she was happy to see me again. The session had lasted around 20 minutes.

I’ve gone into this level of detail for two reasons. First, Alice’s mother was astonished that she had been prepared to do anything with me at all. Second, the reason that she had was that I had adopted a friendly tone, and found a step forward from her initial understanding that she had been able to take. I recommended it with confidence to anyone looking to wean a child off counting on their fingers. But how does a child of 10, who does not have severe general learning difficulties – when she did read to me in a later session, her reading was well up to the standard expected for her age – come to be counting on her fingers? Part of the answer is that schools still teach children to count in multiples rather than to learn tables, reflecting official advice. Asked to pick out an item from a table, they often go back to the beginning and count up on their fingers, a catastrophic practice that hinders learning in mathematics right up to GCSE. Most of the FE students who have to retake GCSE maths do not know their tables, and 16 is not a good age to have to learn them.

On one of the occasions on which she did attend school, Alice had a visit from an educational psychologist. The psychologist described her behaviour as “interesting”, but their report did not mention her difficulties with mathematics at all, an astonishing omission, as Alice’s understanding of maths was barely at the level expected of a child starting school. It also makes no mention of headaches. Alice had been complaining of headaches since starting school. A visit to an optician had found no ophthalmic problems. There had been no treatment, and no relief from the headaches. However, Alice had not had headaches during holidays when absent from school.

This suggested that sensitivity to the fluorescent light that was used in school, but not at home, might be an issue. On the British Institute of Optometry’s screening kit, which uses a range of coloured filters to test for sensitivity to light, Alice found some benefit from a range of colours, with a strong reference for a blue filter. Screening kit costs around £60, and takes minutes to administer. Why did nobody think to use it? Professors Arnold Wilkins and Bruce Evans, respectively Of Essex and City universities, have carried out research on this issue for over 30 years, and I have found it a factor in roughly half of the PDA cases I have met. In one case, screening led to a full assessment by Specsavers, which resulted in immediate referral to hospital and a diagnosis of hydrocephalus.

Alice had, predictably, a minimal score on the government’s test of multiplication tables. Again, this should have been a call to action, but also reveals a weakness with the test. It is presented on a screen, and pupils are required to respond immediately, with no time to think. Perfect scores are reported, but other than that, the test provides no evidence of what the pupil does and doesn’t know. The test needs to be refined to give a clear indication of the gaps in pupils’ knowledge, and to give credit for what they do know as well as simply indicating that some are not perfect. Progressive mathematics teachers shun the careful teaching of multiplication tables, often substituting counting in multiples, which effectively prevents children from using tables in calculations and algebra. Their influence is pernicious, and a more subtle and effective form of assessment is essential if it is to be effectively countered.

There are similar problems with Rishi Sunak’s proposal of compulsory A-level maths for 16-year-olds. Well over half of these students are not operating at the standard previously expected of O-level maths, and most of the weakest have not mastered basic arithmetic. Hegarty Maths, which starts where students are, and is the basis of Michaela’s stunning maths results is a more practical proposition, with a proven track record.

Alice’s case is a perfect illustration of the broken system identified in the Government’s Special Educational Needs review. She has presented both the school and her family with problems they are not in a position to handle, and the local authority’s assessment has not even sought to identify and assess the underlying issues. PDA is a term many people will not even have heard of, but it wrecks lives and is costing billions. Cases like Alice’s show an urgent need for sustained and disciplined research.

Posted at 07:35 AM in Autistic Spectrum., Educational Policy | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 26, 2022

GCSE to A-level transition in languages: introduction and free supplementary Saturday schools, 2022 to 2023.

This video is intended to help students with the transition from GCSE to A-level, particularly in French and German. It will be followed by supplementary schools on Saturday morning, alternating between French and German, beginning with German on Saturday, 3 September, 9.32 11 AM. The supplementary schools will deal with any issues raised by students or other teachers, and teachers are invited to contribute. It will include a session by George Caisley on his experience of working in Germany and for a German company. Please contact me if you need further details.

Download A level videocast 2022

Posted at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

July 14, 2022

Technical Paper: Whole Phonics, or Phonics + Knowledge and Understanding of Language?

Whole Phonics, or Phonics + Knowledge and Understanding of Language?

Summary.

Phonics are the basis of reading, and of learning to read, in English.

Letter-sound correspondence is less consistent in English than in other European languages.

A specialised area of the brain enables us to adapt to these inconsistencies.

Phonics and its variations can, and should, be explained in language familiar to children.

“Whole phonics” makes learning to read difficult, and is not supported by research evidence.

Historical background: alphabetic writing systems and the challenge to phonics.

The use of the Latin alphabet in English is, however, complicated by our history. In the 300 years following the Norman Conquest, English was flooded with French. This has continued over centuries, the computerisation of the Collins-Robert French-English dictionary showed that around thirty per cent of English words, many of them very common - table, fruit, garage, centre - are either identical to French or very nearly so, though their pronunciation is different. These words are phonically regular in French, but not in English. I discussed the issue with the Finnish ambassador at a conference last October. He asked me if I thought English would be regular, as Finnish is, without the Norman Conquest. An excellent question. David Crystal has shown that old English writing has a high degree of phonic regularity, but there are also influences from Northern European languages, in words like answer, that show that English spelling is a hybrid. The thread of sound-symbol correspondence runs through it, but with significant variations.

Handling this has dogged the teaching of reading and spelling since the late nineteenth century. Earlier practice had been simply to present the material without explanation and have children learn it by heart, with rewards for successful memorisation and punishment for failure. An early protest against this approach was appropriately titled, “The Futility of the Spelling Grind” (Rice, 1908). In the 1920s, whole word recognition approaches emerged, with the idea that children might learn to read through its shape – eg, in French, écureuil, squirrel, has an unusual shape and could be supported by a picture. Whole word approaches, supported by flash cards, became widespread in the fifties, notably, in the UK, with Ladybird Key Words and the Janet and John series. The most recent challenge to phonics has come from “psycholinguistic” theories, which presented reading as a “guessing game,” in which readers made predictions based on light sampling of text, rather than paying attention to each word. Variations on these are “multicue” and “Searchlights” theories, in which children are encouraged to guess at words from “cues” in context and pictures.

These theories were shown to be erroneous by research, beginning with Schatz and Baldwin’s demonstration that context clues did not help accurate word identification, continuing with the Clackmannanshire research that proved the benefits of early phonics, and perhaps culminating in the 2018 paper by Castles and colleagues, showing the importance of early phonics in establishing the “alphabetic principle” - that we read by using the information contained in letters, and not by guessing.

A final, important, point is an observation by Ruth Miskin that around half of all children are likely to learn to read, whatever approach is taken. My experience supports this view, and research (notably, but not only, Clay, Observing Young Readers, 1965).has shown that some children who read early see patterns for themselves with minimal support, and quickly learn to spot and correct their own errors. Others require much more explicit instruction before they can do this.

Initial Phonics and Whole phonics.

Initial phonics teaches children to blend the sounds of individual letters from left to right in order to read words. This is essential, and the Ditties in Read Write Inc (Miskin) provide an excellent introduction, as their construction ensures that the approach works with them all the time. Problems begin when it doesn’t work – eg, that t no longer represents the sound t, as in top, when followed by h, or table, where the last two letters represent the order of sounds in French, rather than English. We also have around 25 voice (vowel) sounds in English, and only seven letters – aeiou, y (an alternative to i, known as “Greek i” in European languages) and w, which can operate as a companion vowel. Whole phonics lists the alternative ways of representing a sound – eg sum, come – and expects the child to learn these.

This approach is cumbersome and confusing. A child approaching an unknown word does not know which variation or combination applies. They can’t use what the teacher has taught them – blending from left to right – because it won’t produce a word unless they pick the right variation or combination. They don’t know what this is unless they’ve already learned the word. Home and come – words children will hear every day - use the same combination. Only by learning which applies can the child learn the word, or they are in two minds, and hence lost. This diagram shows the “wordform” area of the brain, dedicated to interpreting the information contained in letters as we read.

In hat her in

To understand the information contained in letters when reading in English, we must know how they are used in English. This requires knowledge of language, as well as – not instead of - phonics.

Explaining English spelling and grammar without jargon.

There is very wide variation in the language knowledge and experience of children starting school. Some can handle new technical vocabulary, such as grapheme, phoneme, correspondence, with little difficulty, while others have almost no spoken language at all. All need to learn to read. It is easy to explain to children, in terms of their own experience, that letters sometimes operate on their own, and sometimes work in groups. They know that they are likely to behave themselves most of the time, but not all the time. This is human. Letters are human constructs, and similarly do not always behave as we might expect. Saying that letters help us most of the time is accurate. Saying, or implying, that they always tell us all we need to know is not. Simple qualifications such as this allow us to teach initial phonics without setting up a false expectations. They enable children who are already having difficulty with reading to adjust their thinking so as to handle variations in spelling in the same way that they adapt to variations in people. I have extensive case study evidence of the effectiveness of this approach in reading and spelling, including a 16 year old girl, assessed as dyslexic, for whom it removed a writing block that was preventing her from expressing herself properly in English. After two telephone lessons, this a student’s English grades improved to A* in English language and literature. I used this case as evidence for my fellowship of the Chartered College of Teaching, and have many more.

While this paper is concerned with phonics, similar considerations apply to the teaching of grammar. The principles of sentence construction can be explained with a very few technical terms, and without the language of academic linguistics, which is completely foreign to the experience of most children, and indeed most teachers.

Conclusion.

Making phonics the basis of teaching initial reading, backed by the phonics check, has improved provision and reduced the numbers of children unable to read. Phonics, on the other hand, must be presented in a way that is clear and understandable to children. The present system is not clear to all, leaving a significant minority of pupils with serious reading problems that affect the whole of their school work. As reading is so important, this leads to anxiety at best, and at worst to serious psychological and behavioural problems. I note the award of an OBE to the founder of the Pathological Demand Avoidance Society in the Birthday Honours, and have known several cases in which failure to understand reading instruction has led to children to give up, and to adopt a hostile attitude to school and to their parents. I am often able to make an immediate and significant impact on such problems by means of clear and simple explanation of the way the alphabet we operate in English, and the reasons for its variations. This is the reason for the referral by my MP, Lucy Frazer, to the Department. A more flexible approach, indicating from the beginning that children should not expect the language to be perfectly consistent, but should use its consistent features of being ready for them not to work all the time, would conserve the benefits of the phonics first policy, and avoid some of the problems it has encountered.

Posted at 06:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 13, 2022

Conservative Ideology and Education: a critique.

Ideology imposes itself on reality and does damage. Labour has plenty. Here is my take on Conservative ideology, first published in Conservative Home.

The Conservative Education Society has a relatively small, but very experienced, membership. We meet in a Lords committee room, and on Monday last week were addressed by Will Quince MP, Children’s Minister, who had been hung out to dry by Boris Johnson on Monday morning’s media round. The Society observes Chatham House rules, so I cannot report what he said, but it was by some way the best informed, most practical and dynamic presentation I have ever heard from an education Minister. The contrast with some of Michael Gove’s successors as a Secretary of State, who have known nothing at all about education, and made their professional supporters cringe with embarrassment, could not have been greater.

This made Quince’s principled resignation the next morning more of a shock and more of a loss. Provision for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is a mess, and the government review, of which he had the final cut, pulled no punches. Two examples of nine year olds from my own work with parents – one assessed as having a mental illness related to demand avoidance who has a year’s wait to see a psychiatrist, and another experiencing severe anxiety and refusing to attend school, despite her parents’ sustained efforts, whose absences are marked as unauthorised, and whose parents are threatened with prosecution.

SEND is by no means the only mess, or even the biggest one. We rightly criticise our opponents for basing policies on ideology, but we have some of our own, and it is doing damage. When Katharine Birbalsingh stood up and told the truth about London schools in 2010 I stood up and cheered – in my living room – and my admiration has grown over the years. Here was opportunity, an alternative to the dead hand of local authorities and what Michael Gove accurately described as “the soft tyranny of low expectations.” Alas, through the influence of Dominic Cummings, some schools were placed in the hands of incompetents, and the academy trust system that replaced them has many of the vices of local authorities, with an added whiff of corruption. It is also extremely expensive. To pay for it, while meeting George Osborne’s requirement of cuts in overall expenditure, provision in further education and in sixth forms was slashed, denying opportunities to pupils whose parents could not afford private education.

The policy of making every school an academy, and now part of a Multi-Academy Trust, was conceived before the 2010 election, but only admitted publicly some years later. It culminated in Nadhim Zahawi’s ill-fated Schools Bill, one of the rare occasions on which the Lords have exercised their powers reasonably and responsibly. Some of the most successful schools in the country are threatened with compulsory incorporation into these organisations. Some are good, but too many have authoritarian managers who think that making their word law constitutes good leadership. To put these people in charge of some of the most distinguished headteachers we have is simply unacceptable, and it must not be allowed to happen. This is wrong and must be stopped.

Smaller scandals also have their origins in neoliberal ideology. It is now accepted that the allocation of the national tuition project to an organisation without experience in the field, on the grounds that they could pay lower wages, was farcical as well as damaging. The refusal to allow local authorities to build their own schools to meet local need, including SEND schools, is anti-social, inefficient and ruinously expensive, saddling councils with fees of hundreds of thousands of pounds for individual students, with no guarantee of quality. Imposing cuts in inspection while introducing new developments was both irresponsible and a false economy – see the failure of Stantonbury Campuses under a MAT leadership, which is very good at trumpeting its “values”. The privatised exam boards, whatever their technical label, have earned an appalling reputation for arbitrary decisions, unfair competition, and cost-cutting at the expense of quality.

Finally undoing the good work of dismantling Labour’s quangos, only to create another one, five times as big, in the Education Endowment Foundation, is plain old-fashioned folly. It duplicates the work of the National Foundation for Educational Research, has a website that mimicks the format of Trip Adviser Reviews, and is very, very expensive. Nothing neoliberal about that.

Many of us rejoiced in 2010 that we would have an education department again, rather than a New Labour thinktank. We at last had a chance to tackle the errors that had beset education since Labour’s botched introduction of comprehensive schools in the 60s. Whatever the outcome of the next election, that opportunity is now in serious jeopardy. Michelle Donelan is manifestly more experienced in education than James Cleverly, and should be restored to office forthwith. We can do without another Secretary of State who doesn’t know the work.

Posted at 06:39 AM in Educational Policy | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 06, 2022

Extreme behaviour - "inclusion", or targetted provision?

Since Baroness Warnock’s 1978 report on the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People, the determination of progressive educators and militant parents to have children with extreme behaviour present in normal lessons, whatever the consequences, has become a threat to the whole of the education system. The Report itself is rather different. It stipulates off-site provision for three groups of children – those with severe and complex needs, those who could not thrive in an normal school setting, and:

“children with severe emotional or behavioural disorders who have very great difficulty in forming relationships with others or whose behaviour is so extreme or unpredictable that it causes severe disruption in an ordinary school or inhibits the educational progress of other children” (Ch8,8).

I’ve seen the damage done by the drive to “include” these children in the mainstream of education at first hand, as a teacher, inspector, and consultant. In the 1970s, I was head of the remedial department in an East End comprehensive school. One of my pupils, who would now be diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome, wrecked every lesson he attended by uncontrollable outbursts, which prevented me from teaching the other pupils to read. I eventually lost my temper. Everyone has a breaking point, and I was lucky. Psychological damage can easily become physical, as in the recent £850k settlement for a teacher who left the profession after being assaulted by a pupil who should not have been in his class in the first place.

As an inspector in a school in the Midlands, I saw a young woman teacher reduced to tears by a class who took great pleasure in taunting her and refusing to do any work. Rules or no rules, I intervened and made it clear to them that unless it stopped immediately, the headteacher would be in their classroom before they could blink. Inspectors were professional colleagues and I was not going to stand by and see a colleague abused. The lead inspector thanked me, but, having spoken to the headteacher, changed his mind, and said that teaching was a tough job and not for everyone. Another headteacher said it would “disenfranchise” the pupils if he took action to stop them from swearing and using sexually abusive language to female teaching assistants, and complained when I stopped a lesson because pupils had made makeshift tomahawks by folding several sheets of paper into sharp triangles, with which they were hitting each other in the face.

Such behaviour, which I also saw as a consultant, makes teaching and learning impossible, and is a threat to the mental health of teachers and of victims of bullying. It has been tolerated for too long, and headteachers who have stood against it – notably Sir Rhodes Boyson, Sir Michael Wilshaw, Katharine Birbalsingh, and Barry Smith – have met insult and abuse from the progressive establishment and militant parents. The Government’s long-awaited review of SEND could, therefore, not be more welcome. It is one of the few good official reviews of education we have had, intelligent, honest, well-argued and practical. The system is broken – or, more accurately, never worked in the first place – and needs to be fixed.

The proposed fix builds on what has been found to work. Pre-Warnock, special schools ranged from excellent, usually small, settings, in which children were given work closely matched to their needs, and superb personal support – to what can only be described as dumping grounds for problems no-one wanted to acknowledge. Pupils were frequently sent to the wrong place, and parents had no choice. We are still not free of this – a parent in my village was threatened with prosecution last year if she did not agree to a special school for her son, who, incidentally, is well-behaved and co-operative.

The Review proposes an expansion of off-site provision, to be used flexibly, so that children can continue with mainstream education and be returned to it when possible. The quality of individual education and health care plans (ECHPs) is to be improved, and backed by earlier identification and tackling of problems in the hope that far fewer will be needed. There will also be a national qualification for special needs and disability co-ordinators (SENDCOs) in schools, though this, and other aspects of training staff, will be much more difficult. The predominance of behaviour has led to serious neglect of the specialised teaching skills needed to tackle specific difficulties, including language and literacy problems, and the education of deaf and hearing-impaired children. There will be plenty of organisations lining up to offer provision in these areas, and, like some of those involved in Labour’s dyslexia initiative in the 00s, they are highly likely to shift things towards their own agenda. The DfE likes to work with organisations rather than individuals, an approach which protects them from mavericks, but also stifles thought – organisations are out to make and influence policy, and, like the department itself, sift available ideas, but do not actually think.

The only way to make an impact on a learning problem is for the teacher to consider what is preventing the person from succeeding in what they are trying to do, and help them to adjust their thinking so that they can do it. An example, with a student assessed as dyslexic, witnessed by his deputy headteacher and parents, is here.

Until this approach is applied throughout SEND training, we will continue along the road paved with good intentions.

Footnotes: The Review is published under the signatures of the Secretaries of State for Health and Education. Much of the work behind it was completed by Vicky Ford MP, and her successor as Children’s Minister, Will Quince MP. This article first appeared on Consevative Home.

Posted at 06:42 AM in Educational Policy, SEND - Special Educational Needs and Disability | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 24, 2022

Ofsted's English research review, and "Whole Phonics". An error.

I am concerned that the view of phonics in this report goes beyond the limits of evidence and endorses "whole phonics". The very existence of the term "grapho-phoneme correspondence" shows that phonics will not tell a child all they need to know in order to read a word. We teach children that letters represent a sound, and that they blend these to read a word, as in c-a-t. This depends on the letters and sounds being in the same order. When they are not, as in table, the child can't blend. When a child finds a letter indicating a sound .it does not normally indicate, the child has no means of knowing whether it indicates the normal sound, or not, unless they have already learned the word. Eg, was.

The truth is, as Byrne in Castles et al showed, that phonics establishes the alphabetic principle - that we read words from their letters. This principle works in different ways in different languages, eg in French the very large number of silent letters used for grammatical connections. In English, mostly from French and Saxon influxes, some phonics are derived from other languages, so that phonics tells us most, but not all we need to know. Until this fact is recognised and understood,teachers following official guidance will continue to present phonics in a way that is both too simple, and too complex. Too simple, because it does not always work. Too complex, because giving lists of possible correspondences and expecting children to memorise and select the appropriate one is inconsistent with what we know of the development of their young minds.

Other aspects of the English review are excellent. This is an error. I've had no reply to attempts to raise the issue directly with Ofsted. The alternative is on this site.

Posted at 08:19 AM in Ofsted, Reading research | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 28, 2022

Turning round reading problems by helping children adjust the way they think.

Two earlier postings have detailed the errors of governments and teacher training on the teaching of reading. This one shows the alternative, based on helping children to adjust their thinking, so as to tune into the way the alphabet is actually used in English.

“A couple of months ago, my nine year old daughter couldn’t read. Now she can.” So began an article a little over 25 years ago in the Times Educational Supplement by Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood – and editor of a major reading scheme for primary schools. Last week, I was, at last, able to video one of the foundation lessons that led to this success. Here it is. Sue is not a Conservative, with or without capitalisation, but, as she says, “What have politics got to do with reading and writing?”

Not everyone shares this view. Professor Alice Bradbury, co-author of the recent UCL paper attacking phonics, considers the use of intervention groups for weak readers a form of discrimination, as it results in a narrowing of the curriculum and hence a restriction of opportunity. This is not a new position. At my interview in Stepney Green in 1975, the headmaster described remedial work as “lowering the boom” on pupils, though he accepted my argument that, if there was a ceiling, it was my job to punch holes in it. This remains the case. The 11 year old in the foundation lesson was frustrated at not being able to read “like everyone else”, and was beginning to do so by the end of the session. Her mother, teacher, and teaching assistant, sat in on Zoom, and were all very pleased; the word “amazing” escaping the teaching assistant, as it had the Deputy Head observing my previous lesson, with J.

Before going into detail, I will say that these opponents, including Professor Becky Francis, Director of the Education Endowment Foundation, have a point. My pre-Plowden primary school had two streams, the upper with a youngish, intelligent, forward-thinking teacher, and the lower with a thug who ruled by terror and of whose pupils nothing was expected at all. Professor Francis’ assertion that ability grouping is “symbolically violent” was true in that context, and this man’s violence was more than symbolic. Around a third of the upper stream passed the 11+.

But this does not mean that grouping pupils to ensure that they all have the skills they need to succeed at school and in their working life is restricting. Most Conservatives see it as liberating, and we have the shining example of Michaela, and schools with a similar approach, to show for it. My focus on literacy and giving up hope of reforming the chaos that I saw in Labour’s Inner London Education Authority, led to success in an essential, but limited, goal. Faced with the same situation, Katharine Birbalsingh went for the bakery rather than the bread, and got it. She is the person best placed to take charge of social mobility, as she is making the biggest contribution to it.

Professor Francis rightly said recently that tuition had to be of high quality to make an impact. Successive governments have failed to understand this, and put people in charge of it who either see teachers as benighted souls in need of detailed prescription from a Cromwellian “strategy” – as if education were a military operation – or who believe in outsourcing to the point at which it does not matter whether those in charge have the faintest idea of what they’re trying to do. The Department for Children, Schools and Families binned my submission to Sir James Rose’s inquiry into dyslexia without even showing it to him. He was furious to hear this, and has since endorsed my approach. Other interested parties, including Matt Hancock and Labour’s education spokesman, should consider how far it may help them reach their goals.

It is based on accurate teaching of the use of the alphabet in English – it is more like a chart of a great river than a grid – and on the increasingly convincing evidence from brain research. Authorities and pressure groups, from dyslexia organisations to the civil service, will, no doubt, continue to judge according to their wits. Parents, teachers, and pupils will speak as they find.

Posted at 06:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 17, 2022

Complete non-reader, 11, lesson 3. Why don't we spell "said" sed?... and more.

Lesson 1 introduced English spelling and its variations, and began to apply this in reading. Lesson 2 began slimmed down spelling, Kimberly moving from writing It wus getin lat at nit to It was getting late at night. This lesson begins with explaining how said is not spelled sed, continued with reading a new book, and ended with Kimberly writing last week's sentence accurately. I then had a conversation with Mrs Whittaker, Kimberly's teaching assistant. Points to note - Kimberly is beginning to correct her own errors, and to use one word in a group as a cue to another (busy, buried). There is, of course, much to do, but we're on our way. Many thanks to Mrs Whittaker for her co-operation.

K, Lesson 3.

Posted at 01:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 10, 2022

First lesson, Slimmed Down Spelling. Videocast

First lesson, Slimmed Down Spelling. K's mother was pleased that so many teachers had seen the recording of the foundation lesson last week. The present lesson starts from the beginning of this piece of independet writing that K wrote last week. The pic becomes clearer if you click on it.

K was spelling words exactly as they seemed to her to sound, with just one letter for each sound.

I explain why this doesn't always work, and introduce the idea that letters sometimes work in groups, and that some words need an extra letter, both of which we only use when we've learned the word needs them. Finally, for historical reasons, the letter we need is sometimes not the one we'd think, as in was, water, warm.

The video starts with the first sentence in K's writing, It wus getin lat at nit. I explain what she needs to add to the letters she's used, and what adjustments she needs to make to her thinking. We never copy. K works hard and succeeds in writing the sentence independently by the end, and I introduce the group tion. We will have a second session next week.

Video is at link here

https://www.facebook.com/john.bald.54

Posted at 01:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 09, 2022

Foundation Lesson for reading and spelling. Videocast

25 years after Sue Palmer suggested this in The TES, I have managed to record a foundation lesson. Each of these is unique, tailored to the needs of the individual pupil. K is in Y6, and her teacher, Craig Fereday, describes her as "very frustrated" at not being able to read "like everybody else." She is, however, conscientious, and tries hard. K's mother and teaching assistant sat in. The lesson is in two parts, partly because of the free time limit on Zoom, and partly to give us a breather.

Foundation lesson for reading and spelling.

Posted at 09:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 28, 2022

Finding the rignt starting point for a person who needs help with reading, spelling or basic maths. Videocast.

This short videocast describes why it is essential to find the right starting point for a person who needs help, and simple ways of doing so.

Download Finding the right starting point

It complements the videocasts at these links.

https://johnbald.typepad.com/language/2022/02/slimmed-down-spelling-videocast.html

https://johnbald.typepad.com/language/2021/12/webinar-reading-session-1-how-the-alphabet-works-in-english-and-how-to-make-this-clear-to-pupils-rec-1.html

Posted at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 27, 2022

Slimmed Down Spelling Videocast.

Slimmed Down Spelling explains the principles of English spelling in plain English, so that children understand them, and teachers don't have to dress things up with jargon. This videocast explains the approach. Further information is on this site, and in my second book, Using Phonics to Teach Reading and Spelling. The unique feature of this book is that explains why phonics won't tell us everything, as well as making use of what they do tell us. Correspondence invited, and happy to help anyone pro bono.

Download Slimmed Down Spelling Videocast Feb22

February 14, 2022

Teacher training and the teaching of reading - errors, sociology and good intentions.

Mylast article (below) outlined errors made by successive governments in their handling of the teaching of reading. This one will deal with the far greater errors of teacher trainers and academics. These are rooted in good intentions. Across the world, public education does not ensure that everyone learns to read and write fluently and well. With rare exceptions, languages are complicated by issues such as complex grammatical rules (German), large numbers of silent letters (French) and, in English, by the fact that there is not a direct and consistent correspondence between every letter and every sound, so that trying to sound out words, one letter at a time, will often fail. As a result, English-speaking countries have always had a long tail of weak readers in international comparisons. Something needed to be done. But what?

The first step was to try to determine what we actually do as we read, and how we think. During the sixties, evidence of eye movements was confined to the large jumps our eyes make as we read down a page, while research on memory showed that we could not hold more than 6 or 7 items in working memory at a time. Taken together, these suggested that we could not hold in our mind all of the letters in longer words, and that we were not paying attention to every detail of print as we read. That led to the fallacy of reading as a “psycholinguistic guessing game”, and to Frank Smith’s proposition that “We learn to read by reading”. Smith’s brilliant, hilarious presentations at conferences won wide acceptance for the theory in teacher training colleges and university departments of education. Rebranded, it became the basis of Reading Recovery’s “multicue” theory and of Labour’s Searchlights.

Modern technology, also used by the military to direct smart bombs, shows that we track not only every word, but the form of every letter as we read. The second error, on the use of memory, is caused by not taking account of the grouping of letters into syllables. Many words have more than seven or eight letters but almost none have more than that number of syllables. The final flaw in the theory was the role of context in identifying the meaning of a word. A series of studies in the 80s, and a doctoral thesis by Morag MacMartin, showed that context and pictures were more likely to mislead than help, as children were likely to misread subsequent words to try to make them fit what they had gleaned from the context.

Having written about these battles for the Times Educational Supplement throughout the eighties, I had thought the issue was settled, but it is not, and the issue is complex. Some academics and teacher trainers use phonics as an Aunt Sally, imposed by governments, and what do governments know? Others, like Professor Dominic Wyse in his contributions to a recent paper publicised by our friends at The Guardian, say that the neglect of phonics has been a weakness, but that they need to be balanced by other methods. These “other methods”, though, do not involve additional teaching of the use of the alphabet in English, which I’ve described in previous postings and in my books – but elements of guessing, which don’t work, as there are too many possibilities in a writer’s choice of words, or in links between texts and pictures, for them to be relied on.

Phonics, though, are only a small part of the argument. Most of the academics involved are more interested in sociology than in reading. Professor Bradbury’s only published paper on phonics does not consider its impact on reading skills, but attacks it as leading teachers to group pupils by their abilities, an approach that the Director of the Education Endowment Foundation considers “symbolically violent”. Professor Wyse has been a primary teacher. His doctorate, The Teaching of English:Research Evidence and government policy argues that policy has been insufficiently supported by research evidence, but does not involve direct research on the teaching of reading. . Dr Mary Bousted, of the National Education Union, wrote her thesis on “The Ideology of English teaching”. Their knowledge and understanding of reading research is limited, and they apply arbitrary selection criteria. For example, they cite an important paper by the Australian, Anne Castles and UK colleagues, but not its key point on the role of phonics in teaching children the principles of alphabetic writing. There is no mention of the late Professor Katharine Perera’s discoveries of the role of accurate reading of words in the development of phrasing, or of the current findings of brain research, notably from Stanislas Dehaene.

Cherry-picking, or a reflection of the authors’ limited knowledge? Perhaps a little of both. In either event, their reliance on a “meta-analysis” of a large number of studies, some of which were not even carried out in English, is grasping at straws. Professor Wyse has long championed randomised controlled trials as the only way of providing reliable evidence, so it is fair to ask why he has chosen to rely on studies from other countries, rather than carry out any on his own approach. The fallacy of over-reliance on such studies is demonstrated by this one, carried out by two of their main advocates, and one of the worst-ever studies in the field of literacy. The academic critics of researchers such as Professors Shona Johnstone and Anne Castles need to up their game or find other work to do.

The government’s sharp response to this paper is fully justified. Phonics has improved matters, and there is a second wind that helps children to read the generally regular words derived from Latin and Greek that they will meet in secondary school. My reservations about “whole phonics”, and the neglect of alphabetic knowledge not directly related to current speech, remain. I continue to demonstrate that filling this gap is the key to solving many serious literacy problems. What we do not need is a return of Searchlights, multicue systems, and other guesswork under the banner of balance. We guess when we don’t know. It doesn’t work. To become literate, children need to know.

Posted at 06:42 AM in Current Affairs, Dyslexia, Literacy and Languages File. | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 31, 2021

Reading - how governments have made mistakes, and how to fix them.

“If I can’t read well, I can’t do most of my work in junior school, and barely any in secondary. I go to school every day, knowing I’m going to fail. So I go and am miserable all day (or misbehave). Or, as this is a race in which I’ve got no chance at all, I don’t go. What would you do?”

I tweeted just before Christmas and got an immediate response from across the English-speaking world. The truth of it first hit me when a pupil bunked off my lesson in Holloway School in 1974. I was reading a book with an English class – from memory, Ginger Over The Wall – and he couldn’t read. So why should he come? The Deputy Head, a distinguished-looking man, assured me that many pupils in the first year of secondary school “couldn’t read”. I’ve told the story many times. No one in the school was doing anything about it – failure was the fault of social conditions and Margaret Thatcher – and I felt I had to. I became a teacher of reading – initially, not a very good one, but I found I had an aptitude for the work, and learned quickly.

In the early nineties, I discussed the issue with Labour shadow ministers, pointing out to Jack Straw that reading failure at seven was statistically linked to truancy, which in turn was strongly linked to crime. They were interested – particularly Win Griffiths MP and David Blunkett – but the idea of a national initiative, which I put to them in a private meeting, was taken over by advisers and became their National Literacy Strategy. This replaced phonics as the basis of learning to read, which I had helped insert into the national curriculum, with “Searchlights”, a rebranding of the “guessing game” theories of reading. It failed, despite sustained efforts to massage the figures – towards the end, a company that would not do as it was told, was sacked – but Labour wasted over 10 years before ditching it.

The phonics revival started in the early ’90s, when St Clare’s School, in Handsworth, Birmingham, won a national award for using phonics to teach reading successfully in a difficult inner city context. Around the same time, Sue Lloyd, a teacher, identified a strong correlation between using phonics and high reading scores in Suffolk. The Major government decided to revise the National Curriculum to take account of this, and I was engaged as a consultant. The collapse of the National Strategy brought about another surge of interest in phonics, backed by a Labour government publication, Letters and Sounds, which presented every possible correspondence between letters, groups of letters and English sounds, and used this as a basis for teaching.

This is “whole phonics”. It is accurate, but makes learning more difficult than it need be by presenting children with too many alternatives at once, and by failing to explain that some combinations of letters do not reflect the order of their sounds in English (eg centre, circle, in which the last two letters represent the order of the sounds in French). It also treats large numbers of the most common words in English as “sight”, or “tricky”, words, which requires children to suspend what they had just been taught, in order to read them. As they do not know in advance whether the new word is tricky or not, the approach is also unreliable. At worst, they resort to sounding words out one letter at a time, which does not work with the single most frequent word in the language, “the”. All of these issues are likely to result in an assessment of dyslexia.

I tackle the issue by explaining why phonics do not always tell us all we need to know about a word, and how to deal with this. I explain that the language is about a thousand years old, and that if we were a thousand years old, we would have a few wrinkles. I then explain the wrinkles, beginning with the Norman conquest – as a result of which almost a third of English words are shared with French, though pronounced differently. I show how letters usually indicate a sound, but that some give us information about others, and some work in groups. That leaves historical issues to be explained, and patterns used. For example, manger, from the French manger, unlocks danger, stranger, arrange and many more. There is a slight modification for spelling. I do all of this in plain English. Pseudo-Greek words – grapheme, morphine, digraph – add a layer of complication that some children can handle and others not.

Since the mid 1990s, I have used this approach consistently to turn serious problems round in one lesson, followed by practice. The result was first reported by Sue Palmer in the TES in 1996, and has been independently witnessed by teachers, parents and pupils.

Here is the latest comment, from the deputy head teacher and parents of an eleven year old, assessed as “severely dyslexic” and unable to read at all:

I’m the Y6 teacher of J and am amazed at the turnaround we have seen since working with John Bald and using his expertise/method. My LSA has taken on board this concept too and together, reading with him every day, we are seeing more and more progress and more confidence He has changed the way he thinks. At the start of the year I didn’t think this was possible. I’d encourage anyone to try it and read the article. Thank you, John

and from J’s mother:

Good morning John,

J is really starting to enjoy reading. He’s seems to be coming home wanting to do homework and reading more. We are so pleased with him. We thank you for all your help.

and father:

It’s an emotional tear that I’m wiping away now.

Other former pupils include a first-class honours physicist with a PhD, a young person diagnosed as dyslexic who got A* in English and English literature after a writing block was removed in two lessons (now a medical doctor), a young man with a physical handicap who saved the country £150m as a fraud buster with customs and an “impossible (SENCO) pupil who arrived in school in full leathers with a crash helmet for a demonstration lesson and left having read a paragraph from a book on motor cycles. Many more have achieved or exceeded the modest grade they were expecting at GCSE.

The introduction of phonics as the vehicle for early reading teaching has prevented many problems, but “whole phonics”, pushed by the DfE in non-statutory guidance and through its authorised materials, is not enough to give all children the reading skills they need to succeed in junior and secondary school. Six year olds identified as struggling by the phonics check do not need a dyslexia assessment, or “intervention”, but more careful explanation of how English spelling really works, and how they can learn to use it. I am happy to demonstrate on request, pro bono.

Posted at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 06, 2021

Webinar - Reading session 1. How the Alphabet works in English, and how to make this clear to pupils. Recorded 06.12.21

This is a recording of a webinar for members of the Facebook Groups for Y5-6 and Y3-4 teachers, following the work with J , an 11 year-old non-reader, reportec by his deputy headteacher and parents. Clicking on the link should play the video, but please let me know if you have snags. I am happy to help anyone with a similar problem, anywhere in the world, via the internet.

Download Reading 1

Posted at 04:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

November 27, 2021

J - an amazing turnround. More will follow.

All of my teaching and remote CPD is now pro bono. Please get in touch if I can help.

J is really starting to enjoy reading. He’s seems to be coming home wanting to do homework and reading more. We are so pleased with him. We thank you for all your help.

and father

It's an emotional tear that I'm wiping away now.

Posted at 05:29 PM in Dyslexia, Educational Policy | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 22, 2021

A Level languages - and other subjects. Some thoughts following a Facebook posting by a Midlands teacher.

In 1966, I started work on my A levels - reading La Peste - almost the day after O levels had finished. They were what I wanted to do, and La Peste as a starting point is a big ask. This is, I think, the key to A level and subsequent academic success - the student must want to do it.

My A level teacher, Francis Holmes - earlier generations of pupils called him Fuss - gave every encouragement to those with that attitude, and to the end of his days - I last met him in his late 90s - did not understand why others did not share it. He saw his work as very worthwhile, but almost none of his pupils - "even the bright ones, those who could handle the subjunctive" - had not developed the ability to speak fluent French. I didn't think my French was particularly good, though those with more fluency tended to have had wider experience of the language, for example by having parents in the diplomatic service, but it was as good as I could make it. But if I was in the best handful over a 50 year career - he carried on working into his 70s - what was going wrong?

As an inspector, I saw, from time to time, the same attitude in minority subjects in sixth forms. One sixth form, that otherwise had serious problems, had a course in social care, run by a single teacher on the main scale, that used exactly the same seminar format that I met at university, encouraging students to read and contribute - a class library of journals as well as books - and so fostered the same attitude. The students were interested, wanted to work, and succeeded. Long Road Sixth Form College, in Cambridge, has the same approach, with the same attitudes, and highly successful results.

This is, in the end, the only way to get students to do A level with any sense of satisfaction - they have to want to, and we have, first, to get them to want to, by providing teaching that enables them to succeed and enjoy their work - whatever their intellectual capacities - and so build a basis for success at a higher level. Present conditions of work in most schools are making this next to impossible. The exceptions are well known, and Michaela, The Power of Culture, is the clearest statement we have of how to build on them.

Posted at 06:46 AM in Educational Policy, Languages | Permalink | Comments (0)

A Level languages - and other subjects. Some thoughts following a Facebook posting by a Midlands teacher.

Posted at 06:46 AM in Educational Policy, Languages | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 20, 2021

To make best use of phonics, we need to understand what it will do, and its limitations.

Eleven year-old Jonathan Bryan has gathered almost 850,000 signatures on a petition for children with disabilities to be taught to read and write. I signed as soon as I heard of it. Case studies since Helen Keller have shown that, if a person has the intellectual capacity to understand what they are reading, they can learn. The key is to find a way of overcoming the communication barriers caused by the disability to reach the person’s intellect. In Keller’s case, it was the feeling of water on her hand, followed by Teacher (Anne Sullivan) tracing the word on her palm, with a finger. In Dorothy Butler’s Cushla and Her Books, it was using Dick Bruner’s strong and simple illustrations to enable Cushla to focus her eyes for the first time, and so get in touch with the world. But there are no miracles. Cushla was able to attend a normal school, but the late Dame Marie Clay told me that her intellectual development did not proceed beyond that of a typical seven-year-old.

A parallel petition has been launched by the British Dyslexia Association (BDA), asking for a revision of government guidelines of July this year, which said that systematic synthetic phonics should be the sole approach to the teaching of reading. I will not be signing that one, despite what I wrote last time about the dangers of “whole phonics”.

The first reason is the BDA’s push for more money to be put into assessments and “diagnosis”, based on their assertion that ten to 15 per cent of the population is dyslexic, a claim I first heard from the late broadcaster, Robin Day, in the ’70s, backed by the assertion “figures show”. The problem is that “figures” from brain research show abnormal patterns of brain activity in only one to two per cent of samples drawn from several countries, including the UK, Italy (which has highly regular spelling) and China, which of course does not use an alphabet. Ten to fifteen per cent – or more – certainly experience difficulties in learning to read, but to describe this as dyslexia, and put more money into assessments designed to prove it, simply labels the problem without contributing to a solution. These assessments are regularly gamed, releasing concessions in examinations without reaching a definite conclusion that the person is, in fact, dyslexic.

The error of whole phonics lies in the history of the language, set out by the linguist David Crystal in Spell It Out, and described for parents in this presentation to the Wellington Festival of Education some years ago. The key fact is the Norman Conquest, which flooded English with French in a way that only happens through invasion. The pupil I wrote about last week found it straightforward to read regular words based on the spelling of his name, but started to read table as if it were tablet, breaking down when he did not see the expected t. He was applying phonics accurately, but it did not work because these are French phonics and not English. Explaining that languages have human foibles, and that English is a thousand years old, and so has wrinkles, unlocked the word and around ten others with the same pattern of spelling and sound. He has remembered and applied this new knowledge, and his Deputy Headteacher reports increasing confidence in other subjects. Whole phonics advocates have argued that variations such as table and centre (also French) are so well established that they can be seen as regular. This argument was dismissed two centuries ago, when the brothers Grimm identified some irregular features as strong enough to resist the pull towards regularity, as centre has in British English despite the US shift to center.

The BDA recommends Professor Usha Goswami’s “onset-rime” approach as an alternative teaching method, and that also needs clarification. Professor Goswami won the Spearman medal in 1992 for her investigation of this approach, in which the second part of the word, the rime, the at in cat, is taught and the first added, enabling us to learn by analogy. This is important, as some pupils find it hard to hold one letter in their mind while they decode and blend the remainder. I stumbled across the idea in the seventies, switching to another word with the same pattern when a child couldn’t read a word (from memory, I switched to pound when they couldn’t read mound). It is an essential aid to teaching reading when it is not straightforward, and helps children to adjust their thinking as identified by Stansilas Dehaene in How We Learn. The research evidence on a computerised version of the approach is, however, based on work with children who had not met the threshold of the phonics check at 6, who may well, nevertheless, still have learned some phonics. The technique is, therefore, neither the first shot in the teacher’s locker, nor the last.

That place is reserved for Professor Sue Buckley of Portsmouth University, who developed an approach for pre-school children with Down syndrome, thought at the time to be incapable of learning to read. It worked by having them learn to match, first pictures, and then words by placing identical cards on a baseboard and gradually increasing the number of items. When the words could be matched, the teacher – or more often a parent – would call them out for the child to select, and, once this was done confidently, the child would name the word. This is, again, a technique best kept for reinforcement when necessary, but I have found it effective in the most difficult cases, including some that had been referred for hospital treatment.

Underlying all of this work is an application to the teaching of Occam’s Razor, reducing the issue to its simplest components and developing effective techniques to address them. But, to paraphrase Einstein, things need to be made as simple as possible, but not more so. We need to be able to hold all of the relevant evidence in mind and work in ways that do not contradict any of it. Whole phonics ignores the parts that don’t fit, and opposes intellect with persistent and energetic assertion. The dyslexia lobby gives the same label to almost all reading problems, whether they are caused by a genuine intellectual problem, or by other factors, including poor teaching, visual stress under fluorescent light, or temporary hearing loss in early childhood. Almost all are overcome once we find, like Anne Sullivan, a way to cut through whatever is causing the difficulty, and establish understanding. My late friend, the linguist Michel Thomas, was right – “What you understand, you don’t forget.”

This article first appeared in Conservative Home.

Posted at 06:42 AM in Educational Policy, Using Phonics - Resources Updates | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 13, 2021

Language Show Live - Alternatives to disapplication for pupils with SEND - Success and enjoyment in learning languages.

Wonderful to have 330 people sign up for this webinar, and so many positive comments.

Download Success and Enjoyment in Language Learning for pupils with SEND. Languages Show 2021

Posted at 04:37 PM in Brain research, Dyslexia, Languages | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 03, 2021

Reading, Dyslexia and Special Educational Needs.

The influence of major Education Secretaries can be measured in decades.

Butler’s 1944 Act lasted two, Crosland’s secondary modern comprehensives, four. Michael Gove’s reforms are into their second, despite the early need to accommodate Liberal Democrats, and the major error of listening to Dominic Cummings. Michaela and Katharine Birbalsingh shine brightly, but Nadhim Zahawi and his new team have plenty to do.

Zahawi made a brilliant start at our Conference. Born in Saddam’s Baghdad, arriving in Britain with no English, he learns to read – key point – graduates in engineering from UCL, makes a fortune from YouGov, and becomes a member of Her Majesty’s Government. No latter-day Dick Whittington, though. Like another noted Conservative, he didn’t turn. Zahawi’s story is one of single-minded determination and staying power, backed by intellect.

It was a nice touch to call for a round of applause for Oxford University’s achievements in vaccination. But Zahawi and the new skills minister, Alex Burghardt, are also intent on reviving Further Education and apprenticeships as an alternative route to qualification. I recently explained the benefits of this – including Btech – to one of my students in the care sector – and expanding degree apprenticeships is the key improving the supply of nurses. A review of Btech is a good idea – taking a scythe to it is not. At the heart of this change is the final recognition that Blair’s huge expansion of universities has been a disaster both for the students saddled with permanent debt, and for the Treasury, for which loans have become a money pit. The argument that apprenticeships are for “other people’s children” does not diminish enthusiasm for them in Germany, whose economy is both more successful, and more strictly regulated, than ours.

Work is also needed on the continuing review into special needs, and the major changes in reading teaching brought in under Nick Gibb.

Since Baroness Warnock’s review of special educational needs provision, the education of these children has become focused almost exclusively on dealing with severe behavioural problems, with next to no attention to the teaching of reading. The waste of human potential has been enormous, and half-hearted attempts in the last years of the Labour governments to redress the balance by means of private tuition were held back by yet another series of authoritarian guidelines to tutors, written by apparatchiks who knew little or nothing about the work. This error was repeated at the height of the pandemic by recruiting unqualified and inexperienced companies to organise tuition.

The key to progress is to introduce rigorous monitoring of all initiatives in terms of their impact on pupils’ progress, rather than the self-advertisement of their proponents. We have not had a nationally standardised test of reading since our opponents hijacked the membership of Margaret Thatcher’s commission on falling reading test scores, and decided that the best solution was to abolish the test. NS6, as it was, would require modest alterations to be returned to service, and would give us a clear idea both of where we stand nationally, and of the real standing of individual pupils. It would also give decisive evidence on the ability of the Reading Recovery programme, which refuses to include phonics, to deliver long-term progress.

The phonics programme itself is half-finished. The key evidence in its favour, the research in Clackmannanshire that showed benefits in word recognition and spelling from initial phonics teaching five years later, has since been reinforced by work showing that this was essential to orient children towards using information from print to read (the “alphabetic principle”) rather than guessing. This information does not, however, tell us all we need to know, as the same letter or group of letters can indicate different sounds. One of my pupils, fourteen and assessed as dyslexic, has become engrossed in the diary of Anne Frank. She was stumped last week by “whitish”, which phonics would not help her distinguish from “British”. To read it, we had to go back to “white”. But it was knowledge of the language beyond phonics that solved the problem.

This little example supports the French Professor Stanislas Dehaene’s theory that we learn by building up ideas based on our experience, and modify them when something doesn’t fit. There could not be a more accurate picture of the process of learning to read in English – or indeed in French, which has four times as many silent letters as English, and uses them to tie things in grammatically. My teaching of reading and spelling, on which I based my application for fellowship of the Chartered College of Teaching, makes these variations clear to children and adults in plain English. It was reported in the Times Educational Supplement 25 years ago, and repeated this morning, pro bono, with an 11 year old non-reader, with his deputy headteacher watching. It changes lives. It deserves serious attention as part of the special needs review.

This article first appeared on Conservative Home.

Posted at 04:37 AM in Dyslexia | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 27, 2021

Literacy and Language Policy at Gateway Primary School, Marylebone, 2005.

This cameo from the Ofsted report should I believe be a model for primary education.The full report is here.

Example of outstanding practice

Exceptionally detailed planning and provision for English, including English as an additional language, makes a key contribution to effective learning in all subjects.

The school has a range of policies, action planning and guidance which are based on specific analysis of its own pupils’ needs and progress, and which are backed by support by the co-ordinator while another teacher takes her class for mathematics. Policies have a very clear balance between speaking, listening, reading and writing skills, each of which is considered in detail, both in terms of its own development and for its contribution to the overall development of language and literacy. They include all provisions of the national literacy strategy, with three or four additional lessons each week devoted to aspects of literacy – such as handwriting, hearing children read, and the use of literacy in other subjects, that the school sees as needing attention beyond the normal literacy hour.

The main policy is supported by detailed policies for speaking and listening and learning, handwriting, and assessment of writing. The policies are followed by teachers across all subjects. Guidance on grouping pupils flexibly for particular purposes makes a key contribution to learning by ensuring that work is matched to individual needs, and that pupils’ work throughout the day equips them with the English skills they need to succeed in secondary school. The policy for the assessment has very effective arrangements for setting targets for groups and classes, and for involving pupils, so that they have a clear view of their own targets and progress.

Policies and guidance are based on extensive knowledge of all areas of the subject. The policies demonstrate have a very clear vision of effective structures for planning and teaching, couched in an economical and understandable way for teachers to follow. They pervade the whole school and are a key factor in its success

Posted at 10:03 AM in English as an Additional Language | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 20, 2021

Success and Enjoyment in Language Learning for Pupils with SEND.

Here is the ppt from my presentation yesterday at the National Modern Languages Conference for Inside Government. Happy to discuss further pro bono.

Download Success and Enjoyment in Language Learning for pupils with SEND.

Posted at 01:27 PM in Dyslexia, Educational Policy | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 23, 2021

French A Level transition School, 2021

Le Loup et l'Agneau - Il était une histoire - IEUH

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqaM5IKcUnY (les bonbons)

Session 1. This session described current developments in brain research, discussed some practical techniques for a personal game plan, and looked at Le Loup et L'Agneau and Jacques Brel's Les Bonbons. The recording should open with Windows Media Player. Download French transition course session 1.

Posted at 06:41 PM in French sixth form transition course 2021 | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 16, 2021

French colours for beginners' toolkit, ppt.

Download French-colours for primary toolkit

Posted at 07:09 AM in Primary Languages Toolkits | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 12, 2021

Emily Corbett, Ashville College, German and the world of work.

Download German and The World of Work

Posted at 09:33 AM in German summer School 2021 | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 30, 2021

Useful German: A collection of ways modern German people have expressed themselves socially and at work. With thanks to David Challinor

Thanks to David Challinor for this very interesting and valuable compendium of modern German expressions, collected over many years of workign in Germany.

Some examples - many, many more on the download.

ein Elefantenrennen…..one slow moving lorry overtaking another on the motorway

sich den Schuh anziehen…..take something personally

Sturm klingeln…….keep on ringing the doorbell

sein eigenes Süppchen kochen… to go your own way

containern…to steal discarded but still edible food from skips behind supermarkets

dumm gelaufen!.....Hard Luck S- - t happens!

Luft nach oben haben…..room for improvement

freischalten….unlock, activate, enable(e.g. mobile phone)

die Denksportaufgabe…..teaser, quiz

sich festquatschen…….to get stuck talking to someone and forget the time

Herz, was willst du mehr?....What more could anyone want/ a heart’s desire?

Das ging ja noch, was?... That wasn’t so bad, was it?

Das ist die halbe Miete….half the battle

Man hat schon Pferde (vor der Apotheke) kotzen sehen….You never know. Anything can happen (literally: one has already seen horses throw up in front of the pharmacy)

Beschrei es nicht!....Don’t tempt fate! Don’t speak too soon!

Ich hänge schon ziemlich….I’m already a bit behind (with it)

Das ist noch nicht spruchreif… It’s not official/definite yet

Er hat eine Zettelwirtschaft…..bits of paper everywhere

Das Leben ist kein Wunschkonzert! / kein Ponyhof! / kein Kindergeburtstag!….Life’s..…a bitch! / no walk in the park!

Er ist eine Frostbeule… He’s ‘nesh’ (sensitive to cold)

Die Fußhupe…..small yappy dog that

https://johnbald.typepad.com/language/a-level-and-sixth-form/

Posted at 09:07 AM in German summer School 2021 | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 29, 2021

Genitive Case in German: Nicola Allen

Download Genitive

Posted at 08:37 AM in German summer School 2021 | Permalink | Comments (0)

German refugee literature and film. Dr Catherine Smale, King's College London.

Here are the documents from Dr Smale's presentation.

Download German summer school 2021

Download Research Refugees discussion qns 2021

Posted at 08:35 AM in German summer School 2021 | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 27, 2021

Powerpoint on German Case system, Nicola Allen

Download Powerpoint case system Nicola AllenNi

Posted at 11:02 AM in German, German summer School 2021 | Permalink | Comments (0)

German Summer School 2021, First session, audio recording.

Download Audio_only

This may be clearer if used with the first slides of this ppt

Download Languages Show 2017

Posted at 08:50 AM in German, German summer School 2021, Languages | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 07, 2021

How a new approach to teaching grammar can teach pupils to communicate.

The controversies over language teaching methodology raise a fundamental question. Should languages be taught around a core of grammatical progression, or thematically? The thematic approach allows mixed ability teaching, as a topic can be presented at different levels within the same group. The progression approach ensures mastery of a growing range of structures, and so allows progress towards the range of competences needed to understand and communicate in reading and writing for the purposes of further study and the world of work.

Until comprehensivisation under Crosland, languages were almost exclusively taught in grammar schools, with only a little in secondary moderns. This was elitist, denying most of the population the opportunity to learn a language. It was also pretty ineffective, even in grammar schools.

I was initially taught French by a succession of not very good teachers, followed by excellence as I moved up the school, and took advantage of Anglo-French Easter and summer schools run by one of these excellent teachers, the late Francis (Fred) Holmes, who ran them, virtually pro bono, for 28 years and had the Palmes Académiques. Our textbook was Sheila M Smith's series, followed by Whitmarsh in the sixth form, and we learned the range of French sentence structures, orthography and prouniciation assiduously. Or some of us did. In fact, very, very few. I kept in touch with Fred until the end of his life, and he said, frankly, that I was one of a tiny handful of his pupils, in a career lasting from the early 40s till the early 70s, who had actually learned to speak French. Even "the bright ones, those who could handle the subjunctive," couldn't do it. So, Smith and Whitmarsh were not working, even for the grammar school population, and most people did not enjoy learning French.

This continues to haunt us.

The alternative, initiated by the late Eric Hawkins, was to focus on communication and tolerate the kind of errors that native speakers of Figs languages spend much of their school lives trying to eradicate (adjectival agreements, slient letters, case endings, verb conjugations, word order, etc). Daily dictations were the norm in France when I took part in exchanges 10 yrs ago, including this sentence from a class of 6 year olds - Arthur n'a pas peur des fantômes. In seven words, I count five silent letters, a contraction with apostrophe, a circumflex and a vowel combination. The teacher was dynamic and humorous, the working atmosphere and relationships great, but accuracy was the only goal. Who Arthur and the ghosts may ave been was not an issue. Significant numbers of children in France, especially those with French as a second language, are failing with this approach.

Without basic grammatical accuracy, on the other hand, it is impossible for a person to form a simple sentence and so communicate. An example from a UK school that taught French without grammar was the sentence, which I saw copied by a class - Eric Cantona suis un footballer. While most of the pupils who ask me for help with languages do so because they are failing completely, I also coach A level students aiming for high grades, and even they have problems with basc sentence construction - eg accurate use of verb inflections in present tense and gender agreements- as well as more advanced features.

My late friend Michel Thomas cut through the problem by using the Latin link to build vocabulary through what I call "shared words", building sentences using pronouns, and using a small number of verbs, but in a full range of tenses. Nothing like traditional grammar. Adding writing, using sentence building without copying, and making the key adjustments to thinking, required to move to a new language, clear in the first three or four lessons, led both to the success of high-attaining pupiils in my French to Falkirk, and to a whole class of Hackney 8 year olds writing accurate positive and negative sentences in French, presented a the BETT conference in 2008. Other approaches to sentence building are also reported to have a positive impact on understanding and achievement, and we need more investigation of the issue.

Michel Thomas was awarded the Légion d'Honneur and made a fortune from his courses for adults, but failed to get his approach adopted by any school system. His first UK lesson was filmed by BBC2 and is on youtube. To locate it, type Michel Thomas into youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0w_uYPAQic Before the end of his life, I showed him how sentence building with clicker could add a bridge for pupils, and he was immediately impressed. Our approach is consistent with brain research and, for those who prefer that route, with cognitive load theory. It is not traditional, but nevertheless ensures accuracy as well as communication at all stages. I am happy to discuss further, pro bono, and to demo.

Posted at 07:40 AM in Languages | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 23, 2021

A Guide to Learning English and other languages. Introduction and contents.

Introduction.

This is the third of three books charting my developing understanding of the processes of language and literacy development since an eleven year old boy “bunked off” my lesson in Holloway School in 1974, and I found he could not read. No-one was doing much about it, and the Deputy Head, who spent much of his time in the staff room playing chess, told me that “lots of boys in the first year can’t read”. I felt obliged to try to do something about that, and have spent the rest of my working life in the attempt. I began by moving to the Faraday reading unit at Beaufoy School, Lambeth, headed by Mike Burton, which allowed me to work with small groups and individual pupils, and to discuss work in detail with experienced colleagues. I have valued both of these test beds ever since.

I began to read as much as I could about teaching techniques, and was soon immersed in what came to be known as “The Reading Wars.” A colleague had told the very first class I ever attempted to teach that phonics – the links between sounds and letters - was “the science of reading and writing”. By contrast, two American writers, Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman, were saying that reading was a “psycholinguistic guessing game”, in which we did not track letters and words closely, but guessed what was going to come next, checking the guesses by light sampling of the text. Smith’s argument was based on the idea that, as most people cannot hold more than a small number of items in memory at a time, we could not possibly read the whole of long words by paying attention to every letter. This sounds convincing until we consider the organisation of words into syllables, which corresponds to the limited capacity of what is now known as “working” memory.

Modern eye-tracking technology, also used by military pilots to guide bombs by focussing on the target, has shown that we do indeed track every letter of every word as we read. When the reading wars began in the sixties, only the large eye movements, known as “saccades”, were known, and Smith and Goodman, like the rest of us, were limited by the scientific knowledge available to them. The guessing game theory was further demolished by Schatz and Baldwin (1986) who found that context was a poor predictor of subsequent words, a finding confirmed by Roger Beard in experiments with undergraduates, who were unable to guess what was coming next when a text suddenly stopped. Morag MacMartin went further in 1991, showing that children often allowed an impression given by a picture to override what a text actually said. In my own work, I found that children would often try to make sens of word they had misread by misreading the next few words, until meaning broke down – rather like banging a piece of a jigsaw with one’s fist when it doesn’t quite fit.

I wrote about these issues, and reviewed reading research, extensively in The Times Educational Supplement during the 1980s, and they sent Sue Palmer to observe my teaching of her daughter, who had been assessed as dyslexic. She described the effect as “miraculous”, and her article, As Easy as ABC Really , led me to write The Literacy File, joint winner of the United Kingdom Reading Association’s Donald Moyle Award in 1997. Dissatisfied with the miserable royalties offered by a publisher, I produced and published it myself, receiving, after costs, roughly the same amount as I’d been offered in the first place. A key feature of this book was that phonics were an essential basis for reading, but limited in English by the influx of French following the Norman conquest, so that many words – eg table, centre, fruit – have put an English pronunciation on top of French spelling.

I had found a straightforward way of explaining the difficulties this causes, but had not yet extended it to Spelling. Slimmed Down Spelling (TES 2003) made a slight adaptation to the explanation used for reading, and also proved effective. One 15 year old who had been assessed as dyslexic by a highly academic private school, found that it quickly removed a writing block and enabled her to reach the same high standard in English and English literature as in her other subjects. This, with additional case studies, was the main new feature in Using Phonics To Teach Reading and Spelling (Sage, 2007).

The present book extends the approach to learning new languages, and to the evidence provided by brain research, which was just emerging at the time of the Sage publication. I had studied French at university, and my early attempts to teach it at Holloway had been disastrous – the pupils did not understand what I was trying to do, and I did not understand why they did not understand. By the late 1980s, it was clear that pupils with reading problems were failing abjectly in learning foreign languages, so I returned to teaching them, this time with a better idea of the nature of their difficulties and how they could be tackled. Beginning with work with two Essex secondary schools, I developed a sentence-building approach that enabled them to say what they wanted to say, and was able to work on this further some years later as languages consultant with The Learning Trust, Hackney.

The most important new element in our understanding of language is the evidence of brain research, that shows how brain cells make, consolidate and extend connections with each other. This begins as we learn our first language, and continues as we add others to it, so that we do not learn a new language from scratch, but adapt our understanding to new ways of working. This is consistent with Standislas Deheane’s view of learning from infancy onwards, and reflects the current state of scientific understanding of the operations of the brain, which will, no doubt, continue to be extended in future decades.

John Bald, Linton, Cambridgeshre, May 2021.

Contents

The Early Development of Language and Evidence from Brain Research.
The Transition to Literacy.
Reading in the junior and secondary school
Writing in the junior and secondary school
Tackling problems with reading and writing
Learning new languages – the early stages
Learning new languages – GCSE and A level.

Posted at 09:21 AM in Guide to Learning English and Other Languages. | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 21, 2021

Some poems and literature for early language learning.

Julie Prince has posted some super Spanish poems here, and Janet Lloyd a lovely poem in French, with ideas of how to use it, here. The Association for Language Learning has a substantial selection of ideas for using literature, here. Janet's selection is from Anne-Marie Chapouton, who has written lots of lovely books, available on Amazon. Duvet is a great name for a little rabbit. The great advantage of the written word in learning langauges is that it will stay still and let us look at it as long as we like and as often as we like. Each time we do, the electricity courses round the new connections in our brain, reinforcing them and speeding them up. Click on the book below, and once again when you reach the Amazon site, for a preview.

Posted at 05:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 16, 2021

Oxford comma. An optional extra.

We use commas to help the reader with phrasing. The Oxford comma is used in lists, and I suggest that it is sometimes helpful and sometimes not.

If the items in a list are single words, the comma creates an unnatural gap, and so does not help. I went to the shop and bought some apples, bananas, beans and pears. No advantage to inserting a comma after beans'

If the items are phrases, a comma can help. He found the argument lacking in substance, unsupproted by evidence, and internally inconsistent. Comma after evidence helps phrasing,

So, a judgement call, depending on the phrasing we want.

Posted at 08:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Grouping Pupils in Primary Schools: A Brief Note.

In a primary school in Essex, 30 yrs ago, we grouped Y5-6 together for English, and taught in two sets. I taught the lower set, and Y6 teacher the higher. I focused on reading and spelling difficulties that the other set did not have, and the Y6 teacher on more advanced work that my pupils couldn't do because of their difficulties. No more than a small experiment, but highly satisfactory to all concerned.

Children for whom learning is not straightforward need work closely matched to their learning needs, or they can't understand it, and so make little progress. They also become frustrated. It's no co-incidence that behaviour problems predominantly affect lower-attaining pupils and those with SEND, as they are getting no satisfaction from their work, and are frequently faced with a daily round of failure. Attempts in Essex, by the primary inspectors, to replace literacy as the basis of education with first-hand experience, simply led to lower standards of literacy.

The kind of streaming that was prevalent at the time of the Plowden report in the 60s - over 90% of primary schools streamed - has been replaced by a mixed ability dogma that is putting huge strain on teachers, and is meeting no-one's needs. An alternative is in Learning without Limits' approach to maths. Classes offer different levels of difficulty/challenge, and pupils are allowed to choose. This should be developed. As people may know, Dame Alison Peacock, head of the school that used this approach, is CEO of the Chartered College of Teaching, of which I am a Fellow.

Posted at 06:48 AM in Educational Policy | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 02, 2021

Complaint to ITN and Ofcom re broadcast on Hackney New School, 30th April, 1st May (ITN Website)

The artificial tone is calculated to convey concern and anger. The reporter does not question the comments of complainants, but acts as their advocates, rejecting school leaders’ comments all but one issue – that of previous poor behaviour – which is minimised in final interview with ITN colleague.
26 the reporter does not question the claim of “behind closed doors”. The school is open to visitors. If there were restrictions due to COVID, this should have been made clear.
The CEO’s notes on effective behaviour systems and harmony are confirmed in a second Ofsted report of a monitoring visit https://reports.ofsted.gov.uk/provider/23/147653. This is not mentioned, making it appear that the CEO’s comments were an unsubstantiated assertion, which is not true.
The July 2029 Ofsted report is fairly presented – 3.01 – but the November follow up, above, is not. This is unfair.
27. The school is not responsible for headlines in the Evening Standard, but the reporter used this headline as if it were evidence of a claim by the school itself, which is clearly untrue. The headteacher’s comments, below, are contained in the article. Furthermore, the reporter conflates the headteacher’s comments on fighting bullying during lockdown, with the effect of changes in breaktimes, which cannot be an issue during lockdown. The statement by a member of staff that lunchtime and breaktime clubs “don’t exist” was neither challenged nor investigated. The sequence shows that the reporter has set this up as a claim by the school and then attacked it. The CEO says that “It would be foolish of a school to say that they had ever eliminated bullying”. The reporter says, “Which is what you did say,”, though the headteacher’s words are clear in the article.

“Headteacher Charlotte Whelan said there have been just five incidents of bullying reported in the last year, including cyberbullying during lockdown, and there have been no permanent exclusions.”

For the avoidance of doubt, that does not constitute a claim of elimination.

The number of detentions may well indicate action to enforce proper discipline following lockdown. Its presentation and tone indicates the view of the reporter on sanctions, rather than an error on the part of the school. There is no discussion of the reason for detentions, or of the pattern. The CEO noted a reduction in the use of detention as the term progressed. The reporter’r selective use of evidence, and her suggestion 5.50 “surely that disrupts children’s learning” – emphasis on “surely” – shows bias and a lack of balance.
The student sending an email to staff – it is not surprising that she did not include the Trust CEO – was not asked for evidence of her allegations or questioned on them. “I have an opinion, and it matters” should be set alongside the opinions of other pupils, which the reporter did not seek. A visit to an assembly does not constitute a fair evaluation of the work of a school, and we did not see any of the content of the “sermon”. Was it a purely religious presentation, as this word implies?
The expression “dangerous school, as he puts it”, and “he believes” minimise the evidence of actual danger – the school had an emergency closure for three days as staff had lost control (Ofsted, June 2019). “He believes” further ignores the evidence of Ofsted’s second visit (November 2019), which showed evidence of improvement beyond the CEO’s belief.
This news item was presented from a point of view. It is unbalanced, selective of evidence, unfair, and an abuse of the authority provided by a news programme. The broadcaster should apoligise and provide a right of reply.

Posted at 10:42 AM in Educational Policy | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 30, 2021

Simple Comme Bonjour: French Phonics Made Easy.

French and English share an alphabet, but use it in ways that meet the requirements of each language. French likes its spoken language to flow, and its written language to be as precise as possible, with nouns and verbs tied to their companion words more closely than in English. English puts one main point of emphasis in each sentence, and in each word that has more than one syllable, while French pronunciation is more even.

As we learn a new language, we adjust our thinking from what we have learned in our first language – in Dehaene’s terms , we modify our working hypothesis to take account of new information https://johnbald.typepad.com/language/2020/04/how-we-learn-apprendre-stanislas-dehaene-review.html . This short paper describes how I introduce this process to beginners in French. A similar approach can be used with Spanish and German.

Who knows how to say hello in French? Someone usually knows bonjour, but pronounced bonn-jour. I explain that, like a some Australian people, they say G’day rather than hello, and bon and jour mean good and day. And when they say bon, they keep their tongue low, which helps the two words run together. We practise bonjour, and they have learned three words – bon, jour, and bonjour. Usually don’t need to emphasise the softer French j, as it comes automatically. I might add bonbons.

The colours ppt https://johnbald.typepad.com/language/2013/10/spanish-colours-free-ppt-with-sound.html introduces most of the main changes from English to French pronunciation. Vert and blanc have silent letters at the end, bleu, rouge, noir, orange and jaune new vowel sounds. French r, and n with dropped tongue in orange, blanc and marron. Orange is a shared word, but with new pronunciation – leading to similar shared words, danger, étrange, étranger, manger (from which, in the Christmas carol, animals ate).

Having introduced the colours with the ppt, I reinforce as starters for the next couple of lessons, eg by going round the classroom, pointing at things and asking, eg pointing at a blue exercise book, “Who thinks this is bleu? Who thinks it’s marron?” All questions are phrased was an alternative, and addressed to the whole class, so that everybody has to answer, and I can see how many have understood. I might also hold up three pencils of different colours, and ask who thinks these are, say, bleu, blanc, rouge, who thinks bleu blanc vert, so that they have to pay attention to all three.

I sometimes use laminated strips of block colours, to vary the questions, for example by having the pupils identify the colours in the correct order. I make these by inserting a table in word, and filling in the cells with colour. Then print off and laminate. They are quick and easy to use, and these forms of practice promote myelinisation along the new connections formed in the brain. Apologies for the poor quality of the pic, but I hope it gives the idea.

The next key feature of French is the promotion of flow in speech by modifying the use of letters in writing, a process that results in a typical French paragraph having around four times the number of silent letters as English. This also comes in the first lesson. Who thinks Je ai sounds smooth? Who thinks it sounds a bit jerky? (Repeat if necessary, exaggerating the glottal stop.) Writing Je ai on the board, I demonstrate knocking off the e and inserting the apostrophe (shared word, which I demonstrate to reinforce their understanding of the idea in English – many still think it’s a comma). Next, delete from board and have pupils trace J’ai on their sleeve with a finger. Who got it nearly right? Who got it exactly right. Very nearly everyone does, but some may need two attempts. Once they’ve got it right, do the same on a miniboard or scrap paper. This is their first experience of writing in French. Everyone understands what they’re doing and gets it right. People like getting things right

Next stage is the simple sentence, J’ai un chat, illustrated with a picture of a cat. Another a shared word (some shared words have one or two different letters), and so easy to remember. What is the letter we don’t pronounce in chat? Where is it? At the end. Yes. Nearly all silent letters in French are at the ends of words. Remove from board, and trace J’ai un chat on sleeve. Who thinks they got it nearly right? Who thinks they got it exactly right? Then again on mini boards, so I can check, or on scrap paper if they don’t have it. Pupils never copy, and only write in a book once they know they can get something right.

Having made these adjustments in the first lesson or two, I begin development and reinforcement. The shared word animal is pronounced more evenly in French than English, and the second a is also a distinct a, and not the weak vowel sound that we use in English. We practise. A literal translation of the children’s book Not Now Bernard – “Pas Maintenant, Bernard” has plenty of choral repetition of the key phrase, with silent letters at the end of each word, and of course introducing the negative. I’ve put the translation onto a ppt, with permission. We extend J’ai un chat to pets they really have – hopefully someone will have deux chats – and to family members, which introduces the accents.

Once these principles are established, we can extend in any direction we choose, confident that the children have a basis to develop full understanding of the operation of French spelling, and avoiding Anglicism altogether. Simple. Comme bonjour.

Posted at 07:02 AM in Introducing French Phonics | Permalink | Comments (0)

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