John Bald/language and literacy

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.

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. 

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. 

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 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, 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. 

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.

 

 

Conservative Ideology and Education: a critique.

 

 

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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.

 

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

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.