Teaching reading

The teaching of reading has gone through many fads – quick fixes to help children learn quickly, and most, it seems to me, built on apparently good ideas sold well by their proponents, and most often based on “common sense” rather than a sound evidential basis. No single fad has survived any sort of evolutionary process – and it’s worth noting that if any of these fads had proved to be a silver bullet, then the evidence in their support would have been overwhelming.

One example only – I am old enough to remember the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA), which was designed to simplify letters and word structures for the youngest children, and from which they would develop into “proper” letters and words. As far as I can tell, the logic went like this: Babies start with baby talk and then become more coherent over time. So if we start young children with baby writing, that is more natural, and then they can translate it into real writing later. So far, so evidence free, but the ITA was developed and championed by Sir James Pitman, whose grandfather, Sir Isaac Pitman, had invented shorthand.

At that time, in the early 1960s, shorthand was still widely used and taught in (mostly) secondary modern schools to girls who were potential shorthand typists, a class of employment that was huge but has now largely disappeared. So the ITA had a brief flowering in progressive primary schools but it didn’t work, and was largely forgotten by the 1970s. Looking back, a system based on 45 phonetically unique symbols to be taught to young children, and that required later translation into a standard alphabet was always an unlikely proposition.

Before the ITA we had “look and say” and more recently the “literacy hour”, and now we have phonics. The main difference is that we are also now more focused on evidence than authority, though I’m sorry to say – though this is not surprising – that proponents of one system tend to use the statistics that suit them.

I’m quite happy to accept the statistics that there is a close correlation between low pay and poverty and lack of literacy, and between criminal offending and low literacy. That makes literacy important, but it doesn’t touch the debate about how we should teach children to read. And the fact that the OECD survey shows that only 60 per cent of UK teenagers read for pleasure, as against up to 90 per cent in Kazakhstan, Albania, China and Thailand is deeply contentious – as always, it depends how you ask the question, what you are asking about, and the cultural context. To what extent, for example, are teenagers actually telling the truth in these surveys?

I’m not convinced by Nick Gibb’s simplistic analysis that things are improving because the phonics screening check has shown dramatic and rapid improvement at the end of Year 1 – from 58 per cent in 2012, 69 per cent in 2013, and 74 per cent in 2014. All this shows is that teachers are teaching to the test, as they always do, in every subject and at every stage in education, right up to degree level and beyond. Every set of new assessments shows the same pattern – a low start, a rapid improvement, and a levelling off.

The question for reading and literacy is whether the improvements driven by the current phonics fad are translated into improved reading skills into secondary school and beyond, and whether reading for pleasure increases into adult life.

Don’t misunderstand me – I really hope that reading and literacy are improving, and I applaud Nick Gibb’s ambition that at Key Stage 2 every child should be “routinely reading five children’s books a month”. Of course, I hope that he means ‘books chosen by the child’ rather than handed out by the teacher, and perhaps even “books borrowed from a library” – where there are still libraries.

It’s difficult to see how a government can, sensibly, on the one hand promote the importance of reading for pleasure and on the other hand dramatically reduce public resources for doing just that. No, I forget, they are run by different ministries, and in any case, over the last five years the austerity agenda has trumped everything – just read the last sentence in the Coalition Agreement.