Armadillo Online

The Literacy Hour

Article by Mary Hoffman
[Armadillo 6.2 Summer 2004]

In May, the Society of Authors held a fascinating meeting on literacy in schools, with contributions from Chris Powling, children's writer and ex-teacher, and Dr. Jonathan Solity, lecturer in Educational Psychology at the University of Warwick. Chris Powling had been involved in some discussions with Secretary of State for Education, Charles Clarke, along with Philip Pullman, Bernard Ashley and Jamila Gavin, who chaired the meeting. They had also met officials and were due to have another meeting the next day. Initiatives that are being pressed for are:

The DfES should fund Children's Book Week
There should be a designated TV channel for teachers
There should be something to raise the profile of books in schools ¨ The Schools Library Service should be supported and revived.
A Children's Books Council, perhaps run by the National Literacy Trust, should be set up to co-ordinate the many agencies involved.

There is a publication ¨ øMeetings with the MinisterÓ ¨ giving the perspectives of Chris, Philip, Bernard, Jamila and also Anne Fine on literacy. It costs £4.99 and is available from the National Centre for Language and Literacy, The University of Reading, Bulmershe Court, Earley, Reading, RG6 1HY (www.ncll.org.uk)

Chris's presentation was a sort of appetiser to the main course of the evening ¨ Jonathan Solity's account of the success he has had in a programme of teaching reading, using only øreal booksÓ, i.e. not Reading Schemes. He developed his project in schools in Essex and was aware from the beginning that it must have no cost implications.

His principles were very simple ¨

If you teach roughly sixty phonic skills to children, they will be able to read almost anything, if applied to real books and supplemented with some sight vocabulary.
Children need more vocabulary, general knowledge and much greater quantities of books.
Children need to see words in different contexts.
The structure of the books they read must be typical of written English, not artificial, otherwise no øtransfer of skillsÓ will take place.

Basildon had some of the lowest attainment levels in the country ¨ 25% of children not able to read. But that had reduced to 2% after Dr. Solity's project. If adopted nationally, it would save £200 million. The teachers were not selected; the team work with whoever is available and all the children. Training consists of five half-day sessions by March of an academic year and the full impact was usually felt in the second year.

He was vitriolic about the National Literacy Strategy, which he claimed had never been properly piloted or tested, researched or evaluated. øIt isn't working, even within its own terms, at either word level, sentence level or text level. Twenty per cent of the school population is still failing to learn to read.Ó And the children who are doing least well get further and further away from real books. Chris Powling gave the depressing statistic that we spend twice as much on testing as we do on books.

Change from the ground up

But Dr. Solity had no interest in changing government policy. øChange must happen from the ground up, not top-down.Ó There was general agreement that children were being taught to read too early. Sue Palmer, who worked for the National Literacy Strategy for three years before resigning, said, øWe have an extremely early school start age in this country. It sets children up for failure.Ó

Dr Solity agreed. If children were going to start so young, their first year should be spent on developing social skills and their spoken language, before starting to learn to read. Children in ødisadvantaged catchment areasÓ can catch up within two years if his approach is used.

There was much lamentation about the way in which parents no longer talk to, read to or sing to their children. There is competition from TV, videos and DVDs, computers etc. Even the MacLaren buggy was blamed for having children pushed around the world facing away from their carers!