Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-179)
8 DECEMBER 2004
MR STEPHEN
TWIGG MP, MR
ANDREW MCCULLY
AND DR
KEVAN COLLINS
Q160 Mr Gibb: 8 or 9%. This is the hard
core of the problem—why we are not going from 85 up to 100%.
If we can tackle this we can solve a lot of Britain's problems.
What could we do to wave one to get that figure down? Do you feel
there is anything we can do?
Dr Collins: We define that as,
if you like, quality first teaching and the imperative is to ensure
that every child gets the best possible start. For me the priorities
are early intervention, so we are working very closely with our
colleagues in the Foundation stage and Early Years, so our recent
phonics publication called Playing with Sounds is driving
the phonics teaching into the Early Years, done on a games-based
approach where it is fast and fun but that is really important.
Also, working very assertively with parents in a sense in terms
of giving them more support on how they can support their children's
reading and we work with Sure Start, but it is all about the early
intervention and working with the children and catching them as
early as possible.
Q161 Chairman: Andrew, are you the lead
person in the National Schools Standard Team?
Mr McCully: Indeed. Kevan leads
the team which is outside the Department in terms of structure,
so I bring Kevan's experience into the Department and combine
that with a range of other approaches to the school improvement,
and it is the school improvement angle where I wanted to supplement
Kevan's points. Mr Gibb, you asked the question what would he
have done differently or more quickly, and I think the other key
aspect of our developments over the last year or so is to bring
the National Literacy Strategy together with the National Numeracy
Strategy into a much more integrated approach to improving standards
in primary schools, and one of the key areas for development and
further progress, because we are very clear we need to make further
progress, is looking at the effective leadership of the overall
curriculum and standards within schools and increasing focus on
interventions and those schools where standards could and should
be better. I highlight two areas which are crucial to the management
of the waves that you have just been talking about. First of all,
our leadership programme in primary schools, where we now have
around about 10% of the most effective primary leaders in the
country working with those schools who are underperforming or
who have room to improve their literacy and numeracy standards.
We are also developing this year a more intensive programme of
support, where the real focus is on the basics—the basic
systems and the basic structures for the improvement of literacy
and numeracy in those schools—and I think with those two
very significant whole school developments we add to the very
structured teaching and learning strategies which Kevan has just
been talking about.
Q162 Mr Gibb: To what extent is phonics
embedded in the text used by children in the first few years in
primary school?
Dr Collins: Phonics, of course,
is embedded in all texts but what we do not do in terms of the
reading books that children enjoy is control them by phonic knowledge.
Where you might be going, and correct me if I am wrong, is that
there are reading approaches which focus on the phonic knowledge
in terms of the text the children read and you just provide text
that sometimes may not even make sense as long as you are giving
the right phonic practice to the children. That is not our approach.
The approach we have is we teach phonics explicitly and directly
away from text. We teach phonic knowledge, and phonic skills of
blending, segmenting and recognition, but then we encourage children
to apply that phonic knowledge to real text. That text is appropriately
age-related.
Q163 Mr Gibb: But even though some of
the words or longer words in those texts will be beyond their
phonics knowledge?
Dr Collins: Yes.
Q164 Mr Gibb: So how are they meant to
get those words?
Dr Collins: They have to develop
two sets of skills, phonic skills which allow you to decode words
where there is a phonic regularity, but the problem in English
because of its orthography is some of the high frequency words,
let us take "the", are quite complex phonic bits of
work, so we have to teach two things—phonic knowledge firstly,
but, secondly, word recognition, and there are some words we just
teach as sight words.
Q165 Mr Gibb: But it goes beyond "the".
There are a huge number of words that go beyond their phonic knowledge.
In your judgment, you think that is not damaging the children's
learning ability in reading?
Dr Collins: Absolutely not because
to read well in English at all levels you need two things—you
need absolute phonic knowledge, that is your first and foremost
certainty, but you also need the ability to problem solve words
that are not regular and that certainly do not conform to the
phonic range.
Q166 Mr Gibb: Lastly, it was very good
to see you at the seminar, and hopefully in January we can thrash
this out a bit more, but what do you think of Morag Stuart's paper
on this? She is quite critical of this double-edged approach,
the four-pronged—
Dr Collins: The Searchlights model.
Q167 Mr Gibb: Yes. What do you think
of her paper which analysed the DfES paper in quite a lot of detail?
Dr Collins: I am a great fan of
Morag and I think she has done tremendous work. The point is,
though, that teachers do work hard to identify texts that are
within the reach of children's kind of phonic knowledge. There
is an attempt to do that, but what I am saying is it is impossible,
or certainly not our approach, to try and completely eliminate
all words that are not within the phonic range.
Mr Twigg: Briefly, we had a seminar
last year at which Kevan was present and Morag as well in which
we reviewed all of this, and there is clearly a range of views
and, indeed, we can be criticised in the direction that Nick has
set out but also from the other direction as well, and the sense—not
from me but that expert seminar—was that we basically got
it about right in terms of the balance.
Chairman: A very senior educationalist,
when he heard that we were looking at this area, said "That
area is a swamp with sharks in it"!
Q168 Helen Jones: Dr Collins, you mentioned
the need for work in the Early Years and when we visited Finland
we found that children in Finnish schools learn to read in a few
months, and there are two reasons for that. One is that Finnish
is a phonetic language, but also they get much more preparation
in pre school to make them ready to read. Are you satisfied with
the quality of preparation that we have in the Early Years in
terms of getting children ready to read, and are you concerned
that in some areas we may be trying to teach children to read
text far too early rather than getting them reading ready? Have
you any evidence for that?
Dr Collins: If I could add one
more piece to the Finnish jigsaw, I have had the privilege of
visiting schools in Finland as well, and the other dimension is
the enormous support in the home and socially for language, and
especially for literacy.
Q169 Helen Jones: Absolutely.
Dr Collins: The focus in Early
Years has been one of the amazing stories of the last 10 years
in this country. The strength of the Foundation stage curriculum,
the work in our Reception, our Nursery, and our Early Years settings
is really beginning to come through. What we now have is a much
more consistent approach. We are focusing in my team on quality,
ensuring that the provision now is consistently higher, and what
I mean by that is that children are engaged in rich oral language
experiences in Early Years.
Q170 Helen Jones: Nursery rhymes.
Dr Collins: Yes, which are really
important for syntactic knowledge—
Q171 Helen Jones: I am trying to get
us back to real English!
Dr Collins: —but the other
dimension of that is it has to be meaningful as well. I was in
Everton children's centre last week where they are engaged in
environmental learning and although it is environmental learning
one of the core outcomes is oral language for those children,
and we see that as key in preparing children for literacy. Absolutely
essential learning. I could not agree with you more.
Q172 Helen Jones: We have received some
evidence that, where we have this problem of underachievement,
it is due to the fact that children have poor language and listening
skills to start with. Now, given the fact that we have difficulty
in recruiting staff in the Early Years and those staff are often
very poorly paid, do you have any evidence that it would help
improve our reading skills if we paid more attention to the qualifications
and pay of staff in Early Years settings before children even
start formal school?
Mr Twigg: That is part of what
we need to do, as we take forward the whole area of children's
services and Early Years. That is an element of what needs to
be done anyway in terms of the status and recruitment and retention
of those staff, so we are providing a genuinely quality early
start for children in those settings. There is work being undertaken,
obviously led by Margaret Hodge, on that.
Mr McCully: You asked about the
evidence. The document that was published on the Government's
child care strategy quoted the most recent evidence from the EPPE
work which confirmed that the crucial element about improving
standards was the quality of the early learning experience, not
necessarily the quantity but the quality, and that points certainly
to your points about qualifications and the standards.
Q173 Helen Jones: We have seen some very
good nursery provision but also some that makes us cringe—children
tracing out letters of the alphabet before they are even properly
equipped to hold their pencils properly. We all agree we have
to get rid of that. But the other question I want to ask you,
if I may, is you referred earlier to this question about phonics
and texts, and English is a terribly difficult language, but can
we clarify what we are trying to achieve here in reading, because
it is not simply about teaching people the mechanics of reading—which
is essential; it is also about getting them to enjoy books so
they continue reading in later life. Have you any evidence to
offer us on how the National Literacy Strategy is working? I can
remember, for instance, you referred to Singapore where they are
very good at teaching maths and science and they then said to
us, "We need to know how to teach creativity"!
Mr Twigg: Yes. I went to Finland
as well—I think everyone goes to Finland to look at this—but
to Kevan's third point about the home I would add in a sense a
fourth but related point about libraries. I went to visit public
libraries in Finland and saw not just the commitment and investment
there but the fact that they are so clearly widely used by people
from all backgrounds, so I think that is an element that we need
to build into the equation as well. They would have a love of
reading as well as that technical ability to read, so there is
a broader cultural aspect. I think in the PIRLS study, from memory
not only did the 10 year olds come out the third most able readers
in the world, but also they came out as the most able to read
full books. They were the most enthused by books, so it was not
simply they had that technical ability: they also had the love
of reading which I agree is critically important.
Dr Collins: Relating back to Mr
Gibbs' earlier question about the strategy, one of the earlier
elements of framework so important for me is there a set of entitlements
included in there for children, that you have to or should enjoy
poetry as part of your studies each year but you have a wide range,
including non fiction for boys particularly and fiction as part
of your reading experience. These are entitlements laid down in
the framework so it is not only about a means to an end with everything
driving towards one outcome; it is about ensuring that in the
here and now your range of experience is full and broad, and that
is a key element of the framework and one of the reasons that
it is so important to document.
Mr McCully: Just to complete the
picture, it has always been absolutely central to the approach
that, alongside the National Literacy Strategy and the resources
that Kevan leads on in schools, is the continuing campaign and
encouragement for the enjoyment of reading. The National Reading
Campaign which reached its height in 1999-2000[4]was
part of the introduction and development of the National Literacy
Strategy. We continue that with a range of partners such as the
National Literacy Trust which do fantastic work in terms of encouraging
children and adults to read, and that remains absolutely central
to our approach.
Q174 Helen Jones: On staff training,
we are asking primary teachers to do an awful lot. We are asking
them to be experts on the mechanics of teaching really, but also
asking them to know a lot about literature, if we want children
to enjoy poetry, novels and so on, and certainly I found when
I was teaching English in secondary school that was a real difficulty.
I used to say, "If I get another child who has only learnt
to write haikus I shall scream"! What are we doing to improve
the training of teachers, including those who were trained quite
some time ago, and make them confident in both the teaching of
reading and improving children's enjoyment of literature, and
what else do you think we need to do that we are not doing now?
Mr Twigg: I think the most recent
piece of work that Ofsted did looking at initial teacher training
demonstrated that partly through the National Literacy Strategy
and the work we have done with the teacher training agency and
the various institutes of teacher education has improved the general,
quality of teacher education with respect to English but clearly
that is only at the initial stage, and what we then need to do
is ensure that is built upon through the further stages of teaching
with continuing professional development. As you will know, last
year we published Excellence and Enjoyment, the programme
for primary, that is very much about building upon the literacy
and the numeracy strategies, but also looking at the broader curriculum
in primary schools, and that itself was a product of a series
of professional engagements, conferences with head teachers, engagement
with teacher associations, talking with subject associations—and
we will come later on to the outdoor learning issue—organisations
like the Geographical Association and the Royal Geographical Society
to really get that professional engagement so the support is there
for work across the curriculum. So I think what we need to do
is to be looking all the time at how we can engage professionally
with teachers to improve their professional schools in English
as a subject but also in literacy skills that can be enhanced
through most, if not all, of the other subjects in the primary
curriculum.
Q175 Chairman: But, Minister, early on
in response to Helen's question you said that the important thing
was quality, quality of teaching and instruction. When we did
our Early Years inquiry on our visits what we noticed in Finland
was that quality, yet we still have people in Early Years, who
are paid a minimum wage, they themselves are not as articulate,
many of them, as we would wish in terms of children learning from
them, and here we have just had research presented to this Committee
only last week that 75% of Sure Start is not really making much
difference. What on earth are you doing in the Department not
to learn from that and switch to the programmes that do add value?
What are you doing to improve the quality of things like Sure
Start, because that is where it matters, is it not?
Mr Twigg: It is where it matters,
and I think it is fair to say that the primary strategy, initially
with the literacy and then the numeracy strategies is where we
started off as a government so we are much further down the line
with respect to the work we are doing in primary than we are with
Sure Start and Early Years, which came a little bit later on.
One of the things that Kevan and his colleagues have been doing
is looking at how we can ensure we learn lessons across the phases,
some of which will be the Early Years and Sure Start approach,
the Children's Services approach, learning lessons from some of
the success in the primary strategy as well as, as you rightly
say, learning lessons from success within Sure Start itself, and
that I know is an absolute priority for Margaret Hodge who leads
on these matters to ensure that we do get that right. A lot of
money has gone into Sure Start and will go into Children's Services.
Of course we want that to be money that is properly spent.
Q176 Chairman: But are we already switching
that money from the programmes that do not add much value to children's
educational experience pre school to those programmes that do?
Some of us know Dr Kathy Silva very well and her research shows
the Government is doing excellently in terms of nursery provision;
it makes a real difference and adds enormous value, but she does
say you can teach parenting if you do it consistently and not
in some nice, warm cuddly environment. You have to know what you
want to achieve in a Sure Start situation. Why is government not
doing more about this quickly?
Mr Twigg: We do need to do more
about it, and it is a priority. I do not think it is as simple
as saying you switch resources because it is often saying that
there is somewhere that has very good practice, somewhere else
that has poor and lots of places in between, and it is about how
you can most effectively share that best practice so it applies
in the other places. I do not think you do not make those places
better by taking the resources away from them but by giving them
the support and challenge they need to succeed.
Q177 Valerie Davey: The consistent element
for a child throughout these different phases are the parents,
and I think Kevan mentioned earlier on the element in the jigsaw
is the parental background. I think the Government, in handing
out books and sorting out, is doing work but what more could we
do to encourage the quality and the professionalism at the schools
and the Sure Start centres, but not to underestimate and defranchise
the role of the parents who then feel a bit on the edge of all
of this? How do we ensure they are that element of giving the
love of books, the reading and all that goes with that?
Dr Collins: There is a tendency
for schools to lay out for parents the sets of things they should
do: "If you do these things, your child will learn to read",
and we are trying to shift that slightly and say, "The language
needs to change as well as the practice". We are trying to
involve, inform and engage parents which all require different
kinds of approaches. For example, when a school comes to a particular
approach for teaching reading, it is not really appropriate and
I do not think it works if a school just tells parents, "That
is what we are doing" without bringing them into the debate,
into the discussion, because the debates are rich and interesting
around the balance between the whole book and the phonics, and
parents need to be engaged in that as well as, at the end, being
part of the solution. So we have been providing lots of information
for schools on the ways you can do that, and the information is
not art—it is just disseminating the effective practice.
What we have is some extremely wonderful practice where schools
are working very closely with parents and very engaged in an involved
way. What we have, though, is not the right mechanisms yet to
get that consistently spread across the system, so we are trying
to find better ways of spreading that knowledge and that learning
across the system. I would say that the solution to engaging parents
will not come from the top; it has to be school-led and school-owned
and community-owned, and so it is not for us to say "This
is how you do it" but for us to say "This is how other
people are doing it; what can we do to help you do it in that
way", and more facilitate the process rather than drive it.
Q178 Chairman: This all sounds very good
in theory, but I go to some of my constituents' homes and I see
a home with no books, no toys and a big television in the corner—and
it may not even be transmitting anything in English. We are talking
about 9%; you say that is the most difficult. You seem to be talking
about everybody but the 9%. What do we do to reach out to these
children that have no encouragement from the home, in fact have
a positive discouragement in many ways? What are we doing to reach
out to that 9% who do not get any help at all from the home?
Dr Collins: The critical thing,
of course, is that the 9% are often parts of cycles where their
families themselves have been very alienated from the education
process, parents and children, and it is a cyclical process and
you are breaking into something quite hard here. There are two
things we are doing which I think are very powerful. We are working
currently with Manchester University on something called Communicating
Matters which is where we are developing training resources for
adults working with children absolutely at the level of "This
is how you help a child's language and communication". This
is a very unnatural thing to do because for most children in the
world learning to talk is a very natural process given the right
kind of articulate machinery, but for some children, and I take
your point it is a very small number, we have to be engaged in
a slightly more assertive way, and we are developing this intervention
really with very young children in nurseries, and that is working
well and we are extending that currently. The other important
experience is through programmes like family literacy, where you
work directly with the whole family, and in my school we used
to run these programmes where you have the parents engaged in
learning, City and Guilds, NVQ—whatever it might have been—and
at the same time you are working directly with their children
and you bring them together for some of the time, and that is
a real solution for some of these families. My own personal view
is that the numbers are relatively small, and we should be doing
it almost case by case.
Q179 Chairman: We know there is 9%, because
the figures are showing. You said yourself, people need third
way with 9%. That is not small.
Dr Collins: We have to be clear;
some of the 9% include children with profound learning needs who
have their own particular profile as learners which will make
learning literacy difficult for them. With some of the children
we can work on the context, but there will be some children who
may have particular medical conditions or particular impairments,
disabilities, who we will find difficult to teach to read. They
are hard to teach.
4 Note by Witness: The National Reading Campaign
reached its height in 1998-1999, not 1999-2000, as stated previously. Back
|
