Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240-260)
8 DECEMBER 2004
MR STEPHEN
TWIGG MP, MR
ANDREW MCCULLY
AND DR
KEVAN COLLINS
Q240 Chairman: You know what I mean,
Minister. It is the difference between friendly persuasion and
saying, "You are not going to get this unless you do that,"
in terms of academies?
Mr Twigg: I have found that friendly
persuasion is the most effective way of persuading people.
Q241 Chairman: But your budget has slipped.
All that hype that you and David Miliband gave about how many
schools are going to renovated by 2015.
Mr Twigg: It is a massive programme.
Q242 Chairman: But you are only talking
about three schools in each LEA now.
Mr Twigg: It depends which stage
of Building Schools for the Future each local authority is at.
Clearly there are issues about those authorities that are going
to be in the latter part of the programme and how many schools
can be renovated or rebuilt in those authorities. Part of what
we wanted to do was to ensure that there is sufficient money in
the capital programme to meet the needs of schools and authorities
that are further down the queue for Building Schools for the Future.
They may be authorities that will not have the majority dealt
with by 2015 because we always said that this was a programme
that would take longer than 10 years.
Chairman: It is all very well in London,
is it not Minister, but take Jeff Ennis's constituency where he
was having a struggle getting £50,000 for a specialist school—
Jeff Ennis: £7,000, never mind £50,000.
Q243 Chairman: £50,000 is a lot
of money. It is alright if you are in Canary Wharf and you have
all those banks like UBS and HSBC, but what about the parts of
the country where £2 million is difficult to find? What are
you going to do about Jeff Ennis's patch if they want an academy?
They can only go to the evangelical wing of the Anglican movement.
Is that their only opportunity?
Mr Twigg: Not at all and we are
making a very proactive effort to encourage sponsors to go to
all parts of the country. It is certainly true on academies that
there will sometimes be a preference for London or perhaps some
of the other big cities and we are addressing that in a very systematic
way. On specialist schools of course we have the fund that is
designed to assist those schools that are unable to raise the
£50,000.
Q244 Chairman: Tesco's boast that £1
in £7 spent in this country goes into Tesco's through their
checkout. What are you doing to encourage these big supermarkets
and banks that suck so much money out of our communities to put
something back?
Mr Twigg: We have, as you are
probably aware, a business unit based in the Department that plays
a very proactive role in trying to get Tesco's and other businesses
engaged with different educational programmes. Clearly some companies
do a lot of this work and others do not do so much. We want to
put every bit of encouragement their way for them to do so.
Q245 Chairman: Could you not start naming
and shaming some of these companies, the ones that do and the
ones that do not? This is a very important point.
Mr Twigg: It is a very important
point.
Q246 Chairman: Some of these people suck
so much out of our communities, they destroy small businesses
and at the same time nothing seems to come back. £2 million
would seem a pittance to put back into a community.
Mr Twigg: And of course we do
have those who are making that contribution. I am not sure we
would want to go down the road of naming and shaming but we can
certainly be very positive about those that are making the contribution.
I would hope that that could be one tool that we can use to persuade
those that are not that they should do so as well.
Q247 Mr Gibb: We had reached a very interesting
point in our discussions with Dr Collins about the key differences
between the NLS and what the various phonics groups are arguing
for. This is about the texts used and you said that the NLS used
texts that go beyond the phonics knowledge of the children. Can
I just probe you on that a bit and say are we just talking about
irregular but commonly used words or are we talking about words
that could be decoded, they are decodable words, but the words
go beyond the particular stage of phonics knowledge of the children?
Are we talking about the latter?
Dr Collins: We are talking about
both, so we are talking about texts that often have irregular
words, some you know by sight vocab, some you do not yet because
you have not been taught them, and some phonic words where you
can apply the knowledge you have. For example, you may have the
CVC knowledge but you do not have the double vowel in the middle
of the word and you are not quite able to sort that word out.
Our approach would be to say you encourage the children to use
all the strategies they have and through the text you often learn
more, but the phonics teaching, which is fast and ambitious which
is going alongside, will very quickly get you to the point where
you are able to decode all of those words.
Q248 Mr Gibb: None of the phonics people
argue that you should not be teaching words like "the"
or "then" because those are the irregular words you
need to make a sentence sound proper, but they would challenge
you on these words that you could decode once you have learnt
the graphemes and the phonemes. What I want to ask you is if you
have not got that phonics knowledge to decode a word how does
the child read it?
Dr Collins: What the child does
is they bring the four aspects of the searchlights to bear. They
bring their knowledge of phonics to get the first consonant. The
dominant consonant is the first thing and they get to bits of
the word. They use other information—the context, maybe
the picture, the evolving story. They use their syntactic knowledge,
the kind of grammar and pattern of English, and they use their
graphic knowledge. They bring those things to bear to try and
solve that word. There are some words at the beginning of reading
which you cannot read and then you have got this great other asset
which is an adult to help you. What we encourage children to do
is to be active learners and to try new things. I have a problem
with texts that are completely bound by what children already
know. It is quite helpful to have some words in a text which require
you to be active and begin to problem solve because I think that
is what a lot of reading is about.
Q249 Mr Gibb: I do not think that is
necessarily a better method of reading. I disagree. I have seen
seven-year-old children guessing words and just pretending to
read and they would flounder without a picture. Why did we need
an NLS in the first place in 1996-97? What was going on in our
schools in the 10 years before that? Why has it become so necessary?
Dr Collins: The principal problem
was that there was no place where literacy—and I think reading
is the priority in the early years—where reading and writing
was taught. There was no moment in the day when this was our focus.
It was lost in an integrated curriculum and literacy teaching—I
think we would agree on this—requires some very focused
and structured teaching in the early years. I would say on your
earlier point I would be appalled if I saw a seven-year-old who
was just guessing words.
Q250 Mr Gibb: I see it often
Dr Collins: What I would want
to see seven-year-olds using the knowledge that they have but
also attempting at problem-solving unknown words. I regard that
as slightly different to guessing.
Q251 Mr Gibb: I have seen children who
have heard the story before and who memorise it. I remember seeing
a girl reading and she said, "Winnie the Pooh ..." The
word "Winnie" was not there at all. She was just making
it up.
Dr Collins: And the text is inappropriately
matched.
Q252 Mr Gibb: The story was right.
Dr Collins: Equally of course,
you see children who decode accurately but have no understanding
of the comprehension in terms of what they are reading. That is
why the balance is so important.
Q253 Mr Gibb: Presumably you cannot comprehend
until you can decode?
Dr Collins: Absolutely.
Q254 Mr Gibb: So the key thing is to
get the decoding right first?
Dr Collins: And that is why our
first structured approach to teaching reading must bring in phonics.
Q255 Mr Gibb: You are bringing in these
texts too soon, are you not, because you are forcing children
to do things that damage the way they should be learning to read
because they are guessing too early. They are getting words that
are too hard for their phonics knowledge and therefore they are
learning to read in two different ways. One is context and guessing
and pictures and the other is build up the word from the phonics.
Dr Collins: Controlling the reading
environment of a child is a tricky business because there might
be the odd book that you have control over but the truth is that
children are active readers right across the curriculum and throughout
their lives, and what you have to do is give them strategies that
allow them to be engaged and positive about that approach and
not think, "I can only when I read these little books and
everything else I cannot read."
Q256 Mr Gibb: You talk about Playing
with Sounds. Can you tell me in what way that is more impressive
than the NLS Progression in Phonics programme?
Dr Collins: It takes the teaching
earlier. It takes it much more into reception and even into nursery.
It engages in a much more play-based context and it accelerates
the phonic learning. One of the things we have learnt (and it
is one of the things you asked earlier we could have done differently)
is that you can accelerate the phonics teaching if it is done
in a fun and ambitious way that is play-based. So it takes it
very much into the early years context and accelerates the learning
through games and through play, which has been very, very successful.
Q257 Mr Gibb: Playing with Sounds
does not use the shape of the letter, does it, it just teaches
the sound?
Dr Collins: It starts with phonic
knowledge which is the phonemic, the hearing of the sounds. It
moves on to recognition which does include the shape later on.
Then it moves into the segmenting for spelling and the blending
for reading. So it takes you through all the steps but absolutely
starts with the sounds, you are right, which is where all phonics
starts.
Q258 Chairman: Let's get the history
of this in time. One small question still remains in my mind.
In terms of the history of this development there used to be a
great controversy about ITA, the Initial Teaching Alphabet. Where
does that play in the scheme of things these days? I remember
much criticism of Glenys Kinnock's role in ITA at one stage. Is
this all dead and buried or is it still part of the pragmatic
approach?
Dr Collins: You can dig it out
of the long grass. It is pretty much there. The trouble with ITA
and other similar approaches is you have to learn two things because
you are learning a particular code, the ITA code, and that you
have to then learn the English phonic code. What we agree absolutely
on is let's teach them English phonics, let's teach phonics early
because they can learn it, and you can then move on to the comprehension
and the other deeper aspects of literacy.
Q259 Chairman: It was a fashion that
is now out of date?
Dr Collins: Yes.
Chairman: Val, the last word to you.
Q260 Valerie Davey: Chairman, I think
what we have we seen this morning is that this debate is very
time consuming, and one of the things that happened when we brought
in the national literacy structures and syllabus was we said to
teachers, "Stop the debate let's get on and do something."
I think that was really important. You are showing us this morning
the depth of the background to it. Can I just ask you finally
to link what you have just said about the strategy of teaching
of young people with the earlier comments you made about boys'
learning because I think that is where context is so important.
My son was bored stiff with Janet and John. He did not want to
learn to read. He would go to the library and he would pick out
something about the solar system or whatever completely beyond
his reading ability but that is the book he wanted to hold and
to look at and to begin to take a few words out of. Is it not
especially for boys that context is so important?
Dr Collins: Absolutely and this
is why Playing with Sounds is important because it is play-based.
It is particularly important for boys because not only was phonics
not taught consistently previously I do not think, it also was
not taught well. It was a letter a week colouring everything that
begins with P and actually that does not teach you a great deal
about phonics. Exploring our sound letter system is particularly
engaging for boys who prefer, for whatever reason, active learning
in small groups and through play, which is exactly what Playing
with Sounds does.
Mr McCully: I should say that
it is really engaging and if the Committee would like to see copies
of this I think you would find it fun as well. We would be delighted
to give the Committee copies if you would be interested.
Chairman: We would like that. Any of
you who did not have the opportunity to be at the IPPR seminar
in Oxford on Friday and Saturday of last week which had some of
the leading experts in terms of this whole range of areas, I really
do recommend the papers that Kathy Silva and others were presenting.
Can I thank you. We have had a lot of Jolly Phonics but I hope
you have found jolly politics as well! Thank you for answering
questions right across the range. Thank you, Minister, and thank
you to your officials.
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