Examination of Witnesses (Questions 280-299)
7 FEBRUARY 2005
MS SUE
LLOYD, PROFESSOR
RHONA JOHNSTON
AND MS
RUTH MISKIN
Q280 Helen Jones: So that is not pure
phonics then, is it?
Ms Miskin: No. Well it is by the
time you get to Harry Potter. You have the simple transparent
code for phonics, but the "kn" is still phonics, it
just means it is the more complex code. I am holding up a grid
and in each box is one sound and each sound is represented by
one symbol, we call that a grapheme. So in the "fe"
box I have an "f", in the "ul" box I have
an "l", in the "um" box I have an "m",
but as we move through the programme, there are more complex codes
and the children are whizzing through these now because they think
"Oh, I can read, I can read". They are not hindered
because we are actually bringing a larger code in to them, but
gradually. We hold their hand to keep them safe. For example,
here in the "s" box now, we have an "f" and
we have double "ff" and we have "ph". Let
me give you another example. In the "e" box we have
"ee" as in "been", we have "y" as
in "shiny", we have "ea" as in "tea".
It is a gradual opening up of the system, until really you think
"My goodness, very soon, by the end of Year 1, they can pick
up anything". May I just say, however, that at the same time
there are two things? We are building up the blocks very gradually
from the bottom to make the child feel very secure, but, equally,
we are immersing them in a wide range of literature so the children
are hearing rhymes, they are listening to stories. It is almost
the difference between, when you have a child at home, hearing
your child read the book and at night time reading them a story
and getting them heavily involved in it. So soon you want to inspire
them to read "the visitors came to stay", but you are
saying "You are here now, but soon you will be here"
and that is what we get.
Q281 Helen Jones: Just to finish off
and be clear, what you are saying is that you are using phonics
but you are also trying to inculcate in children that enjoyment
of literature which is vital if they are going to continue to
read in later life.
Ms Miskin: Exactly, you have put
it in a nutshell. They actually have to see the whole point of
reading. Keith Stanovich in the States has issued some amazing
research. He shows that children who are in the top 5% of readers
by the time they are eight, and what he is looking at is home
reading here, who have been immersed in literature and love reading,
read in one day what the bottom lot do in a year. He calls it
the Matthew effect: unto those that have shall be given and they
shall have abundance. Unto those that have not it shall be taken
away, even what they have.
Q282 Mr Greenway: Just a brief question.
How important is it, if you are going to teach a child to read
through this synthetic phonics method, that they have not been
exposed to some other form of teaching at playschool or nursery?
Ms Lloyd: For three quarters of
the children, it may not make such a difference, but it will for
a quarter, if they have been asked to go to whole words. If you
look at another script you will realise how difficult it is to
try to memorise words just by looking at them. Our letters are
so familiar to us, but to children they are just squiggles. If
we ask them to try to memorise all these books, which they do
in the NLS, they are encouraged to do this, then that is where
they start to fall and then it is very much more difficult to
pick up the pieces. It is better to get the system right at the
beginning. We should look at the mistakes that we have made over
history, because we allowed a whole language philosophy to come
into our teaching with no testing whatsoever and we now realise
what a dreadful thing it was to have taken the phonics out. The
whole language is good when the children can read, but it is not
when they cannot. Then, when we came to the NLS, we did start
to learn what to do because initially they did test the NLS and
here we have Marian Sainsbury's results; the NFER tested it. Although
the children improved through the National Literacy Strategy,
there was improvement, they did not even get to an average quotient
of 100, yet people in synthetic phonics schools like ours had
much higher results than this. That is what I am trying to explain,
that the NLS was better than no phonics, but their type of phonics
is still the cart before the horse, it is trying to get the children
to enjoy the books and read them for themselves before they are
ready, instead of just enjoying good literature by reading to
them and talking about stories. When they have the synthetic phonics,
then you can take them through much more easily and you can reduce
all the problems that you have created with the wrong method.
Look at this synthetic phonics school: no significant difference
in literacy skills between the boys and girls. It is the same
at our school and Ruth's; the boys can do just as well as the
girls. No significant difference between children with summer
birthdays and no children with English as an additional language
on the SEN register. 94% are achieving level four at the Key Stage
2 SATS, compared with 77%in England and this is a large primary
school with a low entry assessment. This is a poor social area,
a very large school. Look at the level five: 65% achieved level
five in this school and only 26% in the rest of England. Boys?
33.3% of boys achieved level five in writing compared with 11%
in the rest of the schools and it goes on like this as well. At
Key Stage 2, their improvement ratio is 13.7. If you get a 12,
you are supposed to be A/A*.
Q283 Chairman: We will take that information
as evidence.
Ms Lloyd: Yes, please take that
as evidence.
Q284 Mr Greenway: The reason for my question
is that having come new to this subject in many ways, reading
the briefs for this, your argument for synthetic phonics is so
convincing, or appears to be, that I just worry that with more
and more children now at three and four years' old in foundation
classes, in nursery classes, in playschools and playgroups and
so on being encouraged to try to learn to read by people who have
not been trained in the approach you are taking, that makes the
teaching of synthetic phonics to them more complicated and more
difficult.
Ms Lloyd: I think both Ruth and
I would probably say the same thing. When the schools are free
to go ahead and do the programme that we have written and they
follow it properly, then they will get the higher results and
both of them are fun programmes. However, when they feel that
they are obliged, because all their literacy consultants are telling
them that the National Literacy Strategy is the one that is the
most important, then they feel that they really ought to follow
the National Literacy Strategy and not exactly do the Jolly Phonics
or Ruth Miskin's RML programme. This is where I think it is a
very unfair advantage that the DfES has taken the high ground
and said "Well we know better". Yet there is no evidence
that their programmes are better. On this report, they have not
even reached the 100 average and with the other one, the Early
Literacy Support programme, they have not even tested it at all
and this programme is the worst of all: it is meant to be for
the children who have difficulties and even the best scientists
are saying that it has nothing in it that is supported by research.
We really need to understand that this is very different from
work done by people like Rhona, which comes through the experimental
psychology research route, which is really very, very scientific.
What we are having is hundreds of pieces of research work but
they are not all through this really scientific route. So we are
being deceived as to what is good research and what is not.
Ms Miskin: I just want to come
in on this. When you get these children coming into nursery or
into reception class, I say to a parent that whatever they have
done, I would not denigrate, because if they have got children
to love books, we can put that right. For example, I worked in
a totally Bengali school and all the parents were teaching their
letter names, which is not terribly helpful but I would always
thank them for it and say that would be so useful soon, if not
now. I do not think parents can harm; good teaching can get over
it.
Mr Greenway: That answers my question.
Q285 Mr Chaytor: What puzzles me, given
that children have been taught to read for hundreds of years,
is why it is only now that there are these fierce arguments about
different methods. Has this not been an issue in previous generations
or were methods so unsophisticated that it was not a matter of
debate? Why has it only developed now and why do we not have a
bigger body, a more substantial body of research which compares
different methods of teaching of reading to enable us to come
to a conclusion?
Prof Johnston: Education is not
very evidence-based in the way it functions and there tend to
be very charismatic figures who announce that this is a fantastic
way of learning to read and are really very influential. You have
heard in previous sessions about Frank Smith and also about Goodman.
Because these people have not done research to show the effectiveness
of their methods, but people have been bowled over by their enthusiasm,
they have just been rolled out in schools and nobody has actually
looked at just what effect it is having. There has in fact been
a huge amount of research about phonics teaching. Marilyn Adams'
book was published in 1990 showing clearly that a systematic phonics
regime was much, much better than a non-systematic one or a scheme
which did not have any phonics in it at all. The research has
actually been there a long time, but the research was not telling
people what they wanted to see and it was ignored really by educationalists.
Q286 Mr Chaytor: What happens in other
countries, particularly countries where children tend to score
more highly at reading than they do in the United Kingdom; Scandinavia
and Holland presumably? Do they use phonics?[1]
Prof Johnston: Yes, Holland uses
a synthetic phonics scheme, Austria does, Germany does and Spain.
Even in these countries the whole language is—
Q287 Mr Chaytor: Not Sweden, not Finland,
not Norway?
Prof Johnston: I would be speaking
out of turn if I announced what they did, because I do not know
for certain. Even in these schools which are very committed to
synthetic phonics, even in these countries which are committed
to synthetic phonics, this whole word, whole language approach
has had some impact. Even in a system where children are doing
very well indeed, there has been this influence, which other researchers
I have met at international conferences have told me about.
Ms Miskin: When the NLS was first
started I was on one of the advisory bodies right at the beginning
with John Stannard. John Stannard was in an almost impossible
position when the NLS was being written, because he had all of
those pressure groups saying "We want this" "We
want this" and then I would come in and others would say
"No, but we want this". What we actually got was a plethora
of eclectic messages to teachers, so they had not just one sort
of phonics, but they had three sorts of phonics. They had a little
tiny bit of synthetic phonics, they had analytic phonics, which
means giving the children a word and telling them the sounds and
then they have to find them, then they had something which you
may not even have heard of called Onset and Rhyme, which was going
"b-een" or "c-at", where you did not bother
breaking it into separate sounds, but two sounds. You then had
the whole word lobby, which was "Let's all learn 250 words
very quickly" as well. So three sorts of phonics and the
word level work; then the real books lobby and that is just the
beginning. Then you have other lobbies to look at how you organise
it, whether you should put children in groups so they could actually
apply the knowledge they have at their level, or whether you should
mix them all up together. Even when you have decided on a method
which actually works, you then have to look at the most effective
way to implement it. I would just like to bring out an important
point which I brought up right at the beginning of the NLS with
some very senior people both at the DfES and at Ofsted. I sat
in front of them and said "This is the biggest problem you
are going to face in seven to eight years' time and it is this.
You are planning for all the children. Just imagine a Year 1 class
of six-year-olds. They are going to spend 20 minutes looking at
a book which they cannot read. That is 20 minutes of every day.
How many minutes is that a week? One hundred minutes a week. You
are going to talk about plot characterisations, settings, structure,
author's craft and author's intention for 20 minutes and you are
six. Then you are going to do a phonics lesson and some of the
six-year-olds do not even know these, they have missed the plot
in reception and they do not know these, and some of them are
way onto multiple graphing systems. So the little lad is sitting
there in the middle group, he has missed the plot altogether because
that is not being taught any more. Then, once a week for 20 minutes
the children have a reading session at their level; once a week
for 20 minutes. They are then given a book. Imagine you do not
know these and you are given a book. What reading material do
you give to a child who cannot read those letters? What you do
is this. I have found some here. You give them a little book that
we can guess together, we can learn off by heart. They are learning
a little book off by heart because of the predictive nature of
the text. They can guess from the first page what all the other
pages are going to be "My home is a shell. My home is a hole.
My home is a web. My home is a stone", when actually they
cannot even read "b". That is their phonics for a week
and the only reading they will do at their level for a week. Even
my programme will not work under that circumstance.
Q288 Mr Gibb: When Kevan Collins was
here last week he said that a lot of schools did well in teaching
reading using the NLS scheme. He actually cited Tower Hamlets,
which is an authority where you have been working.
Ms Miskin: Yes.
Q289 Mr Gibb: Is he right? Can schools
achieve the kind of level that Sue Lloyd was talking about, the
94%, the 100% that you achieved in Kobi Nazrul, using the NLS?
Ms Miskin: Since Kevan made that
comment I have been doing some research into what Tower Hamlets'
schools actually do, because I left Tower Hamlets three years
ago. I wrote to the ex English adviser and we checked up, actually
only earlier today, to find out what they all do. When I was a
head teacher I wrote something called Best Practice Phonics
published by Heineman. Every school in Tower Hamlets adopted a
synthetic reading approach and it was either Best Practice
Phonics or Sue Lloyd's. I talked with a head teacher this
morning who agreed with me that ten years ago in Tower Hamlets
reading was vaguely acquired. It is only in the last ten years
that they have really started teaching reading properly and even
though they do not necessarily apply their knowledge into the
reading they are getting a basic structure. I asked her whether
they did the NLS PIPS and she said "No". I asked whether
they did the NLS ELS, one of the other catch-up programmes, and
she said "A bit", but that they actually fitted it in
with the Best Practice Phonics. I asked whether they did
the new playing and sounds in the NLS and she said "No".
They have not done all of these things which have actually been
brought out, so Kevan was wrong.
Q290 Mr Gibb: What is the key difference
between the texts which the NLS uses and the texts that the Jolly
Phonics and the RML schemes use?
Ms Lloyd: We try very hard to
give the children books that they can actually work out, so that
when they have learned 40-odd letter sounds, they can read reasonably
good stories with that number of sounds. Then gradually, as they
learn more, they go on to the next level of text. I think we have
to understand as well that if we do not actually start being responsible
and test all these programmes and test what is going on we shall
never understand what is best for our children. We need to learn
to go through the scientists that are linked to the true science,
the experimental psychologists . . . I will just give you this
example of how we can go—
Q291 Chairman: Are you saying that of
all the departments of education which do so much research, no
one has properly evaluated the value of phonics against other
methods of teaching children to read?
Ms Lloyd: Yes.
Q292 Chairman: That has never happened.
Ms Lloyd: If you are going to
put a programme out into the whole of the country, and bear in
mind that education is a huge monopoly so if anybody sneezes at
the top the whole of the education world catches the cold, I would
imagine that you would normally create a programme and thoroughly
test it and make sure it was the very best before giving it out
to everybody. Just let me show you how easily you can get fooled
by people using the word "research". It does not mean
the same as when Rhona uses the word "research". If
you take a programme like Reading Recovery, Reading Recovery was
meant to help the children who were failing with whole language.
It was created by people who liked whole language and it is a
programme which was put out as though it was really an excellent
programme, very expensive one-to-one teaching. Many of the international
scientists have got together in America and they have tested it
properly with real scientific tests and their conclusion is that
Reading Recovery is not successful with its targeted student population,
the lowest performing students. Their reason is that when Reading
Recovery did the testing, they did things that would not be acceptable
to the real scientists. They withdrew 25-40% of children who were
failing. If the children are failing with the programme, they
take them out of it, so they do not count in their figures. They
then make tests which are called "in-house testing"
and therefore they have made up the test which is going to test
the teaching. Of course you can then make it show what you want
it to show. This article that I am holding is written by the scientists
and it is signed by 31 eminent scientists, nearly all of whom
have doctorates, and they are really saying "Look, this is
the real science; do not be fooled by other people's science.
Put these programmes, which are so vital for the education of
the country" because if you do not get the reading right,
you have ruined the education for so many children "through
the rigorous testing". If the NLS had had the rigorous testing,
and in fact it did in the beginning but nobody knew about that,
it was kept very quiet, only a few people seemed to know about
the NFER testing and it did not get the best results, then we
could say our programme gets these results and Ruth's gets those
results, Rhona's gets the following results and we would have
something concrete and fair with which to make comparisons and
choose the best for the children.
Q293 Mr Gibb: The criticism of phonics
is that it is a bit dull to teach and it is a bit dull for the
kids, and kids do have a lot of influences. They see words around,
they look at magazines, they will be influenced and they will
see all kinds of words which are way beyond their phonics knowledge
at a certain age, even under Ruth's scheme or your scheme, Sue.
How do you address that criticism?
Ms Lloyd: We think that they are
taking in these words, but in reality they are often just learning
the associated symbols. If you take the McDonald's sign, people
say "Oh, they can read McDonalds", but when you take
the sign and the trimmings away and ask them to read it, they
cannot actually read it; they are reading the sign. Imagine that
the script used is not our usual one. Do we go into a Chinese
restaurant and say "Oh, that looks fascinating writing, I
must learn what that word is?". We do not, do we, and nor
do children? It is only if their parents show them how it works
that they start to take something on board.
Ms Miskin: I have to say that
I had Bengali signs all over my school, because that is what we
always did in Tower Hamlets even though we taught them to read
English, and I did not learn one Bengali word while I was there.
If somebody had swapped the words "school keeper" and
"head teacher" I would not have known. What happens
though, is that as soon as they have some phonics, they will be
going "dav-dav-dav-david. Oh, David". They will start
to put things together and the joy of seeing a child look at a
new word and going "at-at-attenshon-attenshon. Oh, attention"
and they will get it. It is early knowledge, but for more able
children; they are into words very quickly and they start to teach
themselves. As a nation, we have to hold children's hands all
the way through and keep them safe until they go "I can read".
Ms Lloyd: I think, Ruth, you would
say as well, that phonics is different nowadays in that it is
much more fun. The parents enjoy the programmes, the children
enjoy them and the teachers enjoy them because they know exactly
where they are going. As soon as you can see a child is not learning
to remember the letter symbols that is your first sign that you
are going to have troubles, because they do not have a good memory,
even for symbols, so whole words will be even worse. Then, if
they do not have a good ear for hearing the sounds in words, that
is your second warning. When you have programmes that are systematic,
you can immediately see where the children need help and the type
of children, and get in and prevent a lot of their problems.
Q294 Mr Gibb: Final question. I accept
the point that you do get children decoding very rapidly, but
so what? They do not understand the word, do they? All they can
do is decode it. Is there not an issue that you need to make sure
the kids understand words, not just decode them? How do you address
that criticism?
Ms Miskin: I would say first of
all that there is worldwide research to show that, unless you
have effortless decoding, you do not have anything left for comprehension
anyway. So if you are reading so pathetically slowly that you
cannot . . . I used to say to teachers in my training, "You
know when you hear a child read and they are reading very slowly
and you get to the end of page, have you ever been in a position
where you have not got a clue what that was about?" and they
go "Oh, yes". I said "Well, what do you do?"
and they said "Quickly scan it and ask a question".
I said "Can the child answer the question?" and they
said "Well no, of course not, because they read it slowly".
The point is that when we are reading Big Blob and Baby Blob,
we will go through the words first of all, practising decoding
them so that when they come to read it, they have a good chance.
The first time they read it, they will read it in quite a pedestrian
sort of manner without the feeling that Baby Blob needs.
You know, "Big-Blob-is-at-the-shops-with-Baby-Blob"
and it is going to sound deadly. Next time they are going to start
talking about it and it is more like "Big Blob is at the
shops with Baby Blob" and then you are getting the intonation
coming in as the comprehension, as the speed of decoding increases.
You do not read a book once, you read it once to decode, twice
to understand, three for fluency and they go home and say "Mum,
I can read". May I just make one point? If you are teaching
in a very deprived area, who is going to hear the child read at
home? If they take a book home that they have learned off by heart,
all they will do is say "My home is a shell. My home is a
hole. My home is a web", so much so that one little boy said
to me when I was in an earlier phase of my life "I can do
it with my eyes shut, I'm that good". You do not want I-can-do-it-with-my-eyes-shut
type of reading. Most of my parents did not read English, so when
the children took the book home to read it for themselves I wanted
them to get deeply involved in the book and to want to read it.
So you would see the children sitting at home with their books,
practising reading it over and over again.
Q295 Jeff Ennis: To follow up to some
of the earlier answers that Ruth has given, it seems to me that
you are suggesting that the National Literacy Strategy and the
methods that that deploys within the teaching of reading in the
classroom is very much a compromise, because of all the competing
pressures that were coming in when the National Literacy Strategy
was set up. At the same time, that seems to be a contradiction.
If there were all these competing pressures, why has there not
been adequate research in terms of proving beyond a shadow of
a doubt that synthetic phonics, and I am great believer in phonics
myself, is the Holy Grail, shall we say?
Ms Miskin: Everybody was involved
in this development and they got some of the most senior people
in the world to write the NLS, but the trouble was that they all
disagreed at that moment. There was not the research. It was what
Sue and Rhona were saying: they did not want to hear that particular
set of research, because at that time Reading Recovery, the whole
word approach was incredibly embedded. What is scary is that the
more into the inner city you go, the more heavily involved they
are in that psyche still; I should like to say not in Tower Hamlets
so much. When you go to schools out, say, where I work in Walsall
or in Bradford where you have older members of staff who have
actually seen all the systems going through, it is easy, so easy
to put the programme in. They go "Oh, thank goodness, at
last somebody is talking sense". However, when you are in
some of the inner city schools, you can have war because there
are huge principles. It is "We work out the words by looking
at the pictures. We work out the words by guessing what the context
is. We work out the words by using first picture cues" so
you have an awful lot. They are much younger teachers; we do not
have the balance in the inner cities. What is happening now is
that publishers are actually writing books like this one to fit
the objectives that the NLS has. This book is not to read, this
book is to use inference. This book is not to read, this book
is to learn one-to-one correspondence. Each of these books has
a different objective and it is like, "Is a book not to read?
Is a book not just to read and understand?". I say to teachers
"Look, you have one purpose, which is to get the children
reading and writing". If you have 101 objectives, like to
use picture cues, to use context cues, to use this cue and to
use that, they lose the plot. It is like "It is much simpler
than you are being told". All the students at college—remember
I train nearly every day of my life and there are lots of young
students coming in—say "We've been taught on a multiple
cuing system" meaning picture cue, context cue, grammar,
grammatical cue and so on "This is what we've been taught.
What shall we do?". I go "Do it my way".
Ms Lloyd: It was once said that
in education we are like the doctors were 100 years ago and that
was when the drugs were made and they suited some people very
well, but made others ill and a few died. So they brought in some
really effective testing and they do their best to make sure there
is no damage done. Just look at the history of what has happened
in education, particularly with the teaching of reading and maths.
People have been able to have these great influences based on
beliefs, but there has not been the backup of the testing. Until
we actually get this sorted out and make sure that if we do have
to have a layer of consultants and advisers above us in the profession,
then they must say things which have actually been proven and
which work. They must not keep on telling us things that do not
work; in fact we would do better without that layer of advice,
and if we were just told what the researchers, like Rhona, are
finding out. We are learning more and more about what—
Q296 Jeff Ennis: Can we take it then
that other forms of teaching of reading, like Look-and-Say, for
example, are dead and the only thing that we need to be teaching
now is synthetic phonics in the classroom?
Ms Lloyd: Yes; from the beginning.
Ms Miskin: With the proviso of
a small selection of words that do not fit into the system at
the beginning.
Ms Lloyd: Essentially, when you
get to reading books, you should have taught the "t-h"
says "/th/" and then it will be "/th/e/" and
it is then not such a big leap to learn that "the" is
the. Then they have to memorise it. If you look at the books that
Ruth has been talking about from the National Literacy Strategy,
the book bands, only 20% of those words are decodeable. The children
are then being asked to read words for which they have not been
given the skills. If you look at the "Playing with sounds",
look at the actual number of sounds which are not even introduced
until the end of Year 1, they have had two years in school and
they still have not met the following sounds "/ai/, /ee/,
/ie/, /oa/, /ue/ /or/ /er/, /oi/, /ou/, /ar/, and /oo/ as in book
and /oo/ as in moon. You are expecting the children to read words
without the skills to be able to do it. This is where the damage
is done.
Q297 Jeff Ennis: I am concerned if synthetic
phonics is the holy mantra, as it were, making reading fun. I
know a lot of these phonic schemes are fun to teach and to learn
as well from the child's perspective, but when we are dealing
with Reading Recovery schemes and what have you, and this goes
back to something else that Ruth said about involving parents,
when I was teaching Reading Recovery in the 1970s and 1980s, we
had a paired reading scheme for parents, bringing parents in to
read to children, to get them used to reading a full sentence
out, where the parent or the teacher led the child into that sort
of rhythm of reading or whatever you want to call it. Is that
a totally useless exercise now we are just to have synthetic phonics
or is there a place for that sort of thing?
Ms Miskin: You want parents involved
as much as you possibly can. I have spent a lot of time as a head
teacher saying "Please come to the meeting and we will tell
you about what to do at home". Which parents always come?
It is the parents who are really interested from the beginning.
At one headship when I was down in Devon, I used to go knocking
on doors saying "Please, please come in and I will show you
how to help". In the end, when I got to Tower Hamlets, we
started teaching the parents how to read so they could help them,
but they only came once a week and my kids were getting hour after
hour. I said "Look, I am really sorry, but the children have
overtaken you now, so they will be reading to you. All you have
to do is say `Very good. Well done'". You have to break the
cycle because there are loads of parents out there who do find
reading difficult. Let us get the kids reading now, this time
round, so they can then read to their own kids when they have
them.
Q298 Paul Holmes: Sue, you have been
very scathing about people who do not look at the evidence before
they make educational policy, although perhaps, you are saying,
if they looked at your bit of evidence and imposed it on everybody
else, that would be okay, but if they are looking at other pieces
of evidence that you do not agree with, that is wrong.
Ms Lloyd: No, it is what the right
science is, the correct science. There were four, two large and
two small, pieces of research into our programme, admittedly accidental.
What it does show is that you get higher results. This information
is not passed on into our training establishments or schools.
What Rhona's research is showing is that in Scotland, immediately
they saw that these children were so much higher, they said "Well,
we can't have the other children in the control going along with
that other method because it is not good enough". They turned
them all over to synthetic phonics. Here, because we have published
a National Literacy Strategy, people do not want to learn how
to do it with the same open-mindedness. That is what I am asking.
If something came along next time which said that there was a
better way than synthetic phonics and it was proven with the science
that Rhona deals with, then that is what we must go for. We must
just do what is best for the children.
Q299 Paul Holmes: You keep quoting the
example of one particular school where the results, using synthetic
phonics, are much better than the national averages achieved across
the country. Quite a few eminent politicians also have trouble
with understanding averages, but surely the whole point of averages
is that some of them are above average and some are below. Are
you seriously suggesting that there are no schools anywhere in
the country, which are not using synthetic phonics, which could
not produce sets of results which are way above national averages?
Ms Lloyd: If you were in a very
leafy, professional area, you would be able to, because a lot
of the parents actually help their children with phonics as well.
If you have, as well, children who are coming in who have a good
memory and a good ear for sounds, then whatever method you actually
use with those, they will crack the code themselves. They see
the "/sh/" at the beginning of shed and the "/sh/"
at the end of fish and they are going "Aha, that is how it
works", but it is not so obvious to all the children.
1 Initial teaching methods: In Sweden we usually say
that a "mix" of methods are used and every teacher can
select relatively free among alternative books or set of books
and related material from some 5 to 10 publishers. However, there
is a clear bias for synthetic phonics, well grounded in traditions
and among parents. Probably the early schooling system was influenced
from Germany and our language and spelling system can also be
related to German influence. Now and then there have been outbursts
of attempts to focus more or faster on the reading of whole texts
but in general the synthetic principle has always been underlying
and an active part of kind of common "folk" wisdom as
well as a general didactic principle at the teacher colleges. Back
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