Examination of Witnesses (Questions 306-319)
7 FEBRUARY 2005
MR NEIL
MCCLELLAND
OBE, MS JULIA
STRONG, MS
JO WHITE
AND MS
MELIAN MANSFIELD
Q306 Chairman: Thank you very much Jo
White, Melian Mansfield, Neil McClelland and Julia Strong for
joining us. We want to get as much as we can out of this session,
but we know we have a vote coming up, so it may be a little shorter
than we anticipated. Basically, you have listened to the evidence
given by those who would be seen as proponents for the phonics
approach to learning to read. Would one of you like to start off
by telling us how convinced you are about the argument for the
phonics approach by what you heard?
Ms White: I think
phonics is an important part of learning to read. What worries
me slightly about what we have just heard is that it implies that
children come into school with no reading knowledge at all and
suddenly they are taught by people who are called teachers. In
fact, as soon as a baby looks at a symbol on a cot and points
at it, they are actually learning to read. We live in an environment
where print is all around us and children will be asking you at
the breakfast table "What does that say on the cereal packet?"
and will be saying "How do I write my name?" and children
of two and three will be well versed in literacy. We do not suddenly
teach them: we help them to learn. For me, one of the problems
with the National Literacy Strategy was that it lost its way because
it was much more about making better teachers and therefore having
better outcomes for children as learners. One of the issues about
teaching today is that the PGCE, which turns out teachers in less
than eight months from being a graduate in whatever else they
might have studied, is not going to have the depth of knowledge
of child development and the understanding about how children
learn, which is fundamental to literacy and mathematics and science
and those other things. So phonics plays a part. Children play
with sounds joyously all the time. They make up nonsense words,
they tell jokes, they have funny names for people, nicknames,
they are playing with phonics all the time and we need to support
them in that and learning about alphabets and learning about their
names and the letter of the week. If your name happens to begin
with Y, it is very tedious. So you need phonics that actually
makes sense and is relevant and is interesting and is fascinating
and children really want to do it. Phonics is important and I
would never say that phonics was not important, but this rather
rote learning terrifies me.
Mr McClelland: I think from the
National Literacy Trust perspective, and we are not an organisation
which is a particularly expert organisation on phonics or other
approaches, we would be supportive of phonics at the heart of
things, but would regard it as a necessary but not a sufficient
component of the challenge to get all children at the end of Key
Stage 1 and all children as they transfer to secondary school,
fluent, active, highly motivated readers. From our point of view,
the danger of too much preoccupation in this way is that it reduces
a very complex issue down to a single component factor. We would
take the view that yes, we do need phonics and certainly we understood,
and I understood that the National Literacy Strategy was based
on synthetic phonics as I read Kevan Collins's evidence to you
the other day. We very strongly believe, however, that the quality
of early introduction of phonics has to be surrounded with a lot
of pre-school provision, a lot of early language support, a lot
of support in and around the school about reading for pleasure.
I would be interested in further research which compares the various
models of synthetic phonics that there are and the others that
were not represented before us today with some of the approaches
of the strategy, but also to make sure that is longitudinal evidence
which looks at the subsequent attitudes that children have to
reading when they are 11, 12 and 14.
Q307 Chairman: So the only thing which
joins you with the phonics group we have just heard from is that
neither of you likes the National Literacy Strategy.
Mr McClelland: No, I did not want
to say that, and if I did, then I have misrepresented our view.
We broadly support the National Literacy Strategy.
Q308 Chairman: Jo was sort of saying
that, were you not?
Ms White: My expertise is very
young children and I have deep misgivings about the National Literacy
Strategy in the foundation stage. I know much less about it further
on up the school than that, but I have deep misgivings for it
in the foundation stage.
Ms Mansfield: The real issue is
that because the National Literacy Strategy has been introduced
from Key Stage 1, it has actually been pushed back into the foundation
stage and it is very clearly stated in the foundation stage that
children need to be doing a whole range of other things to develop
their concentration; they need to play. I do not know whether
in the course of this investigation you are looking at any issues
about brain research, how the first seven years are a very sensitive
period of brain development and children need to do a whole range
of other kinds of activities pre reading, all the things that
Jo was talking about, before they formally learn to read. I cannot
remember who mentioned it, but someone referred to Finland and
other countries. In fact, there is practically no other country
where children are taught formally to read before they are six
or seven. Before that age they have a wide range of pre-school
experience. Certainly the Early Childhood Forum would endorse
that as well. So, not completely against the National Literacy
Strategy, but that it is being used far too early, that formal
teaching is beginning at a much younger age and should not be
and it is detrimental. There is interesting work being done on
brain development anyway, but the whole issue is the importance
of playing for developing concentration, which is important obviously,
and also children need to be motivated and excited about what
they are reading. A lot of experience is about being read to,
doing songs and rhythms and rhymes and all the things that Jo
was talking about for a long time before actually sitting down
and formally reading. I think we think that many children are
failing too early, that they do not experience success quickly
enough and that if they learned formally—some children are
ready earlier—when they were older, more children would
be achieving more quickly.
Q309 Chairman: Julia, are we trying to
teach children to read too early?
Ms Strong: It is a very interesting
point. If you look around at all the international studies, a
lot of people would say that we are. I do not think anybody actually
knows, which could be the central problem, why it is a blood-on-the-carpet
sort of issue. I do think it is worth looking at other countries
and seeing what they are doing. The trouble is that the other
countries, by and large, are not trying to teach the children
English and teach them to read English, and English is a more
complicated language to read. The only problem with the National
Literacy Strategy is that it did not start at the foundation stage
and build up, which would perhaps be the more logical way to do
it. On the other hand, I think that I would not want to be down
here as bad-mouthing the National Literacy Strategy, because I
think they have done a vast amount that has been very good: in
a nut shell, the fact that they have focused on teaching children
to read and teaching children to write, rather than providing
simplistic opportunities to read and write. I would want to stress
that, but it is a shame that they did not actually start from
the bottom up, and to stress the importance of oracy. Speaking
and listening are the foundation of reading and writing. The trouble
is—you must have found it yourself as you sat here—some
of us are very good at speaking, but we are not very good at listening.
Chairman: Yes, we have found that a great
deal.
Q310 Jeff Ennis: My question has been
partially answered in that I just wondered where we needed to
go with the NLS in actually making it more of a success than at
the present time. It has been quite successful, but how could
we make it even more successful in turning out good readers?
Ms White: Part of it is about
teacher training actually. I think that teachers are not sufficiently
well trained and that is why something like the NLS, which does
have some very interesting and good bits to it, is taken as a
whole and delivered as a whole to every child, regardless of what
their individual learning styles might be. The other thing is
that in terms of the foundation stage it needs to be radically
re-thought and that will have implications for Key Stage 1 as
well. We need to be encouraging children. Sure Start has been
wonderful in the Bookstart programmes in that you are never too
young to be reading and actually getting parents involved in reading
with their children way before the school system ever gets hold
of them. So there is a huge amount of work to do that says literacy
does not suddenly start with the National Literacy Strategy at
school. It is a much more holistic view of literacy and play and
learning.
Mr McClelland: Whilst we support
the use of phonics and synthetic phonics and certainly, in comparison
with what things were like in the past, we have moved forward
massively and radically well, it is that wider context of that
work which we believe is critically important. We obviously agree
with the Early Childhood Forum on the issue of early language
and books and reading in the home from the earliest age; we have
initiatives of our own that build that. As far as the specific
question about the strategy is concerned, we certainly believe
that more emphasis can be put on encouraging children to read
fuller texts, to read more for pleasure, to have more opportunities
for extended writing. I actually think the strategy has come to
terms with that. We are involved with an initiative funded by
the DfES about creating whole-school reading communities, which
perhaps my colleague could briefly mention. We believe that surrounds
and supports the strategy and is a necessary additional component
in this complex picture of getting children, particularly children
from many disadvantaged communities and homes, to be fluent, motivated,
enjoying readers.
Ms Strong: One of the problems
with the strategy was that inadvertently some people took what
was being said to mean that they should not be reading stories
to children so much as they were, and some of the reading corners
disappeared in the primary schools. Nobody said that that should
happen, but it is just one of the things which have tended to
happen. We have set up something called Reading Connects and the
idea of Reading Connects is to try to get schools to think about
how they can involve the whole school in creating school communities
that read and involve all the parents. We are very pleased that
the DfES has now funded that and recognises the importance of
children being motivated to read, because there is any amount
of research which shows that it is motivation which is at the
heart of turning somebody into a life-long reader, and that is
what we are trying to do. Just to give you an example, when you
walk into a school we feel that everything about the school ought
to tell the visitor that this is a reading school, that reading
is valued: the walls, absolutely all the messages that the school
gives, every single lesson, tells you that reading is seen as
something that is there; and that teachers are encouraged to read
aloud to the children. Let us say that I am teaching science,
and science does have some great stories, I might read just a
little bit to bite the imagination so that children hear good
English, well read. All sorts of initiatives. Buddy reading would
be another one, where you try to get some of the older children
to encourage the younger children, because, as we know, in the
end we tend to read what other people, our peers, have recommended
to us. You get those sorts of schemes into schools where the children
are talking about reading and encouraging each other to read.
Q311 Chairman: How long has your organisation
been doing this sort of work?
Ms Strong: We started doing this
about two years ago and it has now been adopted by the DfES in
the last six months.
Q312 Valerie Davey: First of all may
I put on record that I am President of the National Campaign for
Nursery Education, which is one of the groups involved in the
Forum and that is possibly where my main interest comes from in
this richness of experience. Surely we ought to be investing in
that richness of early experience before we get to the reading.
Ms Mansfield: Definitely.
Ms White: That is story and narrative
really. You are never going to be a reader unless you understand
something about story and the way narrative works. Storying is
something that human beings are just destined to do throughout
the ages and that oral tradition and that storying and that narrative
. . . I have brought a few things that we support children with
in making their own books about their own stories, scribing for
children. One of the other things that the previous people did
not mention was the connection between writing and reading, that
actually you do have to understand something about how writing
works if you are going to understand about reading. This is about
children understanding a narrative, a middle, a beginning and
an end. Very young children will tell you fascinating and fantastic
stories and it is that that makes people gradually turn into readers.
I would say that mostly the children are already readers. Take
Reading Recovery, for example. In Finland, if I were to say that
a child of seven was having Reading Recovery, they would say "Recovering
from what?". There is a sort of strange notion about reading
and you know that for me early intervention is the key. We have
many adults who can technically read, but very few who ever read
for pleasure. That disposition to read and that joy of reading
is actually an essential tenet if we are going to have reading.
That develops with parents, in homes and in nurseries from very
early stages.
Q313 Valerie Davey: Yet the Early Childhood
Forum has said very specifically that in those early years, they
would not introduce phonics.
Ms White: Yes. I did not write
the response and I have spoken to Melian today and said that in
fact I do not agree with that. I think what the Early Childhood
Forum were meaning was phonics in the way the National Literacy
Strategy would like us to do it, but rhyme, playing with sound,
knowing about alphabet letters, recognising texts in the environment,
all those things for me are crucial. The problem is that phonics
has a rather bad name now. We think of it as these rather formal
"b-a-t" things, which sends shivers down the spines
of most of us, but actually phonics is playing with sounds and
playing with sounds is an essential ingredient for learning how
to read.
Ms Mansfield: But also, having
a good vocabulary and having had experiences of imaginative play
and other forms of trying things out is absolutely fundamentally
important. The whole issue is about brain development, and there
are real issues about teacher training where there is no explanation
of child development, brain development, that children learn differently.
It can be explored by children playing, doing drama, playing imaginative
games; making up their own stories is really important. All of
this needs to go on for a longer rather than a shorter length
of time. We need to look at Wales, for example, which has extended
the foundation stage up to six and seven and to other countries
where similar type of education is on offer, where these rich
and broad experiences are taking place, enabling children to improve
and develop their vocabulary and so on before the actual formal
reading; lots of games and activities using letters but that is
fundamentally the view of the Early Childhood Forum. We need to
develop the foundation stage further. The other thing is for teachers
to be creative with the NLS. Some teachers are very creative and
others are not. I did a small piece of research with somebody
else on the NLS which showed that some children were just completely
bored, made bored or had become bored with the whole idea of reading
and writing because of the way they were being presented. Quite
a number of authors are not happy with the way in which their
books are being used. They want their books to be enjoyed as literature
and not used in a truncated form and split up and so on. There
is a whole range of issues, but the most compelling for the Early
Childhood Forum is about extending the rich experiences and breadth
of different kinds of use of language, through drama, through
play and so on, before formal teaching of reading starts.
Q314 Chairman: Is that not what the NLS
tells us? Is that not what they believe in too? It is exactly
that.
Ms Mansfield: Is that what they
say?
Q315 Chairman: The National Literacy
Strategy people from the Department for Education and Skills would
totally say the same things as you have just said.
Ms Mansfield: But it is not happening
in the schools.
Q316 Chairman: Rich diversity, pragmatic,
a number of ways the children learn to read.
Ms Mansfield: It is not happening
in schools.
Q317 Chairman: You do not think it is
happening.
Ms Mansfield: Not enough opportunities
are being given even at nursery level for children to have a broad
and wide experience. It varies, obviously.
Q318 Valerie Davey: Could we come back
to children learning differently? My limited experience perhaps
says that some children will need the phonics approach. They find
it very difficult. They cannot, as it were, bring together the
word on the book with what they are saying and they need that
very careful move, which other children have somehow—we
do not understand how—grasped and they are ahead. To go
back to that at five—and I do mean "go back" for
some of them—is boring. Do we not have this range of different
children with different approaches and is it not our professional
job to match them? Is that not it?
Ms Mansfield: Yes, that is right.
Ms White: I think that is absolutely
right. If I come back to the National Literacy Strategy in the
foundation stage, yes, the National Literacy Strategy did not
say literacy had to be taught in reception. The reality is that
the SATS and pressures from head teachers on children going into
Year 1 and then into Year 2 means that for most head teachers
the literacy strategy is being implemented from very early on.
I had a very interesting experience. We have quite a lot of special
needs children and there was a lot of sitting. In September this
child was on a transition and there was a lot of sitting and I
mentioned that there seemed to be a lot of sitting and she said
"It's all right because it is active sitting". There
is a lot of misunderstanding that children do not have to be sitting
in order to learn literature. Schools are really not responding.
The amount of money which went into pushing out the literacy was
huge. For the foundation stage, it was really very little. We
are fighting a comeback position all the time.
Mr McClelland: I agree with your
comments. We need a variety of approaches because all children
learn slightly differently. We need to be responsive to that,
which goes back to my first point, that we cannot simplify this
issue. It is deeply complex. The National Literacy Trust has tended
to argue that if we are really going to deal with this issue of
literacy under-achievement, and it is a long-term problem, what
we need is not just the National Literacy Strategy but a national
strategy for literacy. Which is cradle to grave, inter-generational,
which includes family literacy, which looks at the whole issue
of early language from birth, which incorporates good practices
of the sort, for example, from the PEEP project which has been
operating in Oxford, which is built from Bookstart onwards and
is about early language and communication skills, supporting parents,
which ties into Every Child Matters and looks holistically
at all of those influences of parents and communities on children's
early language and acquisition and enjoyment of books. That is
a necessary component as are the necessary components which we
heard about earlier. I go back to your point that we need a variety
of approaches to meet each child's need.
Q319 Chairman: So we started off on the
National Literacy Strategy, we seem to have got some pretty good
results out of it, but you seem to be pretty critical of it.
Mr McClelland: I am not that critical
of it. All I am saying is that we can strengthen what we are doing
in terms of literacy for this country if we surround it with a
strategy which looks more effectively at pre-school provision
and looks more effectively at inter-generational and family literacy.
That said, I think the National Literacy Strategy or the strategies
for literacy in the last three years have got stronger and stronger.
They have linked more effectively into the foundation stage, the
foundation stage has developed Communicating Matters. We now have
Birth to Three Matters, which links into Sure Start. We have a
better understanding of the relationships with parents and how
they can be supported through the strategy. We have far better
linkages between Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3. A lot of extremely
good things are happening which can tie in well with the Skills
for Life adult basic skills strategy in terms of family learning.
We do need to make sure that they are properly co-ordinated or
a lot of resource will be wasted. Once again, those most vulnerable
in our society will fall through the net.
Ms Strong: It is worth standing
back and considering what has happened to literacy. They started
measuring standards of literacy in this country round about the
Second World War, when the men joined up. Standards of literacy
stayed the same for about 50 years and there were all sorts of
different teaching methods across those 50 years. There were a
few ups and downs, but basically it stayed the same. With the
coming of the National Literacy Strategy there has actually been
progress and it is a very important thing to note that we should
not knock progress in terms of helping our children to become
more literate. I suppose the problem is that if we are beginning
to reach the plateau of what we can achieve with what we are now
doing, we do have to worry about the 20% we are not managing to
reach through these methods. These things are focusing on the
family and all the research shows that what goes on in the home
is so central to how well you get on in school, this idea of being
either a fish in water or a fish out of water when you reach school.
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