Examination of Witnesses (Questions 320-339)
7 FEBRUARY 2005
MR NEIL
MCCLELLAND
OBE, MS JULIA
STRONG, MS
JO WHITE
AND MS
MELIAN MANSFIELD
Q320 Chairman: It is very interesting
that you mention this 20%. We have been to several other countries
with very different and contrasting cultures and most of them,
when they are honest about their figures say they have a 20% problem
as well. It is almost a cross-cultural problem with the bottom
20% in a number of the societies we visited, whatever methods
they use.
Ms Strong: The research seems
to say that we are the worst, that we have a long tail of under-achievement
and have managed to keep it for longer than others. It is not
something one wants to be winning at.
Q321 Mr Greenway: Much of what we still
have to ask you have touched on in a way. Do you think there is
a stronger causal relationship between pre-literacy experience
and reading ability, than there is between specific methods of
reading instruction and reading ability?
Ms White: May I just challenge
the notion of pre-literacy? I am not entirely sure what we mean
by that. Children from very young ages are struggling to make
sense of their world and part of that world contains literacy.
For me a child is literate as it is starting to talk and all those
other things. Pre-literacy is a slight misnomer.
Q322 Mr Greenway: Do we mean pre being
taught formally to read?
Ms White: Possibly pre-school,
pre-formal schooling; that is a different concept. Personally
I do not sit very comfortably with the idea that suddenly children
become literate when they get to school and they are pre-literate
before that. It is a much longer continuum. They can be pre-formal
teaching, or they can be pre-nursery. It is a bit like being pre-communicative.
Babies are communicative as they are born and I would say that
children are making sense of their world and that world is a literate
one from a very, very early age.
Ms Mansfield: Gathering knowledge
and understanding and that is why they need a range of experiences.
The whole issue about the way the brain develops is really important.
Very young children are not able to understand abstractions like
letters and words if they are not connected to something which
is real for them. That is why it is so important that there is
a context in which children learn to read. Anybody who has had
children, has children, watches children, observes young children,
will know they will be making sense of everything which is around
them and every symbol. They replicate those symbols when they
are doing drawings and paintings. It may not be exactly as we
see them initially, but it develops over time. The time which
should be given to that whole period should be longer, so that
children have more chances to develop that understanding and to
play and use all the experiences they have had and to express
them in a variety of different ways, through music, through play,
through drama.
Chairman: That comes very clearly from
the millennium child programmes which Lord Winston has been carrying
through. I do not know whether you agree, but I have been fascinated
by that aspect of them. Indeed you might like to join the pressure
group I have formed to try to get those made available on video
and DVD so people can actually follow them through in terms of
their own interest in child development.
Q323 Mr Greenway: I am just wondering
now whether there is any evidence that you could point to which
supports Melian's contention that there needs to be greater development
of the context, I cannot think of a better phrase than pre-literacy
experience, but the context in which a child is taught to read.
You are all nodding, so you all obviously agree with this.
Ms White: It is very difficult.
People talk about research with young children, but it is extremely
difficult because young children's learning is messy by its very
nature. It is very hard to pin it down. The best longitudinal
research we have at the moment is the EPI project with Cathie
Silver, who is looking at children in different settings and what
outcomes they have. It is very clear that nursery schools and
integrated centres, where that contextual learning is given high
priority, are the best outcomes for children. The difficulty is
that we need to go on and see how they are reading at 12 and 14.
My gut feeling, and that is not good enough of course if you are
trying to find money and power, is that the children who have
that type of experience are those who love to learn. They love
to find out, they love to take a bit of a risk and they love to
experiment. For me that is essential if you are learning anything
and learning to read comes within that. You talked about prediction.
One of the other ways of predicting what a word might be is to
understand how a story might be formed and what word it might
be, because there is no way you are going to be able to decode
every single word. Knowing something about stories gives you that
ability to predict through context.
Q324 Mr Gibb: Which words will you not
be able to decode?
Ms White: The spellings, the fact
that English is not a phonetic language makes it very difficult.
Q325 Mr Gibb: Just give me an example
of a word you cannot decode.
Ms White: "Know".
Q326 Mr Gibb: We did discuss that before.
Ms White: Yes and I am not sure
that learning all of those words, which I think is what we were
told—
Q327 Mr Gibb: No, it is not what we were
told. We were told that "ne" is a phoneme like "n".
Ms White: I have a background
in phonetics and would question whether you can—
Q328 Mr Gibb: Phonics or phonetics.
Ms White: Phonetics.
Q329 Mr Gibb: That is different, is it
not?
Ms White: Yes; it is sounds but
it is looking at how the language is made up.
Q330 Mr Gibb: That was the disastrous
reading scheme of the 1970s, was it not?
Ms White: Phonetics?
Q331 Mr Gibb: Yes.
Ms White: I am a speech and language
therapist and I did phonetics as part of that training. I am sorry,
I have lost the plot now.
Q332 Mr Greenway: Does the National Literacy
Trust have a view on the answer that Jo has given or are you in
agreement?
Mr McClelland: In terms of the
research issues, we have a very strong view that there is research
evidence that children who have appropriate and extended pre-school
experiences, and who developed oral language skills when they
were in reception stage and through foundation, achieve more highly
at school. One piece of research by the Carnegie Institute in
the United States suggested that children who have developed early
language experiences and come into kindergarten, in the case of
the United States, with those language skills are in effect more
likely to read six times more effectively than children who do
not have those skills. That is backed up by quite a substantial
piece of research from Harvard by Catherine Snow. We believe that
the whole issue of children's oral cognizance is absolutely essential
to this issue. I would say that this is being reflected in the
National Literacy Strategy doing more work around fun, around
phonics and oral work in the foundation stage.
Q333 Mr Greenway: Coming back to Jo White,
I think you said earlier on—and I paraphrase -that there
is too much pressure to start formal teaching of reading or learning
at too early an age, that the SATS were the cause of this. What
should be done about this?
Ms White: SATS are a pressure
and I would say that there are children at two and three who are
well able to read wonderfully. So starting too early is about
individual children. We know, for example, in terms of speech
and language therapy, that boys' development of language is very
different to girls' and, sitting in clinics, it will be primarily
boys who are referred for speech and language therapy intervention.
We know that boys' language takes a little longer. For me it is
about looking at individual children and responding to them, allowing
the children who want to do phonics at two and a half and who
are fascinated by it then and the children who are taking a little
bit longer. The problem with SATS is that all children by the
age of seven, regardless of their learning style or the experiences
they have brought to school, which will be very, very different,
all start from a very, very different place and at seven they
all have to take the same assessment. That puts huge pressure
on schools because increasingly parents come when they are getting
children into primary schools and they are saying they have looked
at the SATS results. SATS results really matter. They are terribly,
terribly important for schools. That pressure does not allow some
children the time and the different approach to learning and teaching
that they may need.
Q334 Chairman: So you would welcome the
modification in the SATS at seven.
Ms White: I would celebrate hugely.
Q335 Mr Greenway: We are all agreed on
that.
Ms Mansfield: In Wales in fact
there are no longer SATS at seven.
Q336 Chairman: The government have already
announced for England that they are being phased out, have they
not? It is going to be teacher assessment in future.
Ms Mansfield: Yes.
Q337 Mr Greenway: We need to talk about
parental involvement. Where is the drive for this coming from?
Is the department providing sufficient support and encouragement
for parents to become involved in children's learning?
Ms Mansfield: It is, but there
also needs to be—again back into teacher training—some
work in the initial stages of teacher training to support teachers
to work well with parents and encourage and involve them. It is
absolutely critical that parents are involved all the way through
children's schooling, but not all schools are very good at doing
that. Parents can be very easily put off if they do not feel they
are doing the right thing. They need to be encouraged and supported,
because everything they do with the children matters. It is important
that parents and teachers and staff in schools work together for
children rather than separately. A piece of research was done
in the early 1980s which showed a group of children in junior
schools taught reading in the normal way and another group taught
with an extra teacher; in a third group a research worker was
going into every home, and many of the families did not speak
English, encouraging parents to listen to their children read
or to read to them. When the children for whom that was the case,
where the families had been fully involved throughout the year,
were re-tested at the end of the year they had improved vastly
more.
Mr McClelland: Melian might remember
that I actually had responsibility for the project when she and
I worked in Haringey. That became known as the Haringey Reading
Project which did pick that up. It has to be said that there have
been some concerns about the methodology of that project, but
there are lots of triangulations with other pieces of research
which would support that piece of work.
Q338 Chairman: I do not mean to be rude
here, but it is almost common sense, is it not, that anyone who
knows about early youth would have predicted that might have made
a difference?
Mr McClelland: Yes, but common
sense does not always translate into good educational practice,
then or subsequently. We could work on common sense more effectively
in this country. I certainly agree with Melian about the common
sense of strong partnership relationships between schools and
parents having to be central to the drive. Some of those relationships
are very dominated by the school culture. In answer to your question
about the DfES, I would say that four or five years ago I would
have been not as enthusiastic as I would be now about the department's
commitment to parental involvement. They tended to have a view,
if I may say so, that the curriculum was all and quality of teaching
was all. Clearly it is absolutely central importance, but it was
not sufficient, going back to my view. In recent years, they have
put a lot of investment into parental involvement in children's
education work, commissioned some research and produced a lot
of materials. They strongly see that relationship, which we have
all known about for 30 or 40 years, but that common sense did
not always get translated into practice. Just in that context,
through the National Reading Campaign, which Julia leads, I hope
we have recently managed to persuade all the key organisations
which could have an interest in children's reading and literacy
to sign up for a campaign which will not be a quick-fix campaign,
to encourage in positive ways the role of the home in our society
and that includes professional organisations, Ofsted, QCA, the
department, as well as those which have an interest from the library
sector, the art sector and the parenting sector. The department
are very enthusiastic about that.
Q339 Mr Greenway: From that point of
view, do you then tend to agree with the clarification which Ruth
Miskin gave in answer to my colleague Nick Gibb, that it is important
that the parents, if they are going to be involved, understand
what method of teaching to read is being deployed within a school?
Mr McClelland: I believe it is
absolutely critical. The way in which that is communicated is
also absolutely critical, so that parents fully understand that,
rather than just having been told it. Clearly there needs to be
a dialogue with parents, or as many parents as you can involve
in doing that. I certainly agree with her comments on that and
also her comments that almost anything you can get a parent to
do at home is probably going to be constructive.
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