Examination of Witness (Questions 1-19)
MR JIM
ROSE CBE
30 JANUARY 2006
Q1 Chairman: Can I welcome Jim Rose to
our deliberations. It is a pleasure to have such a distinguished
witness giving evidence to the Committee. You will know exactly
what this session is about, Mr Rose, and I am sure you will know
in our previous incarnation as a Committee, before the last election
we took this very seriously, looking at how we teach children
to read in this country. We took evidence from a wide range of
witnesses. We came out with a report which in part was responded
to positively by the Government. They did not answer all of the
things that we put to them quite the way we had hoped, but we
were very pleased when someone of your background and standing
was appointed to do a review for the Department. Would you like
to say anything to start us off or would you like to go straight
into the questions?
Mr Rose: I would
like to say thank you, Chairman, it is an opportunity to explore,
I hope, whether we have gone the right way or not. Certainly it
took off from your report. Hopefully this will be an exploration
of just how far we have been able to go to either deepen or intensify
the things that you are looking for.
Q2 Chairman: You have done the interim
report, when is the final report due?
Mr Rose: We are working hard on
the final report as we speak, as it were, and we are hoping early
March.
Q3 Chairman: What we talk about today
might have some bearing on the final report?
Mr Rose: Indeed.
Q4 Chairman: We found it a very interesting
session when we took evidence on this particular topic, and passions
ran very high. Some of the witnesses clearly were great advocates
for their particular way of teaching children to read. In terms
of the balance, I was interested when you first reported out your
interim report that the press seem to think you have very much
gone down the way of believing that synthetic phonics was the
answer, that it was this particular way of teaching children to
read that had been relatively neglected and you were advocating
it being brought out, dusted off and used as probably the major
way of teaching children. Is that right? Is that what your report
said? I am sure the press in this country always reflect totally
accurately what the report says?
Mr Rose: I could not but agree,
could I! Seriously, I think what I was asked to do was to form
a judgment. I tried to look at a very wide evidence-base taking,
of course, as the core of that the respondents to your review.
We mounted an exercise, for which I am very grateful to Ofsted
for helping us out with that particular one, where we looked at
20 schools, more in the end, that were offering phonic work in
various ways. We certainly assured, within that sample, that synthetic
phonics and other forms of phonic work were being looked at. We
tried to widen the evidence-base of your Committee because you
obviously did not have time to do that sort of thing. We took
a whole hard look at research in its current cutting edge form,
as it were, and we obviously took a great deal of evidence from
respondents. We visited some of the so-called hotspots like Clackmannanshire
that had come very much to the fore in terms of phonic methodology.
There is a whole story behind each of those subsets, but in the
end—I am still taking views, of course, on those issues—I
think I am going to stick to my guns in terms of the overall judgment
that of all the kinds of phonic work we have seen in action—I
would wish to underline that—as contrasted and yet taking
into account the research, because the research, I have to say,
is very inconclusive, but if you look at the practice on the ground,
then I think the most direct and helpful route to young children
is a very well taught synthetic phonic programme. The reasons
for that are not just for advancing reading. I think a great part
of this debate tends to forget that we are talking about reading
and writing, and it is that second strand that certainly I think,
again, because it is more direct and enables children to see what
the relationship is between reading and writing that I have gone
the way I have. Having said all that, it is extremely important
to remember that in the interim report it was contextualised and
the context was that phonics is an essential but not sufficient
aspect of reading and the rest of the picture is therefore extremely
important. That goes into very deep and long-standing issues about
primary education, such as when to start phonic work, what do
we mean by "start" and the whole idea of some of the
more important ideas in primary education with regard to early
childhood, the place and purpose of play in relation to teacher-led
activities, and all this sort of thing, tends to be compounded
when you start to talk about an issue like phonics. Certainly
that is not a new part of the game.
Q5 Chairman: You will have seen the
evidence we took from the Department. The Department consistently
said, "Yes, we do take phonics and synthetic phonics seriously,
but many children respond to different stimuli. What we try to
do is do a patchwork of different approaches and some children
will respond better to synthetic phonics and others to a rather
different method". We had the feeling that they were saying
that you offer a number of ways of teaching children to read and
that balance is very important rather than giving one or two a
predominant role?
Mr Rose: It is a very important
and a very difficult picture to try and paint. What we have in
essence, obviously, is an ingenious device constructed by man
called the alphabet. One way or another we have got to come to
terms with learning the alphabetic principles which enable us
to crack the code. Whatever else we do that has to be done. It
is not a method, it is a body of knowledge, skills understandings,
knowledge itself, content about the alphabet, that we have to
come to terms with. I think what we have forgotten is that that
needs to be done but it does not need to be done in opposition
to all these other things, it needs to be done in concert with
them so that they support that activity and that activity supports
them. We are talking here about beginner readers and we are looking,
when we are talking about phonic work, at teaching beginner readers
word recognition skills by and large. That activity ceases once
they have mastered that, they then have learned to read and they
can read to learn. Reading to learn goes on throughout life, learning
to read becomes automatic, we have internalised it and we use
it. It is a sharp tool in the box and, in fact, absolutely central
to virtually everything that goes on in our modern lives. That
is where we need to start from in terms of analysing what needs
then to go on in terms of teaching beginner readers. These things
are not antipathetic, there is no reason why phonic work should
not—in fact, there is every reason why it should—go
on in a very active curriculum. I have made big play of saying,
"Let us have a very language rich curriculum which focuses
on speaking and listening", for example, which I really do
think is an area of some neglect, despite what we say very often
about work in schools at this point in time.
Q6 Chairman: We will be able to come
back to that in subsequent questions. One last thing from me.
When we did, some years ago now, quite a thorough report into
early years, one of the conclusions, on a very interesting and
absorbing trip to Denmark, was that we found that places like
Denmark were very reluctant to formally teach children to read
too early and, indeed, not until the age of seven. Indeed, they
argued, and other expert witnesses we took back here, that to
push formal learning too early could be damaging, particularly
to boys. Does any of that carry over into your concerns when you
are writing up your report?
Mr Rose: Certainly there are concerns
about boys. We know that socio economic circumstances are more
of an indicator of problems than gender but, nevertheless, when
you get the two together it is quite important. On the question
of other countries, I think you have always got to look at the
language structures that they are faced with, what the differences
are with English and what we have to do over here. I would not
myself want to see our five- year-olds, or any of our children
for that matter, disadvantaged by reducing expectations for them,
certainly at that level, when we know that you can teach these
things in exciting and interesting ways which do motivate those
children.
Q7 Chairman: You would not be worried
about that?
Mr Rose: I would not be unduly
worried providing we can get to the point where we are delivering
consistently high quality work. Obviously too formal too soon
is a real issue if indeed it is too formal, badly taught too soon.
Chairman: Can I thank you for those opening
answers. They were very interesting.
Q8 Mr Wilson: Mr Rose, you have undertaken
what looks to be a very thorough review, but is that review likely
to put an end to the disagreements about the best teaching methods
now?
Mr Rose: I very much doubt it,
quite honestly, because some of the controversy that surrounds
the teaching and phonic work goes deeper than the review. As I
have said, it goes to the heart of what are the approaches that
we would want to use in teaching primary children more generally.
I suspect there will be continuing debates, certainly in the early
years, about some of these issues. Having said that, I think what
is going on now offers a tremendous opportunity to get rid of
some of these arbitrary divisions between Foundation Stage, Key
Stage 1, reception class, Foundation Stage 1 and so on and so
forth. It is about time we put aside those sorts of nonsenses
and really look at what we need to do to get continuity and progression
in the best possible way for all children which is not damaging
to their patterns of development but, at the same time, does not
enforce them into an infancy which they are growing through, as
it were.
Q9 Mr Wilson: How important do you
think setting is in the teaching of reading?
Mr Rose: From what we have seen
some schools are operating ability groups quite well. In other
words, they are looking at children as they come in, they are
using the profiling that we have got and learning for assessment
and all the rest of it. It is very, very important to do that
to get a good picture of what the child's cognitive status is
and then they are putting them into groups and teaching them accordingly.
They are doing it in very sensible ways so that these groups are
pretty fluid. I would accept that as being one possible positive
way of dealing with differences.
Q10 Mr Wilson: How much difference
can setting make for children at a very young age?
Mr Rose: Certainly even now, if
you go into, I was going to say infant school, you would see aspects
of setting in terms of grouping within the classroom; that has
always been the case. I think early years' practitioners are very
good at differentiating in that kind of way. This is perhaps just
an extension of that kind of experience.
Q11 Mr Wilson: Are you concerned
that the DfES has decided not to commission an independent trial
to compare the sort of "phonics first, fast and only"
with the National Literacy Strategy teaching of reading because
that is what this Committee recommended that they do?
Mr Rose: I think we need to look
at the contribution the NLS has made up to now. If we went back—it
is going a long way back—to 1988, we introduced a National
Curriculum and within the order for English we couched phonics.
There is a serious statutory requirement on schools to teach phonic
work and that has been there since 1988. If we look at the period
between 1988 and 1998, by 1998 I think we were looking at something
like 67% of our 11-year-olds getting the required standard, reaching
Level 4, pretty poor progress to say the least.
Q12 Mr Wilson: Can you repeat those
figures?
Mr Rose: Yes, sure. Around 1998,
about 67% of our youngsters were around Level 4. If you move from
1988 to1998 we are looking at scores in the 80s. Even the most—and
I know there are some—avid critics of the tests, and all
the rest of it, are willing to admit that there has been forward
movement, and I would say they would be willing to admit there
has been forward movement faster than there was over those first
10 years. What was the difference? The difference was that we
had the content set out in the National Curriculum and very little
notice being taken of it, because, I have to say—and I have
spent many hours in classrooms over that period of time as an
HMI looking at this sort of work—there was not a great effort
to deal with phonics thoroughly. When the NLS took off one of
the things that it did very, very successfully, in my view, was
put phonics back on the agenda. I am not associating that with
the entire growth that we saw over the next 10 years, from 1998
to the present day but, certainly, there is a strong association
with a much more structured systematic—I think that is an
important word to introduce into the discussion at this point
in time—view of phonic work, irrespective of whether it
is synthetic, analytic or whatever, that is what we saw.
Q13 Chairman: That came in with the
National Literacy Strategy?
Mr Rose: Yes. The debate since
then is how do we hone more of that to get it to be even better.
It is not that there was no contribution made by the NLS, or the
PNS that it has now become, quite the contrary. What we are now
able to do is build on that because we have got a much wider experience
of how it can fit together in the classroom, in the settings and
all the rest of it. I think that is quite a telling statistic,
frankly, and one that underlines that we have been going in the
right direction but there is certainly scope for improvement.
Q14 Mr Wilson: If phonics made such
a remarkable difference in those 10-year periods you suggest surely
local education authorities' teachers would have seen that difference?
Mr Rose: I am not saying it was
the whole story. If you are asking me for a judgment, I honestly
think it was an important core feature of what was going on over
that period. Yes, sure, some of them have done very, very well
to make sure it is promoted pretty intensively.
Q15 Mr Wilson: Would you not say
that synthetic phonics has not been widely accepted in what you
would describe as the "educational establishment" to
any degree in recent years even if the evidence that you are suggesting
was there on the ground for them to look at?
Mr Rose: Distinguish between synthetic
phonics and systematic phonics, in other words, phonics that was
taught regularly to an agreed plan and covers the ingredients
which I have tried to spell out in this report. That to me is
the important platform. After that you can begin to argue about
the different types of phonics: analytic, synthetic and all these
ugly names which they attach to them. Even one of the researchers
in Clackmannanshire, who is a very keen supporter and, indeed,
set up the whole research in Clackmannanshire in synthetic phonics,
said, for example, analytic phonics is good but synthetic phonics
is better. The suggestion is that you will get results if you
go for a systematic programme. I am suggesting that you will get
even better results if you go for a synthetic one because it is
more direct, it offers a better bite on writing as well as reading
and, quite honestly, it is a sharper tool for children to use
because they are better able to read words in and out of context
and attack words from a phonetic base which is what we are after.
Q16 Mr Wilson: Do you think there
has been an inbuilt resistance within the educational establishment
to phonics generally over the last 10 years?
Mr Rose: Generally, 10 years ago
there was a great deal more reluctance than there is now. From
what I can detect, and from what seems to be the case from the
HMI work that we have done over this survey, I would say we are
much closer to 100% acceptance than we have ever been statistically,
whatever that means.
Q17 Tim Farron: You say the Primary
National Strategy has been quite clearly associated with an increase
in attainment in children's reading and writing. I think this
Committee, certainly in its previous incarnation, would say that
they accept and acknowledge that the Strategy has an awful lot
to do with that increase in attainment, but I wonder whether you
have hard evidence to indicate the cause and effect there with
regard to the Primary National Strategy having the impact in what
is apparently at least an improvement in attainment?
Mr Rose: It is like all these.
If you are talking about cause and effect, I think we are talking
more about association. In 35 years of looking at primary education
that would be my judgment. What we are now seeing is a much more
professional principled approach to teaching this territory. We
are much more informed as a profession, the direction is clearer,
we have spelt out progression in a way which was never there before
and even if this is a bit out of shape one way or another from
school to school where you have got a dedicated group of teachers
who are looking at outcomes, and that is the other thing to remember
about this, teachers are now getting data feedback which enables
them to assess learning and assess for learning in ways which
we have not seen ever before, there is no doubt that is yielding
positive outcomes, no doubt whatsoever.
Tim Farron: I am sure you are right,
but do you think there is evidence—you rightly talk about
outcomes being the important thing—given that there is a
test, that teachers teach to it to an extent and that has some
impact on the overall levels of achievement?
Q18 Chairman: You look at though
you have heard that one before.
Mr Rose: I also sit on the QCA
board, and we do obviously take this issue very, very seriously.
When I retired the first task I was asked to do was to look at
the Key Stage 2 tests. Can I make one or two comments about that
because it does seem to me to be extremely important. I think
that if you look at, let us take the Key Stage 2 test, any child
who gets Level 4 on those Key Stage 2 tests has done well. They
are engaging with let us call it the higher order aspects of reading
for a moment, comprehension, in really quite stretching ways.
Therefore, I think I would use the term "it is a good test".
If it is a good test and it covers the areas that we want to see
children making progress in, teaching to it, but using a sensible
approach to how that is done, must be in many ways a sort of unavoidable
because the test is testing those things we want children to see
gains in. If you allow that to become a pressure cooker in your
school and press down, down, down and down to, let us say, the
reception class, and so on and so forth, and then people begin
to feel that they have got to do things which put children into
straitjackets to obviously deal with that test, then things start
to go pear shaped, and I think that is wrong. That is not necessarily
a criticism of the test. Once you accept that we need tests, and
we do, then there is a professional responsibility to see that
they are handled properly and children get the best out of them.
Chairman: I was only once or twice tempted
to put any of my four children in a straitjacket!
Q19 Tim Farron: I take your point
that if it is a good test then it is not a bad thing if people
teach to it, but obviously a test can only cover so many things
and there are bound to be things which are excluded if there is
an excessive focus upon it. Given that there is that concern,
how widespread do you think the phrase "teaching to the test"
may be at the moment?
Mr Rose: It is difficult to discern,
but I think one should register that as a real issue because we
should be exploring it in the way in which I hope I have just
now indicated.
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