Children are proving too clever for their own good when it comes to taking
the new reading test for six-year-olds, according to research published today.

Association of Teachers and Lecturers head Dr Mary Bousted says fluent
readers can fail the test as they think the test’s non-words are misprints.

A poll of about 1,500 Year One teachers suggested 90% had discovered nothing
new about pupils’ reading abilities.

The government says phonics – blending sounds to read words – is vital.

Most teachers from the ATL, National Association of Head Teachers and the
National Union of Teachers who were polled on the issue said they feared pupils
who failed the test would have their confidence dented.

Nonsense words

Nearly nine out of 10 teachers said they practised nonsense words in the run
up to the test.

Words like spron, fape and thazz were included in the test designed to check
pupils’ abilities to decode using phonics.

And four out of 10 admitted drilling phonics in the week prior to the
test.

One Year one teacher said: “Some able readers failed and some non-fluent,
less-able readers passed! What does that prove?

“It proves synthetic phonics is only part of a variety of strategies used in
learning to read.”

Another teacher said: “I was willing to try it to see if it helped the
children and if it helped inform my planning and assessment.

“It was a waste of time and money – (I had to have) a supply teacher to cover
me – and had a negative effect on several of the children in my class.”

A Year One teacher said: “Many children made mistakes trying to turn the
pseudo words into real words – ‘strom’ became ‘storm’.”

Some 86% of those polled believed the screening check should not be
continued.

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers
(NAHT), said synthetic phonics was an essential contribution to helping most
children learn to read.

“This test, however, is another matter. It is inaccurate and unnecessary. It
distorts the teaching and measurement of reading. A life-long love of reading,
as well as fluency, is built on more than decoding.

“It is built on the pleasure of a great story, something that ideology is now
crowding out of the early curriculum.”

Christine Blower, NUT general secretary, said: “The phonics check must be
scrapped. The results of this survey provide stark evidence that schools are
being made to squander money on what they know to be an unreliable ‘progress
report’.”

The Department for Education maintains that international evidence
demonstrates that phonics is the most effective way of teaching early reading.

Schools minister Nick Gibb has said in the past how crucial it is for
children to master the basics of reading as early as possible so they can go on
to develop a real love of reading.

Source BBC news

The former children’s laureate Michael Rosen is leading the writers’ charge against a phonics-intensive approach to teaching young children how to read.

A letter to the Guardian signed by 91 names including Meg Rosoff, Philip Ardagh and Alan Gibbons says millions is being spent on “systematic synthetic phonics programmes” even though there is “no evidence that such programmes help children understand what they are reading”.

Rosen told the Guardian: “It does not produce reading for understanding, it produces people who can read phonically.”

The letter calls on the government to abandon plans for reading tests, specifically the phonics screening check at the end of year one and the spelling, punctuation and grammar (Spag) test at the end of year six.

The former requires five- and six-year-olds to sound out the letters of a short word or nonsense word and blend them to make the word (for example: emp, sheb, shelf, splok, blow, pine).

Rosen claimed schools were coaching children through the process and at least half were still failing. Many were failing because they were trying to correct the nonsense words, he said, for example saying “strom” as “storm”.

“It is incredibly baffling to most parents because it sounds as if they are being told that their child has failed at reading, which is not the case,” he said.

The proposed Spag test is to be sat by children at the end of primary school as a way of addressing what the government sees as a lack of attention given to spelling and grammar in recent years.

Rosen said it would mean teachers spending months on a “drill, skill and kill” programme, “trying to get them to pass this thing. It’s bad enough with Sats. Anyone who has a year six child will know that for the past six months up until the Sats test, our children have been drilled and drilled, doing paper after paper, when they could have been writing, reading and playing with language in all kinds of ways.

“They have no evidence that any of this stuff they’ve imposed will actually improve children’s writing. If they produced it, perhaps we’d have to shut up, but they don’t.”

The letter highlights a recent Ofsted report, Moving English Forward, which recommended that the government should call on schools to develop policies on reading for enjoyment. “To date there has been no such move by government,” it says.

Instead the government has concentrated on phonics programmes. “As a result, more school time will be devoted to reading as an academic, test-driven exercise; less time will be available for reading and writing enjoyment.

“We deplore this state of affairs and consider that the quality of children’s school lives is about to be altered for the worse.”

Source: The Guardian

The National Association for the Teaching of English says a revised focus on spelling, grammar and punctuation will “impoverish” teaching.

Its chairman, Dr Simon Gibbon, says the reforms are based on ministers’ “diminishing memories of their own grammar- and public-school educations”.

The government says it wants higher standards in English.

But Dr Simon Gibbon, chairman of the association and expert in English education at King’s College, London, warns that such an approach will turn pupils off the subject.

In a speech to his association’s annual conference in York on Friday, he says teachers have been “presented with a reductive primary curriculum dominated by phonics, spelling, grammar and standard English”.

Throwback to 1950s

He continues: “We are likely to see a secondary curriculum (if we have one at all beyond an O-Level syllabus) similarly impoverished, but with the addition of a list of set books drawn from the great and the good of the literary canon.”

He told the BBC News website: “Most English teachers try to teach grammar in context rather than through formal exercises. There’s very little evidence of a benefit to teaching grammar in that way.

“It’s a throwback to the 1950s’ formal grammar teaching.”

He also criticised plans to introduce a new national grammar test, called the technical aspects of English, for all pupils in the top year of primary school.

The test, which will be sat for the first time by pupils next summer, measures children’s ability to “demonstrate their knowledge of grammatical tests”, he said.

It “will effectively hold a gun to the head of teachers who want to take risks”, he said, adding that it would lead to teachers drilling pupils with grammar exercises.

“The myth that people want you to believe is that you become a better writer as a result.

“Motivation and engagement are the things that help children learn, and underlining parts of a sentence, I don’t think that really does it for most people,” he added.

The Department for Education said a focus on spelling and grammar would be at the heart of the new primary school English curriculum.

It said the draft programmes of study were subject to an informal consultation to invite debate.

It added: “The draft programme of study for English at primary school will be far more rigorous than before.

“It will demand higher standards from pupils aged five to 11, with a higher expectation of what children should know as they go through primary school.

“Its aim is that children in England will leave primary school with a strong command of written and spoken English, and high standards of literacy.”

Source: BBC News Education and Family

More than 550,000 children aged 5-6 were the first to take the government’s contentious phonics screening test this week. Their headteachers’ response to the dubious honour was, unsurprisingly, that the exercise was little more than a waste of time and money.

Pupils in every corner of England were asked to read a list of 40 words (half of which were non-words such as “bim”), accompanied by pictures, to a qualified professional – in most cases their teacher.

The latter regulation was one of few that gained support in the consultation process, but while it reduced stress for pupils, it meant many class teachers were unable to teach for a day, with little reward other than the confirmation of what they already knew about their pupils.

The test was introduced by the coalition government to confirm that Year 1 pupils had learned phonic decoding – the links between sounds and letters – to an age-appropriate standard. Pupils who have not reached this level will be expected to receive extra support from their school.

But Rod Woodhouse, head of Essendon CofE Primary in Hertfordshire, is sceptical about the value of the test. “It threw up no surprises,” he said. “We know exactly where our children are in phonics and this didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know. It was a bit of a waste of time. As a school we are fairly relaxed about the whole thing, but it did mean time out of the timetable that the children could have spent doing something more important.

“All the paperwork and back-up emails about it must be keeping someone in a job: update number seven was about how to act on the results, which is like giving grandma an egg to suck.”

Russell Hobby, general secretary of heads’ union the NAHT, agreed. “There are concerns that there is quite a lot of effort being spent and it tells us nothing new,” he said. “One objective of the check was to raise the profile of phonics. But heads are already aware that Ofsted is inspecting phonics and it is part of the draft national curriculum.

“People are paying more attention to phonics, which means the test is even less likely to come up with new information than it was during the pilot.”

Janet Marland, head of Cavendish Community Primary in West Didsbury, Manchester, said: “The test hasn’t highlighted any problems that we didn’t know about already.”

And Ms Marland added that the exercise generated dubious results. “We have a child in Year 1 who understands the decoding system, so can sound out words – scoring 37 out of 40 – but cannot read with understanding,” she said. “We also have some children who can show a good understanding of what they read but scored under 32 (the pass mark) in the test.”

Some heads, however, were more positive. Susan Shoveller, deputy head of South Farnham School in Surrey, said the test was seen as just another assessment by her and her staff. “It all went very smoothly. It was a nice-looking booklet and the children took about five minutes to read it, so it was not an onerous process for them,” she said.

“We didn’t do any preparation for it. We have a structured phonics programme, and if you do two phonics sessions a day you don’t get twice the value because children benefit from enjoying what they’re doing, so we kept our teaching exactly the same.”

The evaluation of the pilot study found that in almost half of schools the check helped to identify problems that they were unaware of.

Although the test results will not be published in a school-by-school table, schools must tell parents whether their child has failed or passed. In the pilot study, the pass mark was set at such a high level that about two-thirds of children failed.

From the forums

The test itself lasts less than 10 minutes, but preparation can take much longer, as teachers on the TES primary forum found.

Lardylady: “Before half-term, the literacy coordinator seemed appalled that I hadn’t been practising the format of the phonics screening test with individual children. Her argument is that children might be freaked out by it, which might affect their scores. I just can’t justify wasting teaching time by practising a test.”

Msz: “I’m the literacy coordinator, but ours haven’t practised. Our Year 1 teacher actually asked if she should be panicking because everyone she knew seemed to be.”

Balse: “I did the practice paper with my Year 1s in February/March – it takes about five minutes per child.”

Katy_T: “I did a practice paper with my class a month ago. After the test I found that a lot of my class struggled with the nonsense words. I dedicated a week of my literacy before the half-term to practising and making up nonsense words. Fingers crossed this has helped and they will do better in the test.”

druimgigha: “I have done a lot of nonsense words, but have always used these anyway, usually in a trash or treasure type game. I find the poorer ones do better with these as they do just apply phonics. The better readers, especially those with a good vocabulary, try so hard to read it as a proper word.”

Source: www.tes.co.uk/forums.

As six-year-olds across England prepared to take the Government’s controversial new reading test, three teaching unions raised fresh concerns that the check is ‘’flawed’’ and could do more damage than good.

The unions say the controversial tests are an expensive way to tell schools what they already know and will do nothing to improve children’s reading.

They describe the checks on how well children can read both real and made-up words, as “flawed”.

Schools minister Nick Gibb called the unions’ position disappointing.

Mr Gibb said: “Many of their members have already told us how this quick check will allow them to identify thousands of children who need extra help to become good readers.

But in a joint briefing note to MPs the leaders of the National Union of Teachers, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and the National Association of Head Teachers voiced their concerns about the checks.

Zog’ and vot

All year one children (five and six-year-olds) will be asked to read 20 words and 20 “made-up words” such as “zog” or “vot” to their teachers on a one-to-one basis.

The checks are expected to take five to 10 minutes.

The aim is to measure whether pupils have a good understanding of phonics – the sounds of letters and groups of letters – which the government says is the key to helping children to read.

The government has asked teachers to feed the results back to parents before the end of term.

The unions say the use of made-up words will frustrate confident readers and confuse children for whom English is a second language or who have special educational needs.

They also voice concerns that the checks risk making young children feel like failures, pointing out that in the pilots only 33% of children reached the expected standard.

They say they do not object to the use of phonics which they view as an essential tool for teaching early literacy but say they are not the only method of teaching children to read.

Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers said: “Once again the government is totally failing to understand how children learn – phonics checks for six-year-olds risk doing more damage than good.”

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers said the test risked “distorting teaching”.

Chrstine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers said the message to the government from professionals was “that they want freedom to adopt whatever method best suits their children and not be pushed down a one-size-fits-all route.”

Informal experience

The unions warn that they may refuse to take part in the 2013 checks.

The Department for Education said the assessments were designed to be an informal experience for children, raise expectations in schools and give parents and teachers valuable information about progress.

Mr Gibb added: “There is a weight of international evidence which demonstrates that phonics is the most effective way of teaching early reading. It is crucial for children to master the basics of reading as early as possible so they can go on to develop a real love of reading.

“Parents want to know exactly how well their children are performing and, if they need help, what their teachers are doing to provide it. This check will help teachers to keep parents fully informed.”

Source: BBC News 2012.

The long-awaited new national curriculum could be the last for a very long time if attempts to build political consensus around the reform are successful.

TES has learned that education secretary Michael Gove is to meet his Labour shadow, Stephen Twigg, who wants to try to thrash out a common approach. Mr Twigg believes any agreement will be in teachers’ interests.

When the coalition took power in 2010, it immediately abandoned a new primary national curriculum inspired by the Rose Review. Schools had spent months preparing for the changes, which were to be introduced last September.

“One of the things teachers always say to me is they hate the chopping and changing when there are changes of government,” Mr Twigg said. “So if we can forge as broad a cross-party consensus on the future curriculum as possible, then any changes that are brought in can bed in and schools can have a sense of confidence they will last.”

The news comes as the long-delayed draft of the new national curriculum for English, maths, science and PE is published. Ministers’ responses to initial recommendations made by the curriculum review expert panel are expected imminently.

Russell Hobby, general secretary of heads’ union the NAHT, applauded any attempt to achieve consensus. “Although the curriculum is a political issue, I don’t think we should play party politics with it,” he said. “Teachers will have a lot more confidence in a new national curriculum if they know it is not going to be changed every few years.”

Mr Twigg said he did “basically agree” with the view of expert panel chair Tim Oates that the curriculum should not stray into telling teachers how to teach.

But the shadow education secretary wants it to include skills as well as subject knowledge and said he had concerns about the importance the panel had given to design and technology and citizenship. Mr Oates’ team of four experts has recommended that the two subjects, along with ICT, should remain statutory but be excluded from the actual national curriculum, with schools free to decide how they cover them.

“There may be some areas where it is a tougher challenge to reach agreement,” Mr Twigg acknowledged. “We may not agree on every dot and comma.” But he was encouraged that Mr Gove had responded to his overtures with the offer of a meeting, expected later this term.

Mr Oates wrote a paper in 2010, praised by Mr Gove, which called for more stability in the national curriculum, warning that the frequency of change had been “problematic”. But he said it had to assume the “right form” first, and warned that a “drive towards consensus” during previous national curriculum reforms caused its own problems.

“Statements which ‘keep all happy’ in fact detract from the very purpose of the national curriculum,” Mr Oates’ paper, Could do Better, concluded.

Labour has already begun its own review of the curriculum.

A Department for Education spokeswoman confirmed that Mr Gove and Mr Twigg were to meet to discuss the curriculum.

Literacy experts say no to ‘nonsense’ words

Literacy experts are warning that they will bitterly resist any attempt to introduce “nonsense” words such as “jound” and “vead” into the new national curriculum.

Concerns have been raised that the curriculum could be used to tell schools to teach pupils the “pseudo” or “non-words” that are a core element of the phonics method of teaching reading.

The government’s independent review of the national curriculum is designed to have a strict focus on subject content rather than teaching methods. But some fear that ministerial enthusiasm for phonics could see that line crossed.

John Coe, chairman of the National Association for Primary Education, thinks ministers “wouldn’t dare” to include the teaching of non-words, but said that if they did it would be “beyond reason”.

“To teach our children nonsense invalidates the whole idea of reading,” he said. “Meaning is intrinsic to reading and you have to give that message right from the beginning.”

Non-words will be used in the first phonics screening test, to be taken by all Year 1 pupils next month. A pilot test in 300 schools last year saw only a third of pupils achieve a pass mark that some heads argue is too high.

Source: TES 2012.

The SPAG test will be sat by pupils at the end of primary school as part of their national curriculum tests (SATs).

But the National Association of Head Teachers said the new tests were “a waste of taxpayers’ money”.

Ministers said too little attention had been paid to spelling, punctuation and grammar in recent years.

But the association has voted to explore ways of ensuring “this flawed test does not take place”.

Introducing a motion to disrupt the “technical English” tests, Milton Keynes head teacher Tony Draper said teachers should be left to assess pupils in spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Mr Draper said the new test from 2013 would cost millions of pounds to administer – money that would be better spent on teacher training and learning.

“It will lead to further narrowing of the curriculum, teaching to the tests and increased misery for our year six students and their families already sick of a diet of practice SATs and drills.

“Trust us to assess all our children’s writing this year and every year or we will not cooperate with any future tests.”

The conference voted almost unanimously (98.8%) to find ways of stopping the test going ahead.

The vote came as NAHT general secretary, Russell Hobby, said the association could boycott a controversial new reading test for six-year-olds in England if it was used as “a stick to beat schools”.

New regime

Mr Hobby said the initiative should only be used as a genuine test to assess pupils, rather than to measure schools.

Two years ago the NAHT boycotted Year 6 SATs and following this the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, set up a review of the tests headed by Lord Bew.

As a result, this year’s tests – which will be sat by 11-year-olds in England next week – will be the first under a new regime.

The writing test – the one most criticised by heads and teachers as an inaccurate assessment of what their pupils can achieve – will, for the first time, be assessed by teachers on the pupils’ work during the year rather than an end-of-year test externally marked.

But the NAHT is angry that the government has got rid of one externally-marked test and effectively replaced with another in the SPAG test.

A DfE spokeswoman said: “Too little attention has been given to spelling, punctuation and grammar over the last decade.

“That’s why we have accepted Lord Bew’s recommendation to assess spelling, punctuation, grammar and vocabulary as part of the writing test at Key Stage 2.”

Source: BBC News 2012.

The National Association of Head Teachers said the initiative should only be used as a genuine test to assess pupils, rather than to measure schools.

The NAHT said schools were already proficient in testing pupils’ reading.

The Government says it will help identify children who need extra help.

The phonics reading checks will be used for children at the end of Year 1 from June and are expected to take five to 10 minutes.

Children will be asked to read 20 words and 20 “made-up words” such as “zog” or “vot” to their teachers.

The check is aimed at measuring whether pupils have a good understanding of phonics – the sounds of letters and groups of letters – which the government says is the key to helping children to read.

Genuine test

Proposing a motion calling for a “fairer and more purposeful system of assessment”, Yorkshire head teacher Jane Gilmour said schools should be able to choose whether to do it, rather than have it imposed.

“We need a balanced approach to teaching reading, not one driven by fear of tests,” she said.

“If the intention is to improve reading, let’s stop wasting money on a blanket test.”

The motion was overwhelmingly carried.

Later, in his address to the NAHT conference in Harrogate, general secretary Russell Hobby said: “We fear that the pass rate for the new phonics screening check will be set at an arbitrary high level in order to fuel headlines about children failing to learn to read.

“There is not yet a robust evidence base for any particular pass rate.

“We don’t see the need for this screening check – it is inferior to what most schools do already – but if it is to happen it should be used as a genuine diagnostic test, not a stick to beat schools with.

“And if it is used to attack rather than assess, that will be the end of the screening check as far as the NAHT is concerned.

“And we will happily work with our colleagues in other unions like NUT to frustrate its further application.”

A spokeswoman for the Department for Education said: “We have been clear that the results for the reading check will not be published in league tables.

“Schools will be required to tell parents their own child’s results.”

Parents

Mr Hobby also told heads that winning the backing of parents was the best way to challenge government policy.

“The hardest lesson I have learned over the last 18 months is that, to put it bluntly, we are talking to the wrong people.

“Traditionally, public sector trade unions have faced off – positively or negatively – towards the government.

“Our target must be public opinion. And, in our existing close relationship with parents and families… we have a massive opportunity.

“In this age of criticism of schools and the people who work in them, we need to blow our own trumpet and talk about the massive achievements we have made.

“Therefore, as you already do in your schools, NAHT itself must listen to and talk to parents and families, to champion their concerns as well as its own; to give them the information they need and treat them as partners – not merely consumers – in education.”

Source: BBC News 2012.