- The Observer,
- Sunday March 10 2002
Imagine that the words on this page blur into meaningless squiggles, that you can't read mail when it arrives, fill in official forms, or use a computer. Imagine reading so badly you have to get someone else to look at the listings to find out the times of television programmes, and you have been like this since childhood.
You would think you were thick. Which is what Pat Mannix thought until she was 55. Pat left school at 15 virtually unable to read and brought up four children convinced she was too stupid to understand the labels on the food she bought. Last September, Pat started free classes in English and maths near her home in Liverpool. She is now planning to take GCSEs and is convinced 'anyone can learn given the opportunity'.
Seven million adults in this country are functionally illiterate. That means that one in five, given Yellow Pages, couldn't find a plumber. Since the last election, the Government has put serious money into the problem, setting up the Adult Skills Basic Strategy Unit, with £15 million to kick-start its activities. These include reaching potential students through nurseries and health centres, offering employers money to release workers to learn, and establishing a national curriculum that can be individually tailored. On Thursday, some of the early successes will be celebrating with the Prime Minister.
But even as the Government pumps in money (£1.5 billion was pledged in the manifesto) there is concern about how many teenagers continue to leave school illiterate. The current position is an indictment of our education system, as Lord Moser, who wrote the definitive report on the subject in 1999, made clear. Home circumstances have a role to play, he acknowledged, but 'above all', illiteracy comes 'from poor schooling'.
The Government's target is still 80 per cent will leave primary school with the desired level of literacy (having reached level 4 and above at Key Stage 2). What does that mean for the other 20 per cent? Why is the system still accepting their failure - especially when a handful of schools produce results way above this year after year? Perhaps it's because, awkwardly for the Government, these schools are, on the whole, not following the National Literacy Strategy?
As some schools get 98-100 per cent of their children to read and spell (and by no means in the most socially or economically advantaged areas) others consistently produce high numbers of children with learning difficulties. One in five children is on the special needs register nationally (suspiciously, the same proportion as adult illiterates in the population) but at some schools the proportion is as high as 55 per cent. Which begs the question whether, in fact, it might not be the pupils that have learning difficulties so much as the schools that have teaching difficulties.
Most teachers would probably accept the view of Keda Cowling, who developed her own reading scheme (originally for children, now highly successful with adult illiterates in Wandsworth Prison) that around 25 per cent of children learn to read effortlessly, almost regardless of method. A further 50 per cent can be taught in class. But there is always a proportion, around 20 per cent, who struggle. Cowling taught from 1968 until a couple of years ago and says: 'There would always be six or seven in a class of 40 who were word blind, though they were often highly intelligent.'
Cowling regards these children as dyslexic - but unlike many in the special needs industry, she doesn't see this as a burden for all time. It means that a better way of reaching them has to be found, before they fall behind and become disillusioned. She devised her own method as a result of offering them free private tuition over decades. Her headmaster begged her 'not to die and take it with me', so she has since published it as Toe By Toe .
Cowling's method is based on so-called 'synthetic phonics' - a recent, and confusing, term for a method that has probably been around for millennia. It involves breaking the word up - before you know what it is - into its component sounds and blending, or synthesizing, them. eg C-A-T. Despite the fact that this sounds a lot like common sense, and although she got there by trial and error in isolation, Cowling now finds herself in a highly contentious area.
The teaching of reading has been a battleground among educationalists for half a century. As 'look and say' and 'real books' vied with phonics for dominance. Supporters of phonics were often portrayed as traditionalists who also wanted to bring back grammar and make school boring. (Some are conservatives, not all.) And although the importance of phonics has been accepted in the National Literacy Strategy, resistance remains. Those who teach synthetic phonics tend to do it very early - in reception - and fast. The National Literacy Strategy spreads it over years and also encourages guesswork, which the synthetics phonics people deplore.
The most far-reaching and reputable international report on reading, compiled for the US Congress in 1998, concluded that synthetic phonics was the best method for teaching low-achieving children. The small-scale, on-the-ground experience in British schools meanwhile suggests that it doesn't hold back the brightest. Take Kobi Nazrul school in Tower Hamlets. It uses its own synthetic phonics method and its 11-year-olds last year got 100 per cent 'passes', against a national average of 75 per cent.
There's the research from Clackmannanshire where, in 1998, one group of reception-age children learnt synthetic phonics, and two others by different methods - still phonics, but so-called analytic phonics, where children are told how to say the word spelt CAT, and then asked to analyse the sounds 'C-A-T'. After 16 weeks, the synthetic phonics children were seven months ahead in reading age. In May, the school switched all the children to synthetic phonics and by the following year they were all 11 months ahead of the average in both reading and spelling.
Or there's St Michael's, Stoke Gifford, South Gloucestershire, where children are taught synthetic phonics through a combination of the commercial Jolly Phonics scheme and their own materials. When the children arrive at this school, their baseline assessments are below the country average, yet at the end of recep tion, the top quarter of children are 25 months ahead, while the bottom quarter are eight months ahead in reading, and 11 months ahead in spelling.
Synthetic phonics also seems to work for adults. A small charity, the Shannon Trust, has provided Toe by Toe on one wing of Wandsworth Prison (60 per cent of the prison population is illiterate), and has already had 50 graduates. Jim, 55, started the course a few months ago and expects to finish it within another three. He believes that when he gets out, his reading may help him get a job.
The DFES insists that the national literacy strategy was based on extensive research and was piloted. It was not, however, scientifically tested against other methods. Proponents of synthetic phonics argue that it is essential to teach phonemes very fast and systematically, without cluttering up the process. 'The National Literacy Strategy throws in every method,' says one teacher, 'as if in the hope that one will stick.'
Brains seem to be wired differently in different people. But given that we allegedly only use a tiny fraction of our brainpower anyway, this seems a ridiculous reason to conclude that the dyslexics, or whatever, are in some sense ineducable. Lord Moser's report warned that we don't know what works best when teaching adults, and urged the Government to explore an international research project to reach some consensus.
The Government should also investigate whether synthetic phonics really works better for children. The educationalists running the National Literacy Strategy owe it to all the children who are thought to have special needs, and to the five or six strugglers in every class in the country, at least to test its claims - before they, like Pat Mannix, give up and decide they're stupid.
