All Children To Be Literate

The Conservatives may pledge to eradicate illiteracy within a generation, but the solution to this 150-year-old problem must go beyond a reading test with no adequate follow up, says Mick Waters...

Ever the politician, Michael Gove has sought to counteract difficult media coverage with a positive headline. He has proposed there should be a national campaign to ensure all children can read and write, and for illiteracy in childhood to be eradicated. Mr Gove is good at coming up with principles that garner universal agreement. Any difference of opinion after that is seen as opposition to the principle itself, resulting in a series of spats, accusations and insults that deflect from the task in hand. This is one reason the noble mission of educating the next generation has become embroiled in argument, rather than united behind a common cause.

Ensuring every child can read is the aim of every teacher. Once they can read, there is at least something purposeful children can do, and teaching is certainly a less demanding proposition. But teaching all children to read is an elusive target; in nearly 150 years of state education the ambition remains frustratingly beyond our grasp. Whilst largely attributed to poverty, there must be other causes.

Most children seem to learn to read relatively easily, almost naturally. Like talking and walking, they see others doing it, want to join in, get the right help at the right time and it all sort of ‘emerges’. As with talking and walking, some do it earlier than others, but with reading we seem unwilling to wait long before setting in place programmes for those who are slower to start.

The view is that the best way to get children thought ‘less likely to read’ started is to introduce formal approaches earlier in their life. The approaches used vary. Like all teaching, the teaching of reading goes through fads, waves, trends and gimmicks, with new practices emerging to overcome the frustration with previous approaches. A small piece of research will ‘prove’ the value of an approach and it will spread, only to meet another coming in the opposite direction.

Since the war there have been many materials developed to support reading: look and say, phonics, whole word methods, phonics again, real book approaches, text, sentence and word level techniques, reading recovery… and phonics, again. Currently, the government insists that all children are taught synthetic phonics and are screened at the age of six. This is based on research from Clackmannanshire where a small cohort of children was shown to make better progress in synthetic, rather than applied, phonics approaches. The problem is that whilst we test children for their phonics success, there seems to be no systematic process to react to the evidence of the screening at the individual level. As with most so called ‘assessment’ in England, it is really ‘testing’, which is used as a sort of ‘product control’ mechanism to compare schools’ performance. If proficiency in phonics is so important then we should be doing more than testing a school’s efficiency at teaching synthetic phonics and devising programmes to address the shortcomings for each child in their particular screening.

Most people know that learning to read goes far beyond knowledge of phonics. Over the years, the search for the hidden secret to literacy has thrown up a range of sensible reference points: the importance of contextual clues, meeting stories early, nursery rhymes and singing, a rich vocabulary, word shapes, word recognition, searching for meaning, the value of books being to hand, even the importance of motor skills, balance and sensory awareness. There is, though, currently no guaranteed treatment for the ‘slow to start’ reader. Maybe it is a combination of all of these approaches, plus a few others?

Another life skill in which most people manage to become proficient is driving. Children expect to learn to drive and few anticipate never being able to do it. A potentially complex and difficult skill is acquired because the desire to do it is there and it is now a rite of passage in the teenage years. Characteristically, the youngster spends many years sitting beside others who can already drive – watching them getting it right most of the time, often articulating why they did or didn’t get it quite right and what others are doing wrong. The youngster reads the road for years before she is expected to show she can drive. Maybe there is a message there for formally structuring learning to read? Perhaps we start too early and, in doing so, create in some children the belief that reading is difficult…and it is not for them. Whatever combination of approaches we use, creating an unquenchable thirst for reading is surely the starting point.

About the author

Mick Waters is Professor of Education at Wolverhampton University. His recent book, Thinking Allowed on Schooling, addresses this issue further.