Just the other day a friend, a primary head, was bewailing her problems with the phonics test. She’s not against phonics per se, but the test for six-year-olds is causing her headaches. Why? For some children it’s just too hard.
Not those, arguably the majority, for whom learning to read is best done via phonics: for them the test is entirely logical. The problem lies with those instinctive readers who grasp intuitively how words are written, recognise and use them. For them there is something bewildering and fundamentally wrong about being required to read words such as “gar” and “kloob”: they know they aren’t real.
For them the fake words aren’t just confusing: they’re actually upsetting. Intuitive readers have subconsciously grasped both the logic and the illogicality of English spelling: so the test is a regressive step.
Like my colleague, I don’t object to teaching reading through phonics – but it shouldn’t be used (or tested) with those children for whom it renders the task more difficult.
It is patently wrong to apply this blanket prescription to a fundamental skill – not the skill of phonics, merely a tool, but that of reading. Forcing all schools and teachers to use it with all children is wrong.
All children are different, individuals: that’s why we differentiate in teaching, stretching the most able, providing scaffolding and catch-up for the struggling.
I find it fascinating – indeed, bizarre – that a Tory government professing to believe in small government, in allowing decisions to be made at the proper level, persists in centralising its control of education. It doesn’t even like organisations as big as local authorities: it prefers standalone academies (but perversely pushes them to form chains or multi-academy trusts). Yet it demands that every child must learn reading the same way.
Another recent news item stemmed from government diktat, inflexible and inhumane. A court case deemed it illegal for local authorities to fine parents for taking children out of school on holiday. Even after the ruling, schools minister Nick Gibb added a rider that, while we might permit children time off for funerals, there was no need to allow time afterwards for grieving. They should be back in school.
Fifteen months ago my family celebrated my parents’ 70th wedding anniversary (they were married just after D-Day). Yet my niece and her husband felt they couldn’t take their three children out of school. In 2014 England it wasn’t worth the risk of their schools and local authority adopting a hostile position and issuing a fine. That family landmark would not, they feared, be considered acceptable grounds for absence.
Fortunately, mum’s funeral, when she died two months later, aged 92, was deemed permissible.
Teachers and school leaders know that no single solution suits everyone, that one-size-fits-all approaches never work: yet government is generally in too much of a hurry to listen. We are creating a ruthless, sour and unkind educational world.
Last week, surprisingly, it seemed for a moment as if government had paid heed to primary heads over its controversial proposal for primary school tests at ages 5, 7 and 11. After the NAHT, articulated well-founded concerns about increased and unnecessary pressures on pupils and schools alike, Nicky Morgan was reportedly ready to back off. Until, that is, the Sunday Times used its front page to dub her response a “U-turn”, accusing ministers of “caving into unions”. Now it appears tests are back on the menu.
In the manner of Orwell’s Animal Farm characters haplessly regarding their rulers, we might look from the politicians to the right-wing press and back, and find ourselves entirely unable to tell the difference.
- Dr Bernard Trafford is head of Newcastle’s Royal Grammar School and a former chairman of HMC. His views are personal. Follow him on Twitter @bernardtrafford