It is reported in the Independent this morning that, in an effort to raise standards in the classroom, the government is now going to offer a free Master’s degree to 5,000 newly qualified teachers. One of the principal targets of this initiative is the four hundred schools still failing to get more than 30% of… Continue reading Master’s degrees for newly qualifieds?
I have just been sent data for a Y5 class at Tyldesley Primary school in Wigan, whose pupils all received Sounds-Write tuition from the beginning of Reception. All twenty-five pupils scored above their chronological ages, the weakest by two months, the next weakest by eight months – in itself a remarkable achievement. At the top… Continue reading Great results from Tyldesley Primary School in Wigan.
The BBC has just announced this morning that the national Strategies are to be scrapped from 2011! Hurrah!
Here’s a follow up to ‘A Rose but …’ Debbie Hepplewhite of the Reading Reform Foundation summed up the Report pretty well I thought: “I’ve now read through Rose’s Dyslexia Report – some parts too quickly so I need to re-read – however there is a lack of clarity and lack of mention of different… Continue reading O Rose, thou art sick!
News again from National Public Radio or npr in the USA. They’ve recently noticed the jettisoning by the UK government of the ‘i before e, except after c’ rule.Npr reports that Ben Schott has fixed the rule in his sights and declared it to be ‘an annoying edict about an annoying rule’. On his blog… Continue reading Schott takes aim at ‘i before e, except after c’.
Another government report: ‘Identifying and Teaching Children and Young People with Dyslexia and Literacy Difficulties’! They’re churning them out faster than David Crystal can write books on language these days. Probably so that we don’t have time to read them thoroughly!With this latest offering, we’re treated to the usual platitudes – ‘every child to succeed’,… Continue reading A Rose is but …
You might, if you were watching, have seen last week’s ‘English at the crossroads’ Report from Ofsted declaring what we all know already: that English standards are ‘not good enough’.As I’ve written in a number of posting before (see the postings on the Policy Exchange Report), although the government have spent huge amounts of money… Continue reading Standards stall – more evidence.
John was in Northern Ireland last week training teachers at a primary school in Lurgan. This is the second time I’ve run a training at the school and, after training the teachers in P1/P2 last year, this year we trained the P3/P4 teachers. And an enthusiastic lot they were too! (P1 in Northern Ireland corresponds… Continue reading How many children are read to by their parents?
In September last year, the children’s author, Alan Gibbons (Shadow of the Minotaur is a terrific read!), launched a campaign to protect libraries in schools and to try and prevent library closures in the community. He’s now organised an e-petition, which reads: We, the undersigned, call on Her Majesty’s Government to accept in principle that… Continue reading Campaign for the Book
In case you missed it, the one millionth word passed into the English language sometime around last week, according to Telegraph writer Simon Winchester. If you’ve never heard of autopeotomy, nor still linked the word with Dr James Murray, two elderly lexicographers at Oxford station, or Simon Winchester himself, you may shudder a little and… Continue reading The Joys of Our Truly Global Language