For anyone interested, I posted a couple of replies to questions on Mumsnet this morning. You can read them (and the rest of the thread) here and here.
The other thing that’s on my mind is that I have recently offered two local primary school the opportunity to train one member of their Key Stage 1 teams entirely free of charge. This is partly because I would genuinely like to contribute something to my local community and, of course, partly because I hoped that, if they did agree to send someone, they would be so blown away by the efficacy of the Sounds-Write programme, they’d be banging on the door within six months begging to train more.
So, what was the response? In the case of one of the schools, the head teacher, who said he’d look at the website and, presumably, see that Sounds-Write has been accepted for match funding, as well as being scrutinised by the DfE, never even bothered to reply. In the case of the other school, after an initial reply – a couple of days after the course began – on a second prompting, replied that the school was ‘ok’. This, I hasten to add, is a school attended by two children I have been teaching to read and spell and who clearly have not been getting clear instruction.
Again, in both cases, I also offered to go in and talk them and/or their respective staffs about Sounds-Write and to explain how the programme works and the kinds of results one might expect if they were to implement the programme. In neither case was there any response.
I shall be very interested to see what kinds of results are produced by both schools after the DfE’s new phonics screening check in June. We’ll see then whether or not they are justified in having confidence in what they are doing.