By kind permission of Debbie Hepplewhite, I am posting, in its entirety, her response on the Reading Reform Foundation to an article by Graeme Paton in yesterday’s Telegraph newspaper. Debbie’s post provides an excellent risposte to many of the issues raised in Paton’s piece, titled “Compulsory reading test ‘should be scrapped’” and straplined ‘Bright children are… Continue reading Debbie Hepplewhite confounds screening check critics
Since the government launched its scheme to encourage schools to train teaching staffs in how to teach phonics, only 1,000 primaries have booked such training. Graeme Paton, writing in the Telegraph, reported last week that in many areas of the country in which pupils are failing to reach the national average in reading, schools are… Continue reading Take-up of match funding
It sounds like a headline from the Daily Stands-back-in-amazement: the BBC education news desk reported yesterday that an OECD study has discovered there is ‘a strong link between teenage reading skills and early parental help’. Hmmm, you’re very likely calling to mind John Cleese’s ‘stating the bleeding obvious’ remark! Graeme Paton in the Telegraph has also picked up the story today, which… Continue reading The parent factor in student performance (OECD)
You’ve got to give credit to Graeme Paton. He is nothing if not dogged. When it comes to trying to get something done about the numbers of children being unable to read and write, persistence is a key attribute. Yesterday, he revealed that around ‘15 per cent of children in England have reading skills no… Continue reading Paton – tly obvious!
What was Christopher Middleton at the Telegraph thinking when he called what Dianne Murphy is doing a ‘literacy revolution’? He evidently has never read Marx’s 18th Brumaire of Louise Napoleon, which, prompted Marx to remark famously that history repeats itself, ‘first as tragedy, then as farce’. Far from being a revolution, this kind of methodology… Continue reading Murphy’s law re-stated
There’s a story in the Telegraph this morning declaring that ‘politically correct’ parents who avoid telling their children folk tales are missing the chance ‘to teach children morality’. Some parents, it is alleged, are refusing to read or tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood because it involves a child wandering off alone into… Continue reading If you go down to the woods today, your mother obviously hasn’t been telling you the right kinds of stories
The Telegraph (yesterday) and the Sunday Times today are both running stories on Ms Birbalsingh’s departure (sacking) from St Michael and All Angels Academy after she had spoken out against ‘low standards and expecting the very least from the poor and disadvantaged’ at the Conservative Party conference a few weeks ago.Despite being given permission to… Continue reading Ms Birbalsingh departs
As a postscript to yesterday’s story about Lincolnshire county council’s desire to pursue Mark McCullough for allowing his daughter to walk twenty yards to the stop for her school bus, Toby Young, in the Telegraph (13/09/2010) – ‘Schools must be braver with our children: Spending a childhood wrapped in cotton wool is no preparation for… Continue reading Busy bureaucrats must be braver!
I expect people will have been pretty shocked to read in today’s papers of another county council that doesn’t seem to know where to draw the line when it comes to minding its own business. This morning’s Telegraph is reporting that Mark McCullough is being threatened by Lincolnshire county council for allowing his seven-year-old daughter… Continue reading Busybody bureaucrats at it again!
At school, my old Latin master, Georgie Lamb, once told us how Cato, in the face of the rising power of Carthage, used to include in every speech he made in the senate, the words, ‘Carthago delenda est!’ – Carthage must be destroyed. Allegedly, he (Cato) finally got his point across by holding up a… Continue reading New figures on illiteracy, or It’s the latest SATs results.