On January 26th the Telegraph’s chief education correspondent Graeme Paton reported that Cambridge University has been given the go-ahead by the government to establish a primary school for 630 pupils. The University of Cambridge Training School will be overseen by Cambridge dons and will be used to train teachers undertaking their PGCE training. The idea… Continue reading The Philistines are upon us!
As expected, yesterday’s interview with Debbie Hepplewhite and Andrew Davis on Radio 4’s PM programme followed the usual course of the debates between phonics advocates and the anti-phonics lobby. As such, it was highly instructive. Before I could write about the exchange, I had to listen to it again because, as often happens with phonics… Continue reading Andrew Davis’s damp squib
For some time now, there have been various accounts of the differences between linguistic phonics and synthetic phonics. Some of the principal differences you can find here on SusanGodland’s excellent website dyslexics.org.uk, but the differences also extend far beyond those adumbrated by Susan into the detail of how linguistic phonics should be taught. And, of… Continue reading Linguistic phonics: a practical example
I’ve just had my daughter and her two children over for a few days over Christmas and, while they were here, it set me thinking a bit more about a programme I’d been listening to recently on Radio 4 about Ladybird books, which you can look at here. As I have a small collection of… Continue reading The very contented grandson!
Here are the SATs results from three schools that have implemented Sounds~Write. What is really impressive about these results is that they all have very good results at Level 5. The head teacher of one of these schools I was talking to this morning was nonplussed about the fact that even when some schools do… Continue reading Now you know why we called it Sounds-Write!
I’ve posted this on my blog because I couldn’t post such a long answer on Chris’s blog. You can read what he had to say here. Hi Chris, You’re right about lots of the things you say in this posting. Spelling does ‘bug’ lots of people. It is accorded far too much importance partly because it… Continue reading The hydra of spelling!
The closing keynote talk at Thursday’s conference, ‘EAL: testing the limits of phonics’, given by Frank Monaghan, was nothing more nor less than a crude caricature of phonics. As a matter of fact, he never attempted to engage with the principles behind phonics teaching. Rather he posed as the scourge of educational psychologists, of the… Continue reading Second half: the dog whistle politics of the anti-phonics lobby
Yesterday I attended ‘The Future of Phonics in Education and Learning’ conference in London, organised by ‘Inside Government’. Gordon Askew, literacy adviser and phonics expert, was one of the keynote speakers tasked with the job of providing guidance on the direction in which government is going to take phonics. Both of Askew’s talks set out… Continue reading A game of two halves: first half
What a week! My visit to Blackthorns Primary School in West Sussex turned out to be hugely enjoyable. I was shown round the school and into all the classes by Marianne Brand, the school’s new head teacher. Years ago, Marianne was a teacher at my daughter’s former primary school, St Thomas Aquinas, and so it… Continue reading My week in the round
I’ve just been reading ‘Why some kids can’t spell and why spelling tests won’t help’ by Misty Adoniou, who is a ‘Senior Lecturer in Language, Literacy and Teaching English as a Second Language’ at the University of Canberra. The piece, which appeared on the website ‘The Conversation’, begins from the perspective that spelling does matter. On… Continue reading De-misty-fying spelling!