When was the 'only' bit dropped from 'first, fast and only' phonics?

I gather that the latest way in which the Ruth Miskin phonics package in the very first weeks of Year 1 is now delivered (according to the training and what you buy) goes like this:
1. Phonics instruction for half hour a day using Miskin materials.
2. Using Miskin texts as written by the Miskin team. These are phonically regular.
3. Using a 'real book' - not by Miskin, but specifically chosen by Miskin in the Miskin package that the school buys into. This is not phonically regular.
4. Note: the sequence can go 1, 3, 2, ie using the non-phonically regular text before the regular one.


Isn't this a departure from 'first, fast and only'? I heard several people from the phonics camp explain quite clearly that the beginning of Year 1 was too early for children to be looking at and being taught using non-phonically regular texts - including Nick Gibb who told me personally that it was 'confusing' for children at this point. When did the prescription of non-phonically regular texts come in to the Miskin package? Has it been included in e.g. Jolly Phonics or any other of the prescribed and govt. ratified schemes?

Isn't this an example of the 'mixed method' systems, so derided and scorned by some in the phonics camp?

I am writing to Justine Greening for permission to set up My Front Room Grammar School.

Dear Justine Greening

At present our two children attend a comprehensive school. This is a bad idea, because, as you've pointed out, the only way to get a good education is through selection by ability.

I have an idea. I will turn our front room into a grammar school. To do this, I will need to select so I am in the process of writing an exam to decide which of our two children can come to My Front Room Grammar School. I've seen from your speeches that I need a poor child to join us. I am in the process of finding one.

My two and the poor one will do the test. I will make sure that two of them - not the poor one - don't pass. These two will be sent back to the comprehensive school, which is now not comprehensive because it doesn't include anyone at My Front Room Grammar School.

I hope you think that this is a good idea and makes My Front Room Grammar School eligible for government funding.

Best wishes
Michael Rosen

Selection means rejection, inequality, and a lousy curriculum at KS2.

What is emerging from what we might laughingly call Tory 'plans' for schools, is that there will not be a universal 11-plus system in England,  but a much more improvised ad hoc one, whereby anyone or any group who wants to set up a selective school (and fulfils some as yet unspecified criteria) will be able to.

In other words, the government will set up what is in effect a selection competition: schools will compete with each other to get the 'best' pupils - however that is decided, presumably by new tests.

This is to be modified by some kind of commitment that these schools will find (?), get (?), procure (?) poor pupils. One form for this is for a selective school to sponsor a primary school in a 'poor area'. And these new selective schools are to have some kind of income-meter which measures parents' income in order to supposedly guarantee that this doing-well-by-poor-kids system is working.

It doesn't take much imagination to see some problems here:

1. Selection is not inclusion. If you select,  you exclude. Selection is rejection. Some won't get in. Even if all schools were allowed to select, the competition for selection excludes. What's more, instead of schools co-operating - a proven method of school improvement, as demonstrated by Tim Brighouse - schools will compete to exclude: a sure fire way of creating sump schools. It's inbuilt into such a system. Guaranteed.

2. There is a bureaucratic nightmare, open to many abuses if there is in effect a new kind of means test for identifying poor people. People can hide income, can hide changing circumstances, particularly in the new world of self-employment. The system will be 'gamed'. And a new layer of bureaucracy will have to be created to monitor all this. More jobs paid for by the DfE that are not helping children in classrooms. More inspection!

3.  A raft of new tests will appear further enriching the bloated exam and testing system. These test-designers will produce vast volumes of BS about how their tests are valid, reliable, fair etc etc ways of discerning 'ability', 'aptitude', 'intelligence',  but about ten years later, it will be shown conclusively that all they showed was the relative ability for parents to pay for tutors. There is no such thing as a test that can't be coached for.

4. Meanwhile, primary schools will be under even more pressure to make the curriculum match the tests, while the test is designed to select - not to find out what children know. This will involve even more of a distortion of the purpose of education than exists with KS SATs. These tests will be restricted to right/wrong answers, forcing the curriculum to focus even more on right/wrong teaching and learning. What gets squeezed out here are the arts as a whole, plus real enquiry, invention, and interpretation. Anyone concerned about the content of education, should be concerned about these new proposals.

5.  The old 11-plus system made a half-hearted effort to be 'fair' in terms of provision of grammar schools across the country. It didn't succeed. One area might provide as many as 40% places, others as little as 20%. It was uneven. This was recognised as being a major flaw in the system as the theory had been that the 11-plus was an 'objective' assessment of ability and/or intelligence and the system responded to it. In fact, what happened was that the system provided places for just as many as that local authority decided. The number wasn't fixed by those who could perform tasks in a test, but by some bureaucrats in an office deciding how much money they would spend. It was cynical and outrageous. However, if that was bad, the unevenness that will occur with these Tory plans will be huge. There will be some areas with very few selective schools, some with many. There will be very different reasons for this and some researchers and journalists will earn good money and sound 'radical' showing this, as if somehow the system as a whole could be made fairer by providing a few more grammar school places.

6. Unevenness and inequality are written through this whole proposal. There will be many kinds of unevenness and inequality because that's how the inventors of this scheme like it. They pretend they loathe the role of the state in education whilst the state is creating patterns of inequality at the stroke of the pen. Far from removing or lessening inequalities, this whole proposal will give birth to hundreds of local wangling and wrangling over places, income, money per pupil, pupil-staff ratios and so on. The system will have many losers. It turns education into a battleground of competing consumers.  Ultimately, this is because the people behind this plan believe in something very basic: that the best outcomes arise from competition. They are not interested in the best education for all. This is a point of philosophy. They believe that the more you can get human beings to compete with each other, the net result will be better - whether that's in the making of cars, or the 'production' of educated 16 and 18 year olds. This philosophy is what is at the heart of this proposal. The fact that competition always results in failure is, in their book, the point. They want and need failure-people to work for those that succeed. This in their book is the natural order. We haven't progressed from 'the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate'. This business of going out hunting for poor kids to stuff into grammar schools is mix of cosmetics ('hey look what we're doing for the poor, aren't we kind, nice and good people? ') and doing what the system does anyway - which is succeed in providing a route to university and/or well paid jobs  to some kids from poor backgrounds. But their addiction to competition is really an addiction to failure. They need a system that produces failures to feed the low-paid economy they have been working so hard to create since the crash of 2008. This proposal will help them achieve that goal.

New secret measurement of primary schools will follow

If more grammar schools come in, stand by for a new kind of secret measurement of primary schools coming in: how good a school is at getting kids into 'the grammar'. In fact, it will be a measure of how many middle class parents who want their kids to go, but from the outside it will look as if one school is 'better' at getting kids in and another not so good. 

This will then have a knock-on effect on what is taught and how it is taught in order to keep up with this kind of 'demand' in certain areas. This will be tied to the kind of questions that are asked on the exams that select - heavily loaded towards right/wrong answers, 'grammar' and 'verbal reasoning' (IQ). 

I suspect that much of this will revive the flagging IQ business anyway, with people accepting the idea that 'ability' is the same as doing IQ questions.

Your comma was too far below a line that wasn't there. Exam surrealism at the DfE

The marking of Key stage 2 SATs GPS is revealing something pretty nasty at the heart of high stakes testing.

Here are some examples:

The children were asked to 're-arrange' some words to turn a statement into a question:

'They are listening to music.'

for which

'Are they listening to music?' is the correct answer.

(note: this is a test of what all children immersed in English can do when speaking. It's only when they get into exam situations that things like this become a problem for them. The word 'rearrange' is likely to give some children more problems than the task itself! )

In giving this correct answer, some children made what are deemed 'errors' or 'mistakes'. So one child inadvertently put a capital 't' for 'they'. This then makes that child's answer 'wrong'. No mark. Zero. The child showed that he/she had the knowledge to answer the question but zero marks nevertheless.
[UPDATE: IT'S JUST BEEN POINTED OUT TO ME THAT THIS CHILD WAS DOING THE 'RIGHT' THING: HE/SHE REARRANGED THE WORDS AS GIVEN, THAT INCLUDES USING 'THEY' WITH A CAPITAL 'T'. IF THESE WERE CUT-UPS AND INVOLVED MOVING CUT-OUT WORDS AROUND ON THE TABLE, THE SAME 'ERROR' WOULD BE MADE. THIS UPDATE SHOWS THE ZERO MARK TO BE EVEN CRAZIER.]

So, yes, of course, the children and teachers have all been told that everything has to be 'right' for the answer to be 'right' but more holistically, we can see that this is tosh. The child has done the task correctly, but made a different kind of 'error'. (A computer would have corrected this, by the way, even as it is correcting my writing of this blog!)

Ultimately, this doesn't penalise the child, it penalises the school. If there is a cumulative effect of such mark-downs, the school can and will be turned into an academy. If it's an academy, it will be turned into another academy.

If people reading this think this is an exceptional case, there are others:

No mark for a 'p' not descending below the line; 

a semi-colon not being 'on the line' (but there was no line); 

a full stop missing; 

a comma too far below the line (there was no line).

Welcome to education England, 2016.

(By that, I mean that we all know that this marking will have a knock-on effect on how teachers teach - not their fault, and how much time children will have to spend on making sure that their commas don't go too far below the line of a line that isn't there. This way a test that is supposedly on 'grammar', 'spelling' and 'punctuation' actually becomes a test in motor control. )

Thoughts on 'comprehension' in the primary school

I've written many times before how 'decoding' is not the same as 'reading'. In short, I've suggested that 'reading' has to be do with 'meaning' - why else would we read?

In theory, the curriculum in primary schools covers 'reading for meaning' or 'reading with meaning' or  'reading with understanding' and called it 'comprehension'. Even so, this still leaves me thinking that there's something wanting. Do we read in order to 'comprehend'? I don't think so. We probably read in the hope of comprehending, or with comprehension. But we really read because we want to 'get' something from a passage, scene, book, poem etc., don't we?

How might we call this something? The stuff we 'get' or want to 'get'?
Entertainment, enlightenment, some kind of 'truth'?
And how do we get to it?

Key to getting there is through making analogies: we compare what we are reading (or think we are reading) with moments in our lives (experience) and with other 'texts' (intertextuality). These acts of comparison are crucial in our means of understanding and getting 'value' from a text.

But what is the 'value'?

Some say, it's learning empathy. Others might want to call it 'morality' - what's fair, what's not fair, what's right, what's wrong.

But there's also something to do with abstract thought. We come out of the specifics of the text and the analogies we have made,  with generalities about, say, fear, anger, love, jealousy and how we might behave in such circumstances and/or how the protagonist(s) behaved.

We may also make generalities about the text being 'good' or 'bad' or 'saying...x' - an overall 'evaluation', then.

Also in here, we should also think more psychologically about 'compensations' and ways in which texts can appear to satisfy or support our needs, desires and anxieties.

When you look at transcripts of children responding to books - as I have, as I've been marking my students' essays - you can see very different ways in which children behave when given books and poems.

You can of course ask them questions which will 'prove' they have comprehended. These are the right/wrong answers much loved of examiners. However, these won't show that children can have 'informed opinions' or 'interpretations'.
Where do these come from?
1) Because, I the teacher, told them to have them?
2) Or because, through careful work using trigger questions, they arrived at them?
3) Or does it also come from reading for pleasure linked to open-ended discussion?
4) Is that always with the teacher guiding or sometimes with the pupils in pairs?
5) Or a combination of all of these approaches?

Somewhere in this process, too, are some micro-moments. When you read the transcripts, you can see children swapping views as they try to 'catch' or 'capture' what a particular moment in the story or poem is about or for. These often sound and feel like discoveries. You can hear the children being excited as they feel that they have revealed something about what's 'in' the story.  In those moments, it's very interesting what happens when they make analogies with their own lives or other texts they know. It is really a kind of hidden generalising. In order to do it, you have to invent a category (you may not name it) like, say, falling down, and then you talk about 'falling down' moments for a bit. That's what's been called a 'schema'. Then you may well end up talking about the dangers of 'falling down' and 'consequences' and whether people in the book and/or real life behaved well or badly when there was someone 'falling down'.

Though this doesn't look like abstract thought, it involves a form of abstraction: selecting out of the particular and generalising that experience. It may or may not end up with an abstract noun. There's a movement that starts from implicit abstraction to explicit abstraction.

Squeaky-bum time in Tory-land

It's all getting squeaky-bum in Tory land:
1. Over decades, Tories play race card trying to hoover up xenophobic votes rather than explain that immigration is paying pensions and providing services e.g. Thatcher and 'swamped'.
2. Tories never explain that EU migration is non-negotiable and applies equally to Brits abroad who benefit from it.
3. Tories think they can swing a 'remain' vote in order to isolate Brexiteers because it's been their permanent split.
4. Brexiteers succeed in getting a lot of votes purely on basis of saying that Brexit means fewer immigrants, therefore your standard of life will go up. The fact that this is a lie, is hardly countered by anyone.
5. A non-Brexit PM takes over, who immediately realises that she can't and won't and doesn't want to deliver a change in immigration policy. Presumably, she thinks she can ride out the storm when the anti-immigration people notice - perhaps by yet more xenophobic crap and 'slapping down' on something or other.
6. for the record: standards of living are lowered by governments in league with big business fixing wage rates, cutting services, introducing zero hour contracts, and phoney self-employed status, not building social housing, privatising services, whilst allowing trillions of unpaid tax to be taken out of the country. They are not lowered by migrants. If employers don't pay minimum wages that's because employers do that and are not locked up for doing it.