How do you become 'fluent' at reading? Ruth Miskin knows.

Maybe I'm slow off the mark here but I was alerted this week to a programme that is on sale now that will teach children 'reading fluency'. I'll come to what it is in a moment, but first a few words about where we've got to with 'learning to read'.

In 2011, I was present at the launch in the House of Commons of the Reading Association's Summer Reading Challenge, a nationwide effort to get children going to libraries and reading books. Nick Gibb, the Schools Minister at the time gave a speech. He hardly mentioned the Reading Challenge at all. He used the occasion to launch his government's policy on phonics, which would involve compulsory phonics sessions in every maintained school in England with a phonics screening test at the end of Year One. Nick Gibb said that this would 'eradicate illiteracy'. 

At the time, I thought that that was a bold claim. All sorts of efforts over the last 100 years or so in many different countries have been tried out to 'eradicate' illiteracy and to date all that had been found was that there were competing ways to 'improve' literacy. 

Digression: I was taught to read using a scheme called 'Beacon Readers'. In the teachers' guide to the scheme, the writers pointed out that it would be a great mistake to teach reading in a way that either only worked on what they called 'phonetics' (what we would now call 'phonics') or solely on 'meaning'. The scheme, they claimed, would combine both. And indeed it did. Stories, words lists using repeated phonemes all linked together. 

When Nick Gibb's phonic revolution came in, one way they did it was to claim that the obstacle facing children was 'Look and Say', a method which supposedly or actually tried to teach reading by teaching 'whole words'. What surprised me at the time was that I was of a generation that wasn't taught to read that way and yet I didn't ever hear the argument against the Beacon Readers method. 

So, phonics came in and here we are 14 or so years later, and simple question: has illiteracy been eradicated? If not, why not? If so, what are the problems that remain? 

I can't answer those questions directly but I'm picking up a few hints. Firstly, is the one concerning the Key Stage 2 scores. I've heard experts talking about how they're worried that these scores seem 'difficult to budge'. Really? Surely after all this phonics, then we should have seen huge leaps in the KS2 scores. This would be or should be the proof in the pudding. Teach phonics: push up reading scores for 11 year olds. No?

Well there's one theoretical problem here: phonics is a way of teaching the alphabetic code as an abstract skill - it matches phonemes and graphemes. It's supposed to be detached and detachable from reading-for-meaning. A good phonics performer, it's claimed, can see most words for the first time and read them or at least have a good shot at them. On the other hand, the KS2 reading test asks the children to answer questions related to the meaning. (I have strong criticisms of this but I'll leave that to one side.) The key word here is 'meaning'. 

Those of us who were critical of the phonics revolution kept using this word 'meaning'. We were (and still are) concerned that children were spending a lot of time looking at texts (reading schemes) and not relating their knowledge of the alphabetic code to meaning. As a result, the actual process of what we all commonly understand reading to be (ie reading for meaning) was, and is, taking a back seat. 

When we raised this, we've been pushed away and told that we're doubters and people who are trying to prevent children from progressing. Hmmm. The lack of 'progress' accusation seems to be the one that can be directed at this failure of the system to get the Key Stage 2 scores to budge.

Oh no, say the defenders of phonics, look out our PISA scores! What these show is that England has risen in the international table. Hooray! But they only show a tiny improvement on scores. How can that be? Well, anyone who follows football knows precisely how. You can win the league one year with,  say 85 points, but the next year you can get 85 points and come second. There is not a direct correlation between raw scores and places in a league. This elementary fact seemed to escape the notice of the commentators and, stand by for when or if this government introduces some changes to reading policies and the newspapers will again mis-read the meaning of the PISA tables. That's because they will have been briefed by people who defend the phonics revolution.

But now we have another very big hint that all might not be well with phonics revolution and 'phonics-will-eradicate-illiteracy' line. The remarkable Ruth Miskin who devised a phonics programme (as well as advised the government on phonics - surely a coincidence), has developed a reading fluency programme. 

What schools should do is buy the programme and buy the training. Of course. As a writer for children, I will immediately declare an interest here:  money from school budgets to buy Ruth Miskin's phonics programme and money from school budgets to buy Ruth Miskin's reading fluency programme is less money to buy books for children. I reveal this fact to anticipate the argument that I am only talking about this stuff because it affects my pocket. 

Nevertheless, I will take the view that Ruth Miskin herself has clocked that even her fail-safe phonics scheme may not enable children to read fluently. So, simple question again, why not?

What possible obstacle to reading fluently can there be if nearly all children are passing their phonics screening check? 

I have some recent experience of this with myself. I have done some Yiddish classes. Yiddish can be written with the same letters I'm using here (so-called 'Roman alphabet') but traditionally it's written with Hebrew letters. I have done phonics with these in order to learn them. What do you think my difficulty has been? Reading fluently! So, though I could say out loud each letter, I found recognising words and getting the 'flow' quite difficult. I think I know why. I didn't do any writing so I didn't get to express myself in writing in Yiddish (though I can say quite a lot of elementary things and colloquial stuff that my parents said.) And also I didn't immerse myself in enough simple texts to be able to become fluent. Further, in a way that is similar to English, there are exceptions to the regular forms. Unless these are artificially excluded from texts, they pose problems if you want to be fluent. 

So, excuse me for using my own experience but I can see some analogies here with the problem that I suspect even Ruth Miskin has spotted. Real texts and real reading of real texts are more complicated then saying out loud simplified texts devised in order to teach phonics.

So will Ruth Miskin's second batch of materials do the trick? I will say, in spite of my declared interest, what's the matter with real books? If the aim is to get children reading and understanding real books, why not give them real books? Why create yet another level before you get to read real books ? Anyway, there'll be fewer real books available because all the money has gone on phonics materials and fluency materials!

I am expecting there will be a third tier of materials soon. Why not the Ruth Miskin anthologies so that children won't need to read real books, instead they follow programmed reading all the way through primary schools? There really isn't any need for children to read real books at all, is there?  

Here's Ruth Miskin's fluency programme. Buy, buy, buy. 

(The title  'Beyond Phonics' is a bit of a giveway, innit? 'Beyond'? But I was told that phonics could do it all. Native speakers, people told me, would do phonics and then be able to read. I've seen TV programmes on it. But now we need 'Beyond Phonics'. Buy, buy, buy.)

https://www.ruthmiskin.com/comprehension/

Gaza: this is the word

Gaza
I'm sorry.
This.
This is the word.
This is the word that can't say.
This is the word that can't say what needs to be said.
This is the word that can't say what needs to be said about things that are being done.
This is the word that can't say what needs to be said about things that are being done to people.
This is the word that can't say what needs to be said about things that are being done.
This is the word that can't say what needs to be said.
This is the word that can't say.
This is the word.
This.
I'm sorry
Gaza.

Bulldozers just been shipped to Israel from US. Here's a poem about bulldozers.

 July 9 2025, headline in Times of Israel

IDF receives bulldozer shipment from US that was reportedly held up by Biden administration

One day...

...people made

the bulldozer:

a great power that could be put to many uses,

the bulldozer could move earth

so that there could be roads

and railways

and we would rush along

moving between villages, towns and cities

sharing what we make and know.

River banks and sea walls could be built

with a bulldozer

so that the floods wouldn’t come

and overwhelm us.

The earth could be flattened

by a bulldozer

so that we could have houses

and flats to live in.

And it was good.

And then one day

people 

saw that the great bulldozer 

could flatten the houses and flats

that men, women and children live in,

these the men, women and children

who the people didn’t like

men, women and children 

who the people didn’t want to be there

and these men, women and children 

would have to move, go, 

transfer to somewhere else.

And it was said

that if ever there were men, women and children

who got in the way of the bulldozer

they could be flattened.

Yes

people made the bulldozer.

The great bulldozer

a powerful invention that 

can be put to many uses.

I give you:

the bulldozer.

Writing Framework: no poetry? no drama? Why not?

 In the 1950s and 60s when I was at school, there was a simple and basic way that English regarded the field of writing: it was made up of plays, poems, fiction and non-fiction. As a result, examples of these were put in front of us, and we spent time writing our own versions of these. 

At the time, some teachers pointed out that there were other kinds of writing that were getting overlooked by this curriculum: song lyrics, TV drama scripts and that there was a general neglect of the field of 'orality' eg storytelling, everyday speech and telling anecdotes, wisdom carried in what people say in terms of idioms and proverbs. 

Since 1988, various governments have taken it upon themselves to intervene in what was a rich dialogue between teachers, university researchers, teacher trainers and writers, as expressed through organisations like the Schools Council, the London Association of the Teaching of English, the National Association of the Teaching of English, the English Association, the English and Media Centre, the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education and others. 

Some of these government interventions have been disastrous: none so obvious than the SPaG, then GPS test in primary schools which has changed the meaning of the word 'writing' in primary schools. The so-called 'expected levels' of writing have skewed 'writing' to mean fulfilling the norms of the GPS test. Assessing writing has ended up as tick-boxing children performing the right numbers of 'fronted adverbials', 'subordinate clauses', 'expanded noun phrases', 'embedded relative clauses' and so on. Pushed out of sight has been the sense that the purpose of writing might be to convey ideas, feelings, emotions, thoughts and experiences. 

The present government has picked up where the others left off and produced a new Writing Framework. Again, the model is the one we have come to expect: people in government go away into a huddle, take 'evidence' and produce a 'report' that is a genre all of its own. It's not a book, it's not a speech, it's not the opening document for discussion. It's what claims to be some kind of defining and ultimate statement - in this case on 'writing'.  We're not supposed to notice the arrogance of this. It's just become the norm of what we have come to expect since 1988. The 'huddle' will tell us what writing is.

As it happens, the 'huddle' seems ignorant of some key features of what writing is. Why is the sole focus of the document on standard English extended prose? If we just start with 'Literature', we know that it's made up of poetry, drama as well as fiction. 

Is the message of this document that children shouldn't be writing poetry and drama? Really? If so, why not? What's the theory here? Pedagogic or literary? 

The whole document seems to turn on the axis of the 'sentence'. As I've tried to show in the previous blogs here, I don't think this is accurate. Writing is much more various than what is described here.

In a future blog, I'll take up the question of why a document written in 2025 doesn't seem to know about stylistics and narratology. These sounds like very dry, academic ideas but as I've tried to show in blogs and booklets, these ideas open up many fascinating and exciting ways in which we can talk about writing with children. One example: how do we get readers to want to know what comes next in a story? The best trick we have at our disposal is 'reveal-conceal' - a method of by which the writer 'reveals' something but in so doing 'conceals' or 'hints at' or invites the curiosity of the reader to want to know more. 

It's great fun to experiment with this core idea of fiction writing. Think  of the opening words of 'Hamlet' - 'Who's there?' The 'reveal' is that two people are on the castle battlements and that they want to know what's going on? The 'conceal' is that the writing doesn't tell us at that point what IS going on! As a result, we want to know. 

If you're looking for this kind of suggestion, idea, thought in a document on writing given out by the government - like Macavity the cat, it's not there. 

And so, on we go, with government 'huddles' thinking that they know better than teachers, researchers and writers. The joke is that the document is itself a piece of writing. And as an example of writing, it is of course deadly boring. Whoever wrote it, knows how to write but doesn't know how to write, if you get me. They can string sentences along. They can 'demonstrate' and 'expound' but they certainly can't 'fascinate'. Lols. (Is 'Lols' a sentence?) 

New Writing Framework - sentences. Not.

 The new Writing Framework is largely structured round the idea that writing is made up of sentences. This is summed up in their false statement:  'All writing is ultimately made up of sentences'.

The fact is that most standard English extended prose is made up of sentences. It's plainly wrong to say that 'all writing is ultimately made up of sentences'. In this blog I give plenty of examples of writing that is not made up of sentences: 

https://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2024/06/whats-happened-to-sentence-does-it.html

A few moments thought, and we can easily find others: powerpoint presentations, titles, slogans, lists - and talking of lists - there's another way in which we have been writing for hundreds of years without making a sentence: proverbs and idioms. Here's a list of some of them.

More haste, less speed.

Cold hands, warm heart.

Jack of all trades, master of none.

Like father, like son.

No rest of the wicked.

Once bitten, twice shy.

Out of the frying pan into the fire.

Penny wise, pound foolish.,

Slow but sure.

To each his own.

Too little, too late.

Whatever floats your boat. 

The New Writing Framework - first thoughts

 I've had a quick look at the new writing framework. Here are my first observations.

1. Don't come to this document for inspiration, excitement or fun. The theme that is repeated over and over again is that writing is hard and can't be done in a joyful way.  

2. There is a strong element in the document that writing comes about through building blocks. To be fair, it's not the only element in the document but it's the one that's easiest to get hold of, and, I suggest, the one most seductive for a particular mechanical way of teaching and running a writing curriculum. 

3. Only one kind of writing seems to be being discussed: extended prose written in standard English . This is a misrepresentation of what writing is. Here are some examples of writing that is not always extended prose: poetry, song lyrics, film scripts, play scripts, dialogue in novels, ads on billboards, the scripts for ads we see on TV, notes on power points, lists, notes for speeches that we might give, a lot of rules, instructions, directions that are written up in public places, a good deal of writing in the digital sphere (texts, chat room chat, comments threads, posts on  social media etc), slogans, titles, powerpoint presentations, proverbs and idioms that are self-enclosed

 (see https://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2025/07/new-writing-framework-sentences-not.html).

It's worth remembering that a lot of this is the daily language of the modern world and being good at it, is a highly commercial skill to have! You could argue that by schools not helping children write in these ways, we are depriving them of marketability! 

4. There is a sad irony that a document on writing hardly talks about how we might convey feelings, tension, excitement, lyricism, horror, fear, intrigue etc etc in writing.  It's as if learning how to write is an exercise in being correct (or becoming more and more correct). 

5. Don't come to this document looking for ways in which reading exciting and engrossing books is the best platform for talk and writing. Don't come to it looking for a raft of exciting ways in which we can use what's in great books, as triggers for children to express ideas and feelings triggered by what they read. 

6. I spotted two inaccuracies: 'All writing is ultimately made up of sentences'. This is an ignorant and silly thing to say. There are 100s of different ways of not writing in sentences. Shakespeare was brilliant at it. Stand on any station and look at the ads. Look at any film script. Go on the internet and look at song lyrics. Go through the collected works of many poets. 

The second inaccuracy is about 'adverbials'. You'll find this in the glossary. As people will know from what I've written elsewhere, the obsession with 'adverbials' is absurd. It isolates one tiny feature of 'stylistics' and magnifies it to the detriment of many other stylistic features which would help children write. It seems that the people who've written this document have never come across a book about stylistics. That's possible! 

Even so, the last 15 years has seen an obsession with adverbials. What are they? They are adverbs, adverbial phrases and adverbial clauses. In this document, for some mysterious reason, they don't include adverbial clauses. So, to recap, here are three sentences using fronted adverbials. The first one uses a fronted adverb. The second one uses a fronted adverbial phrase. The third one uses a fronted adverbial clause.

Luckily, I found my pen.

With a smile on my face, I left the room.

When it's hot, I take my jacket off.

In short, the very same people who obsessively peddle this stuff don't even know their own 'grammar'. You can find the same mistakes on the 'expected levels' examples on gov.uk where someone has called an adverbial phrase a subordinate clause. The truth of the matter is, the people who write this stuff, demand high levels of correctness from children but find it so difficult themselves, they keep getting it wrong themselves. 

My Grandmother

 My Grandmother

Here’s a photo.

It’s of Rose

on board a ship in 1922

from Boston to London

It’s the SS President Harding.

She’s standing next to a ladder

to an upper deck.

With her left hand

she holds my father’s hand

he stands next to her

trying to hide his face from the camera

wearing long loose shorts

and a dark top.

On the ladder

sit baby Wallace

holding Rose’s right hand

and next to him on the ladder

their sister, Sylvia.

This is a journey

that is going to change their lives forever.

Rose will never go back to America.

Wallace has only a few weeks left to live.

My father will go to America

but it’ll be long after his father Morris has died.

Sylvia will be the pioneer

not early enough to see her father

but even so, she’s the one who’ll 

discover cousin Ted,

Morris’s nephew

and the family out there in Connecticut

and Massachusetts.

At the end of this transatlantic crossing

Rose will take the children

into a house Whitechapel

that is already full with her sisters

brother and their parents.

It will end up with 

11 or 12 of them in a two-up, two-down 

terrace house. 

Rose looks tired 

but whatever’s gone on between her and Morris

hasn’t broken her.

Four years later

she’ll be out on the streets demonstrating

against the ‘baby starvers’ as it says on the banner

supporting the General Strike

and she buys a little brass brooch 

which is a replica of a miner’s lamp

to support the miners

who hold out after the other unions go back to work.

Now that’s a thought:

a Jewish woman in London

buying a brooch for the miners.

She can’t really work much herself

because she’s had polio and one of her arms

is weak.

She’s going to have to rely on the family

to help her bring up the children

and some of them are going to resent her for it.

Wasn’t she the clever one

with her nose in a book

politics, politics, politics

can’t keep a husband though, 

now look at her!

She brings people to the house:

a Jamaican seafarer,

a grande dame of a woman called Beatrice

who my father goes to see in her flat

in Belsize Park.

Years later

it turns out that Beatrice

was Modigliani’s partner

and he painted pictures of her.

My father will be 

the first person in the family

to go to grammar school

the first person in the family to go to university

the first person in the family to be a teacher

the first person in the family to become a professor.

Rose is very proud of him

He calls her Ma

but it’s my father’s sister Sylvia who looks after her

when she gets a stroke,

two strokes actually. 

I remember her

coming round to our flat

and giving me a red shoe horn.

My mother, Connie loves her.

My father tells me that Connie

ran away from home

and went to live with Rose

when she was finally able to move out 

of the house in Whitechapel

and moved into a flat in White City.

People called her Rosie.

Rosie Rosen.

My mother called my father ‘Rosie’ too.

She’d shout for him, ‘Rosie!’

Or she’d say to us

‘Ask your father what he’s doing

and tell him to stop it’.

And of course

if Rose hadn’t got on that boat

and come back to London

I wouldn’t be here telling you any of this.

I wouldn’t exist.