Civitas Blog

For those who have faithfully taken national test statistics as a reliable measure of standards in literacy, the Committee’s revelations come as a shock. National results from the literacy Standardised Attainment Tests (SATs), examinations taken in the last year of primary school, convey rocketing improvement since the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) eight years ago. According to these figures there has been a 30% rise since 1995 in the number of children achieving Level 4, the expected standard of reading and writing for 11 years-olds. However a wave of new evidence has clouded the optimistic picture of attainment put forward by the DfES. Most notably, OfSTED’s February 2005 evaluation of the National Numeracy and Literacy Strategies found one in three literacy lessons to be unsatisfactory – while half of all boys and a third of girls leave primary school ‘unable to write properly’. This crushing report was shortly followed by much-publicised research from the Centre of Policy Studies which alleged that the NLS was failing over 1.2 million children by not equipping them with the literacy skills necessary for secondary school.
The validity of the national test results themselves is part of the concern. Yesterday the Committee contributed to criticisms of the SATs, arguing that results could be ‘skewed by associated factors, such as ‘teaching to the test’’ – therefore rendering them misleading. Other sceptics of statutory testing have also suggested that a rise in scores may be more likely attributable to lowered benchmarks than higher achievement.

Yet the Government refuses to accept that the NLS is flawed, persistently brandishing progress in national test attainment, and ignoring the scepticism surrounding it. Amongst practitioners on the other hand, there appears to be a consensus on where the NLS is going wrong: the lack of emphasis on 'phonics'. The NLS effectively entails a rejection of what is termed ‘synthetic phonics’ teaching, whereby at an early age the focus is on the sounds of the alphabet and letter combinations, enabling children to 'decode' words. The Education and Skills Select Committee argue that this early ability to decode words is key to later success in reading. However, the Education Secretary Ruth Kelly recently reasserted the DfES’s rejection of such phonics-centred teaching, arguing that so ‘prescriptive and reductionist'an approach was ‘not the way forward’. The NLS model on the other hand, uses what the Education and Skills Select Committee term a ‘compromise’ between competing models. In brief, whilst the NLS approach does touch on a form of decoding words phonically, there is a very strong emphasis on decoding using grammatical, contextual and pictorial cues.

The Scottish education system provides a prime example of the potential success of the synthetic phonics-based reading method. Scotland is particularly pertinent to the anti-NLS argument, as it has deliberately moved away from methodologies used in the Literacy Strategy, to return to a more ‘traditional’phonics-centred model of teaching reading. Arguably on the basis of this policy change, Scotland has witnessed significant improvements in primary level reading standards.

In view of the extensive evidence supporting phonics-based literacy teaching, why has the UK Government discarded it? It’s back to the problem which has infiltrated New Labour’s Department of Education from day one – the novelty factor. Improvement in education persists as New Labour’s mantra, and misguidedly improvement has been equated with innovation – if it’s not new, it cannot contribute to progress. This notion of innovation then links to New Labour’s efforts to embrace ‘progressive’ liberalism in education policy – what the Shadow Education Secretary Tim Collins, has referred to as ‘failed 1960s theories and 21st century political correctness’. And certainly it is largely in a revolt against conservatism that the Government has rejected traditional teaching methodologies. This explains the current DfES’s tendency to dismiss anything which even smacks of old school, or at the very least to re-brand it beyond recognition.

The reality is that the innovation in New Labour’s education policy would be better paired with chaos than with improvement. Continuous changes in key DfES personnel have exacerbated what has become a policy area rife with 'mongrel' pedagogies and continual u-turns. And as an unsurprising consequence, slipping standards. What the DfES will do next on the literacy front is difficult to predict. Continuing with an approach to literacy teaching which is clearly flawed will sooner or later only do further damage to the reputation of New Labour education policy. However, reverting back to traditional phonics would mean the Government essentially eating its words.

Anastasia de Waal