[senco-forum] Re Literacy

Elizabethans wrote more phonetically but that is hardly evidence of having been taught to read using a synthetic phonics approach. Whether synthetic phonics is boring or not is also, not the issue. We must not fall into the trap that has engulfed the SP fundamentalists, many of whom appear to have lost sight of what SP is all about. Synthetic phonics is just a means of teaching reading which provides an experience of sound/symbol relationships which the vast majority of children simply do not need because all the evidence shows that they deduce it for themselves anyway. I have not seen any cogent arguments to the contrary. This is something that we know NOW. Let's not fall into the trap of 'discovering' it ten years down the line when the next 'initiative' comes along.  Its use will certainly enable about 18% of children in the lower ability band to learn to read and to achieve functional literacy and that alone makes it a valid instrument for use with these children. In no way can that justify its use with the vast majority of children who self-evidently have no need of it. SP will not take us into a brave new word of educated, literate adults. Those in the lower ability band will be still be in the lower ability band but rather than remaining illiterate, they will be functionally literate and able to read tabloid newspapers and whilst that makes it use with this particular group, very worthwhile, surely it cannot justify its imposition on the vast majority of children who learn to read without it.

In Education, we have a great tendency to latch on to fads and fashions and we must be careful about rushing headlong into this one.  Politicians have a very blinkered, short term view of life. What they want is to see is our national literacy statistics brought into line with that of other developed countries so that they can prove how clever they are. What damage they might inflict achieving this end is not important to them but it its teachers who will be left to pick up the pieces. Where are the valid, logical, Educational reasons for teaching children something they very obviously have no need of because they clearly master reading without it? The frequently expressed view that it would do them no harm is simplistic, short -termism and something I would expect to hear from politicians of the calibre of John Prescott, Neil Hamilton and other similar intellectual giants. It is right and propr that we should keep the lunatics in an asylum but putting them in charge of the asylum is something that should at the very least, be given very careful consideration. 

Eddie C.