[SENco-forum] Re Literacy

halcyon

Good to read your comments, Ruth.  Perhaps we should all have a large
poster stating "There are lies, damned lies and statistics."  where we can
see it daily.

For several years now, one of the secondaries that some of our children go
on to has asked for details of any children not achieving RA 10:00years,
but not on the SEN list, at the end of June in Y6.  They have in place an
intensive literacy programme which they run throughout Y7, which helps
these children to catch up, usually with a high success rate.  It works as
they have the time, the staff and resources to provide what is needed for
the boys [it is a boys'school] who have previously been totally
uninterested in anything that involved reading and writing, but who see
high school as a more "grown up" place, with greater motivation provided
by a wider range of subjects.

I am a little puzzled by Maggie's reiteration that all children should be
able to read by 11, if taught properly.  Does that include those whose
cognitive difficulties mean that they might previously have been taught in
a special school?  We have a boy in Y5 who has made immense progress since
Reception, but whose Speech and Language difficulties, including a very
poor short-term memory, mean that his functional reading may reach an
age-appropriate level, but his comprehension will always need considerable
support, which will be provided throughout his school career.  We also
have a boy who is chronologically Y3 but being taught in Y2, who is
autistic, dyspraxic, has two hearing aids and severe speech and language
problems.  The fact that he has just started to build up a small sight
vocabulary, is the result of 2 years' hard work by his teachers and LSAs,
his mother, outreach support from a specialist school for autism and also
the boy himself.  With the best will in the world, as he is currently
reading at Level P8, which is just below the level at which a child is
working towards L1 of NC, at the age of 8, he is unlikely to reach an
age-appropriate level by the end of Y6.

Mainstream primary schools now accept children with many and complex
difficulties, who will eventually transfer to mainstream secondaries,
taking their needs with them.  This is one reason why what I said in my
previous post concerns me: the money that is being wasted on SATs etc
could be used much more effectively in providing for the needs of all of
those children who will never fit into the expected statistics.

Regards

Jean

S Wales

One of the first texts I was required to read at college - in those
> halcyon
> 60s days was How to Lie with Statistics.
>
> The message given to us then was that any person should be able to
> abstract
> what they need from statistics in order to prove their point.  From what I
> see he papers each day, I can see that the DFES  is expert in abstracting
> any figures from statistics to prove the point they wish to make.
>
> If you wish to look at the literacy levels of the population you can do
> worse than look at the reading age of the daily newspapers.  The last time
> I
> investigated these figures the levels were The Sun, The Mirror and the
> Star
> equalled around the eight-year-old level.  The Express and the Mail were
> around the 12-year-old level and The Scotsman was top of the list with a
> required reading age of 16 plus.
>
> I wish and that publishers of textbooks would put the reading age required
> to deal with the text as part of the blurb we have and we are choosing
> textbooks.
>
> My figures, not from years of research but from years of looking at my
> school statistics, and trying to match them with staff comments and
> student
> performance meant that I monitored student reading ages very carefully
> until
> they reached a level of about 13.5.  Once they reach that level it was
> rather like marathon training, you improve on your performance by actually
> reading regularly of something at the appropriate level that will extend
> your reading.  The same rule of thumb applied to those who were really
> non-readers of the secondary level.  You slogged like mad to get them to
> the
> level of around 10.5.  I then tended to use textbooks to develop reading
> skills and did an awful lot of work with subject specific vocabulary in
> order to get the moving at that level.
>
> And apropos of nothing, I do hope that someone at the DFES has made a New
> Year resolution that learning in schools should be fun!
>
> Regards
>
> Ruth
>
>
>
>
>
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