Broadcast: Monday 22 October 2007 08:00 PM |
Reporter Alex Thomson finds out why our children are struggling and shows that with the right teaching methods virtually every child in mainstream schooling can be taught to read.
Why Our Children Can't Read
Lost
for Words | Have Your Say
According to Government statistics, a fifth
of youngsters leaving primary school can't read and write properly. That means
they have not reached the benchmark reading age of an 11-year-old and are
unlikely to be able to follow lessons when they go to secondary
school.
Reporter Alex Thomson investigates how this failure has come
about and shows that with the right teaching methods virtually every child in
mainstream schooling can be taught to read properly.
Dispatches visits a
comprehensive school in Bristol to see the impact that poor literacy levels are
having on the children. The staff investigated behavioural problems in classes
and found they stemmed from the fact that, on average, 40% of the school's years
seven, eight and nine (ages 11-14) had major reading problems.
Those
children who had not achieved a reading age of over nine were unable to access
the curriculum - and dealt with the problem by disrupting lessons or, in extreme
cases, simply refusing to enter the classroom. Following reading tests the
school took radical steps, including ripping up lesson plans. As the head
teacher says: "What's the point of learning French if you can't read
English?"
But when Dispatches visits a primary school in Hackney, it's a
different story. Just as in Bristol, the children here come from disadvantaged
backgrounds, but teachers achieve far superior results in teaching children to
read. Thomson discovers that a key factor in this appears to be the use of
synthetic phonics, a method of teaching children to read based on learning the
individual sounds of English and then learning how to put them together as
words.
Thomson interviews Sir Jim Rose, who last year completed his
report into teaching reading. His report starkly showed that phonics was
markedly superior to other approaches, which he argued sometimes left children
confused and bewildered.
The Government has now rushed out advice to
schools to change their teaching methods. However, despite Government backing,
this technique still faces resistance within the educational world. Rose tells
Thomson that parents with children in schools not accepting the new advice
should ask why not. And there is one further option open to them, says Rose:
"They can move schools."
Dispatches visits West Dunbartonshire, a
deprived area in Scotland where a combination of synthetic phonics and other
initiatives that promote access to books have taken reading levels from 79% to
nearly 100%. Dr Tommy McKay, the psychologist who engineered the project, says
the changes have been dramatic.
With the help of the Institute of
Education, Dispatches reveals research which shows that if failing readers can
be taught to read by the age of ten, their life prospects improve, but they are
still far worse off than children who learn to read at the right
age.
Institute of Education & Queen Margaret University
research
New research from the Institute of Education and Queen
Margaret University, Edinburgh for Channel 4's Dispatches which used data from
the 1970 British Cohort Study shows that positive intervention during primary
school can make children better readers and significantly improve their life
chances. More
details
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