AN IMMEDIATE review of how children are taught to read was demanded yesterday after MPs cast doubt on one of Tony Blair’s key reforms.
The one in five children who cannot read properly at the age of 11 is “unacceptably high” eight years after the National Literacy Strategy was introduced in primary schools, the Education and Skills Select Committee said.
The Labour-dominated committee cast doubt on Mr Blair’s claims that primary school standards have improved under Labour and was sceptical about improvements in the results of the national curriculum English test at 11.
It contrasted the failing of English schools with Scotland where the restoration of the more traditional phonics approach has recorded some remarkable improvements.
The MPs said that a large-scale inquiry was necessary to establish the best ways to teach children to read. It concluded: “It may be that some methods of teaching (such as phonics) are more effective for children in danger of being left behind.”
It disputed claims by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) that the literacy strategy was based on the best available research.
In Clackmannanshire, 300 children received intensive instruction in a method known as synthetic phonics, learning the sounds of the alphabet and combinations of letters for 16 weeks as soon as they started school. By the age of 11, they were more than three years ahead of their peers.
There was no difference between girls and boys, unlike their counterparts in England, and children from poor backgrounds performed as well as those from better-off homes.
The committee’s report said that there was “some evidence” of a rise in standards since the literacy strategy was introduced in 1997.
But the MPs noted that the Government’s figures had been challenged by critics who believed that more children were having “significant difficulties” with reading. They said that the results could be “skewed by associated factors, such as teachers ‘teaching to the test’ ”. Scores have improved from 63 per cent reaching the required standard in 1997 to 83 per cent in 2004.
The committee urged the DfES to commission an independent evaluation of trends in reading standards to make clear “the scale and nature of the problem”.
“Even if government figures are taken at face value, at age 11 around 20 per cent of children still do not achieve the success in reading (and writing) expected of their age. This figure is unacceptably high,” it said.
“Furthermore, there is a wide variation of results achieved by schools with apparently similar intakes. This . . . suggests that problems do exist, either in the implementation of the Government’s strategies or inherently in the methodologies it promotes.”
The dispute centres on whether existing methods work as effectively as synthetic phonics. The committee said that the literacy strategy had been a compromise between competing approaches.
It included a form of phonics but also encouraged pupils to work out the meaning of words using context, grammatical understanding and pictures. The idea was that if one failed, others would help children to decode words. But some argue that the strategy takes too long, leaves many children confused and encourages them to guess. Some children come to believe that they are not good at reading and never learn.
Phonics advocates say that children should be given intensive lessons in the 44 sounds of the language, so that they can blend combinations of letters into words.
Tim Collins, the Shadow Education Secretary, said: “This report is further evidence that Labour’s present literacy strategy, despite some limited success, is still letting down an alarming proportion of children. The next Conservative government will put synthetic phonics at the heart of our literacy strategy. We are determined to make sure that every child who is capable of learning does so before leaving primary school and we will not allow failed 1960s theories or 21st century political correctness to stop us.”
Labour insists that it has got reading right and that its approach is backed by research from the US. Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, argued in The Guardian this week that phonics was not a “magic bullet”, saying: “We are clear that the way forward is not a prescriptive and reductionist approach to phonics, to the exclusion of all else.”
The committee said: “The evidence in favour of synthetic phonics is based on the belief that an early ability to ‘decode’ words is the key to later success in reading.”
It wants a review to compare the relative effectiveness of the literacy strategy and synthetic phonics, including the impact on different groups of children and how long any gains were sustained, using standardised tests, rather than relying on national curriculum test results, to measure progress.
