Britain’s schools are in trouble. Anyone still inclined to doubt that should
read last week’s report from the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted).
Christine Gilbert, the chief inspector of schools, courageously pointed out
that while some secondary schools are doing well, one in three (affecting
1.6m children) are no better than “satisfactory” - a word which tends in the
direction of its opposite. One in 10 are “inadequate”. Two hundred thousand
16 to 18-year-olds are “neets” - not in education, employment or training -
and one in five children leave primary school unable to read properly or at
all.
The Labour government famously made education a top priority 10 years ago and
has poured billions of pounds into schools. So clearly something is very
wrong. There is one woman who passionately believes she knows what it is,
and what to do about it, to save this country’s schools and schoolchildren.
Ruth Miskin, a former primary head teacher, believes that the problem and the
solution are very simple. The problem with education is that too many
children can’t read at all, or can’t read properly; clearly, if they can’t
read they can’t be educated. But Miskin is convinced, from her own successes
in inner city schools, that learning to read can be and should be simple and
quick, both for the child and for the teacher. And she has spent the past 13
years trying to prove it, with her own literacy programme (Read Write Inc)
in state schools.
It has been an exhausting time. I have known her well for most of it, and
watched her move on from being a head teacher to developing her own
synthetic phonics programme, working obsessively, discussing it ceaselessly,
writing and self-publishing her own teaching material and story books,
borrowing money to do it, travelling round the country to introduce it to
schools, from motorway to school hall to solitary Travel Inn, from north to
south and back to London.
When I meet her, between training sessions in Bristol, I ask why she does not
stop this punishing schedule. Lots of schools now use her programme, with
excellent Ofsted reports as a result. Now she has sold the programme to
Oxford University Press she could surely slow down. “I can’t,” she says,
laughing. “It’s too much part of me, and besides I love it.”
Miskin looks like rather an unlikely campaigner in a worthy educational cause.
She is very slender, almost fragile, very pretty in a girlish way, both
elegant and inclined to giggle. But she is driven, and furious at the way
children are being failed, and her slight northern accent gets stronger when
she talks of it.
“You can’t call a primary school satisfactory, as the Ofsted report does, if
it sends kids to secondary schools who can’t read,” she says. “That’s not
‘satisfactory’; it’s completely unacceptable. Every child can be taught to
read. And that’s true whether they watch too much telly, play too many
computer games, whether they have dyslexia, suffer from attention
hyperactivity disorder. It’s true even if they have parents who don’t read
to them, or are new to English.”
“Every child?” I ask. “Well, yes,” she concedes, “there may be perhaps one or
even two in a school, with such pronounced learning disabilities that they
may never be able to crack the code. But plenty of people with LDs can learn
to read, given time.” That’s true - my sister is an excellent reader,
despite her marked learning disability. Surely, though, we’ve had synthetic
phonics in schools for nearly 10 years now? Didn’t Tony Blair bring the
discipline of synthetic phonics into the national literacy strategy in 1998,
for which Miskin herself was an adviser. So why didn’t that work?
She smiles, but with long-standing frustration; she thinks the strategy was a
doomed compromise between warring educational ideologies. “Yes, they did put
in a little synthetic phonics. But you can’t have a little phonics - it’s
all or nothing. What we got instead was a mishmash of all sorts of methods -
most of which weren’t working for the most vulnerable kids - the worst of
all worlds.”
These other methods might seem rather strange to an outsider. According to
current government recommendations, there are several different ways of
reading a word, in the sense of figuring out what it says. The child could
look at a picture on the same page, or at the first letter, or at the
context as a whole, or at a combination of all three.
“That’s just guesswork,” says Miskin. “That’s not reading. Reading is cracking
the code, that this squiggle stands for this sound, and then knowing the
sounds of the letters and blending them together, not guessing. Guessing
just holds kids back, it stops them learning to read. And it undermines
their confidence.”
She is scathing about what happens in the government’s national literacy hour
each day. Maybe it’s because there’s a confusion between story time and
literacy time. Of course it’s important to read ambitious stories to
children, beyond their reading age, but not, in the literacy time, until
they can actually read.
In practice, in the literacy hour teachers discuss with young children the
plot, characterisation, authorial intentions and even “genre” in a story
they cannot actually read - cannot decipher - in the hour especially devoted
to teaching them the skill of reading. “You’ll only find just a touch of
phonics in all that melee,” says Miskin. “And that’s where the problem is -
there’s always just a bit of phonics, so everyone thinks they are already
doing it.” What makes it worse, she argues is that many schools give up
trying to teach the weakest children.
“What’s really needed is a tried and tested synthetic phonics system - and
there are several on the market for heads to choose from - which teachers
must teach enthusiastically, systematically, thoroughly and quickly every
day. You can’t muddle it up with any other methods, even other synthetic
phonics programmes. And you need to teach every single child for as long as
it takes.”
Most children will learn to read somehow, no matter how they are taught. “But
there is a large minority,” says Miskin, “about 25%, who won’t and indeed
that’s roughly what we’ve got - 20-25% of kids destined for a blighted life,
for humiliation, unemployment or jail, just because they can’t decode words.
But they could all be reading. I can prove it.”
She does quite clearly prove it, in a very touching documentary mini-series
called Last Chance Kids, which starts on Tuesday. It is part of Channel 4’s
four-day campaign against illiteracy, called The Fight to Help Kids Read,
which also includes a Dispatches investigation into illiteracy and its
social causes and a Richard and Judy book launch.
The Last Chance Kids films are about a deprived school in Dagenham, east
London, called Monteagle, where a quarter of the six to 11-year-olds could
not read at all in 2006 and 50% of them were far behind their chronological
reading age. As a result, many of them were destined to go on to secondary
school unable to learn anything, the flotsam and jetsam of society.
Lynna Thompson, their head teacher, decided to use Miskin’s very rigorous
literacy programme throughout her school, to get every child to become a
reader by the end of the school year. And they all did. Some of them cracked
it in just a few weeks. Monteagle is a success story; this is one of the few
documentaries that have made me cry.
The dawning of happiness and pride on the face of an angry, humiliated,
excluded nine-year-old boy, when he first proves to camera he can really,
truly, read, all by himself - after only a few weeks of synthetic phonics -
is very moving to watch. Some of the parents were weeping. Miskin herself
was obviously deeply moved. “I always am,” she tells me. “It’s always amazing.
It feels like a miracle. But it’s simple really.”
What lies behind it isn’t entirely simple. Having decided on Miskin’s
programme, the head had to persuade her teachers to agree to teach it
according to Miskin’s methods, precisely, exclusively and very uniformly.
Some teachers dislike her insistence that children should be grouped for
reading with other children at the same stage, regardless of their ages. So
you might get a 10-year-old bad boy in a class of five or six-year-olds.
“At first, some teachers think it’s humiliating,” says Miskin. “But which is
more humiliating? Being with little kids for a couple of weeks, or spending
your whole life on the scrapheap, because you’re illiterate?
“The biggest single thing that Ofsted could do for our failing schools would
be to tell the inspectors to find out, before anything else, whether the
lowest-achieving 25% of every class can read - I mean to find out whether
each child has a reading age close to his chronological age, regardless of
anything else. Only then can a school begin to be considered satisfactory.
That’s all they have to do, you know.”
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