DCSF consultation convulsions vol. 3: the primary curriculum

Another day, another consultation… The latest is the independent review into the primary curriculum Sir Jim Rose. An interim report was published late last year and the deadline for comments passed over the weekend.

So what did Sir Jim Rose have to say about children with special educational needs and the primary curriculum? Given that one in five children are reported to have some form of special educational need, it’s obviously going to be high on the agenda when considering how the primary curriculum should be reformed and made relevant to everyone. Yes?

Well, here’s the thing. There was virtually no mention. No mention of deaf children, and no mention of any other group who might have additional needs.

OK, so it’s only an interim report. But if you’re going to looking at major reforms of the primary curriculum, surely you’re going to want to consider how everyone is going to access this new curriculum, and make recommendations for how this will be met FROM THE OUTSET. Not afterwards. And definitely not after the whole thing has been implemented on the ground.

The Government has done this before – by introducing phonics as a new method of teaching literacy without considering how this would work for deaf children.

Our response has been to say you can’t get away with treating deaf children as an afterthought. No new curriculum initiatives should be introduced unless without first considering – at the very beginning – how the needs of all children can be met.

Here’s hoping someone in the review team heeds this point.

More money for phonics… but what about deaf children?

On Monday, the Department for Children, Schools and Families announced £9m funding for teaching phonics in the classroom.

Phonics is something I’ve blogged on before. I have no beef with the whole concept of phonics but I still fail to see how a teaching method based on listening of sounds will work for severely and profoundly deaf children. It feels like such an obvious point but it is never reflected in government announcements like this. And there is still no guidance on alternatives to phonics for such children or how to modify the teaching of it for deaf children with a mild or moderate loss. What is a mainstream teacher with a deaf child in the classroom meant to do exactly?

For these reasons, we rushed out a press statement on this on Monday afternoon. NDCS is also, at its own cost, drafting guidance for teachers to fill this gap. I feel it should be the Government’s responsibility to do this but in the absence of any action, we have stepped up.

I have a feeling I’ll be banging on about phonics for a bit longer…

Mentioning the phonics after all…

When I recently wrote about phonics, I got an interesting response from a guy who said:

Recent research in the United Kingdom showed that tests of the ability to distinguish isolated phonemes and syllables did not relate to tests of the ability to discriminate normal, everyday speech in any meaningful way. So why consider phonics for deaf children? I think if you are careful in the way you apply phonics, it can be helpful.

To those that don’t know, phonics is basically a way of learning literacy through listening to sounds (it’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the general gist of it). And just to prove that we do read our comments and take then on board, I thought I would respond to this and set out my own thoughts on the prickly issue of phonics.

First of all, intuitively, it is difficult to see how can a child who is profoundly deaf, who has little or no useful hearing, can learn literacy through a method that involves listening. Even if it was possible, it must be incredibly tiring and difficult to do so. I am most happy to be contradicted by research out there and would definitely like to take a closer look at the research mentioned so that we can use it to develop our thinking.

This is not to say that it can never be useful for deaf children. Many deaf children have some useful hearing and so it can useful for those. But it is difficult to see how it can be useful for all. And for those for might be useful, as the above comment says, it still needs to be applied in a careful way.

Which is why I objected to phonics being presented as the end-all solution to fix the problem entirely in the answers coming out from Government. In the context of parliamentary questions about deaf children, it is slightly baffling that phonics continues to be mentioned as the ’solution’ without a recognition or fuller acknowledgement of the subtleties behind it. We’re also concerned that teachers are not always aware of these subtleties.

My esteemed colleagues are currently developing some thoughts on this which will aim to look at 3 questions:

1) Is phonics appropriate to all deaf children?

2) If is not appropriate for some deaf children, how can these children be taught literacy?

3) For deaf children for which phonics is appropriate, does it need to be taught in a slightly different way to ensure it is accessible?

This may seem like a slightly airy-fairy debate. But I think it’s definitely one worth having – especially when you look at figures given to us by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (which are set out in the annex of our Must do better! campaign report), deaf children are 300% more likely to leave primary school without a basic understanding of literacy.

300%!! Something is going very wrong when it comes to deaf children’s literacy and so we really need to get to the bottom of how deaf children can learn literacy and the different approaches that should be used.

So, as before, please feed in your comments and enter the debate if you’ve got any thoughts on this issue. We definitely read them and we definitely appreciate them.

Don’t mention the phonics!

So after all that hard work in getting our campaign report written, published and launched, what have we achieved? Have we changed the world for deaf children and campaigned ourselves out of existence? Or was it all as pointless as Ray Quinn? Let’s take a look at what’s happened in the past month…

1) All MPs received a copy of the report and quite a few of them wrote to the Department for Children, Schools and Families to ask what the Department was doing about educational under achievement of deaf children. Quite a few replies have started trickling back to us. In one letter I’ve seen, Lord Adonis, the Minister responsible for children with special educational needs (SEN), says:

We support the aspirations of those, like the National Deaf Children’s Society, who believe that the perfomance gap between children with a physical or sensory impairment and children without special educational needs should be eliminated.

Ahh. The letter also says:

Our priroirty is to personalise learning, by focussing on each pupil’s progression, so that every child achieves their potential, whatever their starting point. High quality, systematic phonics… should be the prime approach for teaching children to read.

Arghh! Phonics is a way of teaching literacy to children which basically involves listening to the sounds of words. Because it involves listening, our report specifically says that the emphasis on phonics can sometimes be inappropriate for teaching many children literacy. So why is phonics being advocated as the prime approach? Slightly frustrating.

2) MPs have also been tabling questions in parliament on our behalf. Just before Parliament closed down for the summer, both Michael Gove and Simon Hughes asked about deaf children, which elicited an interesting reply. In one excerpt, the Minister says:

Our renewed literacy strategy builds on Sir Jim Rose’s independent review of the teaching of early reading by putting phonics at the heart of teaching reading in order to help to raise attainment levels amongst all pupils.

Arrrghhh! Phonics again!

3) We also managed to get lots of local papers from across the UK, from Glasgow to Cambridge covering our campaign, and highlighting how their local MP was supporting it. Here’s an example from Glasgow about Jim Murphy’s support for our campaign.

Local press coverage like this is helping us spread awareness of the problem across the UK. Disability Now magazine also covered the story.

4) Finally, Lord Adonis has agreed to meet with NDCS in September. This is very good news, and will hopefully allow us to explain in person why the need for action is so urgent. And why I go “Arrrgh!” everytime I hear the word ‘phonics’. We’re currently thinking up our ‘hit list’ of things we want to ask him to do.

My overall assessment? Well, we haven’t changed the world, but then that was never really going to happen overnight. Some of the replies coming through so far are slightly disappointing in their emphasis on phonics, suggesting that key civil servants haven’t really digested this point.

But I hope we’ve created a wide and warm base of support from which seeds of action may grow. It is encouraging that MPs are raising issues relevant to us – sometimes at our prompting but often at their own behest. Clearly we have some way to go – but we’ve made some small steps forward.

What’s your assessment? Let me know your thought while I take some big steps forward towards the pub.