Blog
Results or Outcomes?
While the current round of results is seen as an avoidable fiasco, the real value of education has never been more apparent. After a year of turmoil, uncertainty, sudden announcements and mountains of marking, students will be turning up to school this week to collect...
How to Build Independent Learners
The adage, ‘everything works somewhere and nothing works everywhere’ can result in teachers dismissing effective practices because they don’t realize the principles that lie behind those practices. Understanding these principles helps teachers to select the most...
When is a crisis not a crisis?
Claims of a crisis can distract us from dealing with the real crisis. Another Sunday morning, another ‘literacy crisis’. The Sunday Times has just learned that some students are arriving at secondary school with reading ages as low as six, as if this was a recent...
Jay Blades: Learning to Read at 51 – review
This week I watched a documentary called “Jay Blades: learning to read at 51”. The experience was both uplifting and frustrating: uplifting, because of the determination and sheer hard work of Jay, whose painful but rewarding journey we followed; and frustrating, to...
Am I to Blame?
Following our last post about whether schools should be holding parents accountable for children’s reading, a mother wrote this piece about her experience. It is, understandably, anonymous. Who is responsible when a child can’t read? Is it the fault of the parents or...
Whose Responsibility?
It came as a shock to see a letter in the Sunday Times demanding that parents be held to account if their children do not learn to read at school. I had thought that we were making progress on such attitudes, but apparently, they are alive and well. ...
Thinking and Reading
The well-known statement, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” is attributed to the philosopher Wittgenstein. In anthropology, we studied the same idea as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: the proposition that language influences, and even limits, our...
Ofsted and literacy – a two-edged sword?
Many readers of this blog will know that we have been working for some years to raise the importance of reading in secondary schools, and showing how struggling adolescent readers can make impressive gains with skilled instruction. Rather than write off children as...
High Fidelity?
Education does not have an evidence problem – it has an implementation problem. In recent years we’ve seen a rising awareness of the importance of research-based evidence in education. This is, of course, to be welcomed, not least by those who have been campaigning...