It was interesting to see in last week’s Tory leadership voting that both you and your schools minister Nick Gibb had backed Michael Gove to be prime minister.
On TV and radio Gove seemed very proud of his record as education secretary. One of his favourite words at the time was “rigour”. I thought there was “rigour” missing in how Gove was treated during his interviews: I didn’t hear anyone ask him why he was sacked as education secretary (it was because he was considered a “toxic liability”).
Meanwhile, you must have been outraged, surely, by something your other colleague Jeremy Hunt, who beat Gove in the voting, said in the debate: 25% of primary school leavers are unable to read, he said. What a shock. All state primary school leavers have been taught to read according to the strict methods prescribed by Michael Gove and Nick Gibb. If Hunt is right, they are a terrible indictment of your own party’s favoured methods and record in government. Did you and Mr Gibb write to Mr Hunt to ask him for clarification on this matter or, if you thought it was an error, to ask him to withdraw it?
It is of course a nonsense that 25% of primary school children leave unable to read and this shows how schools, teachers and education are used by politicians at election time as a punch ball. Politicians say what they want and get away with it. Even so, as secretary of state for education, you must have been desperate to set the record straight.
Perhaps I can help. In the early stages of bringing in systematic, synthetic phonics for teaching children to read, people in charge were scrupulous in separating the ideas of “decoding” and “reading”. Phonics, they said, taught children how to “decode” writing: that is, to learn the “alphabetic principle”, while “reading” was used to describe reading for meaning.
Your predecessors invented a test – the phonics screening check – to assess how well children were learning to decode. This isn’t a reading test because clearly it doesn’t test whether the children have understood anything. “The check focuses solely on decoding,” [pdf] the ministers said. At the end of primary school, the children have a reading test. They read a passage and answer right/wrong questions on it. These questions are about “retrieval, inference, chronology and presentation” which, it is claimed, show whether children understand what they read.
You’ll know, of course, that children are scoring in the 90s for the decoding test, but when those same children are tested five years later for reading they are reaching the “expected level” of around 75%. This is where Hunt got confused. He thinks that 25% not being at the expected level is the same as saying they are “unable to read”. This is certainly not true.
Nigh on every child can “decode” by age five or six, yet when the same children are 10 or 11, some of the decoders don’t understand what they’re reading. How does that happen? You don’t suppose it is because we are not spending enough time in primary schools enjoying real books and chatting about them because we are too busy preparing for the tests politicians impose and then misrepresent?
Incidentally, I thought of a great history lesson on democracy. Pupils could compare proportions: the tiny percentage of the population who could vote before the first reform bill of 1832 and the tiny percentage who could vote for a new PM. Just a thought.
Yours, Michael Rosen
