CLARKE BACKS PHONICS AGAINST ‘CRANKY’ TEACHING METHODS

The article says that Kenneth Clarke, then Secretary of State for Education, ‘...gave the heaviest ministerial support so far to teaching children to read through phonics. He derided other teaching methods as ‘… 'cranky'.... Most of the new methods turn out to be no good at all compared to the traditional one.’ (In the Guardian a few days later (12/3/91) Glenys Kinnock hit back: ‘Somehow the ‘real books’ phrase has become a term of disapproval... a war cry for the ignorant.’) People dug fortified trenches and occupied them for the duration. What actually takes place in real classrooms was caricatured ruthlessly, on all sides. Much of the most enthusiastic sniping was done by non-educationalists at several removes from the chalkface. A multitude of special interests stuck their various oars in and rowed vigorously in every direction.

What was going on? Was there really a decline in reading skills among primary school children? If so, was it anything to do with teaching methods?

The conduct of this debate is so important, as backdrop to this chapter and literacy teaching, that some history may usefully be dug up to display the phenomenon in ‘real life’. One of the most recent and influential scares about literacy standards was set off, and assiduously fuelled thereafter across the media, by a single psychologist, Martin Turner. Remarks made during the brouhaha following release of his report (Turner 1990) swiftly became part of the scare, though they were not part of the research. The Guardian of 7/9/90 headlines an article ‘Psychologist blames bad teaching methods for ‘worst fall’ in standards’ and in the article Turner claims that ‘…the proportion of children with reading difficulties has risen from 10 to 15 per cent in the last five years’. He went on to say that this was a fall in standards ‘…unprecedented in peacetime in modern educational history’ and that ‘progressive’ methods of teaching were the reason for the alleged decline. So loudly and frequently was this declaimed that it became the received wisdom of its time. By April the next year even royalty was involved. A headline from the Guardian of 23/4/91 reads ‘Prince hits at school illiteracy’. Prince Charles is quoted accusing ‘…the educational establishment of failing children’. The Secretary of State for Education felt able to deride all literacy teaching methodology other than straight, pure phonics as ‘cranky’ and ‘no good’ to a House of Commons committee, in March 1991.

And almost all of the debate was founded on wet sand. Turner, eventually, admitted he had ‘…no data indicating which teaching methods had been used for the children in the survey.’ (Guardian 10/12/90) On June 17^th 1991 the Guardian reports that ‘A new survey…will confirm a drop in standards but absolve teaching methods and say that the most important factors are family and social background’. (Though the Secretary of State repeats, in the same article, that ‘… progressive education has reduced children’s basic skills’.) In evidence to the Commons Education, Science and Arts Committee in 1991 Professor Cashdan rebutted the Turner evidence and said ‘We have not got a crisis’. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of schools (HMI) reported in 1991 that the data ‘cannot contribute to a reliable national picture of reading standards or the direction in which they are moving or if they are moving at all’ (HMI 1991 p.3). They concluded that there was probably no decline but that there was a ‘… small, but worryingly stubborn, proportion of the work in reading which is poor.’ (ibid. p.3) Other researchers reported only tiny fluctuations in reading standards, and great difficulty in intelligible measurement and comparison of these standards across time. Most denied that any valid conclusions could be drawn from the data we had, and stated that fluctuations, if any, were probably not significant. (Cashdan 1990, Cato and Whetton 1991, Lake 1992, Pumfrey 1992) An article in the Independent much later (16/8/96) reported that reading standards had probably remained about the same over a period of 48 years, quoting an NFER study (Brooks et al 1995). Evidence from the adult literacy world indicated that standards were low but had remained roughly stable over many years (Basic Skills Agency 1995, Bynner and Steedman 1995, Elkinsmyth and Bynner 1994).

Notwithstanding the shakiness, not to say almost complete lack, of reliable evidence, political wheels turned and in the words of the Sunday Telegraph of December 15^th 1996 ‘Thousands of children are to be taught reading … the old-fashioned way … in a move that reverses decades of progressive theory and is portrayed by critics as a return to the Victorian classroom. In reading, teachers will have to employ standard worksheets and exercises such as phonic drills which have rarely been used on a large scale in the classroom since the fifties’. Many educationalists felt that teaching methodology was being wound back to the ‘barking at print’ era with little, if any, evidence that such a reversal of praxis was necessary, let alone desirable.