Teachers Taking The Rap For English Government Literacy Failings

As more depressing stats appear about kids who can’t achieve basic standards of literacy, it is time to give teachers the tools they require in their fight to help youngsters hit their potential.

I am not a teacher, but I empathise with teachers. How a teacher’s heart must sink as wave after wave of bad opinion threatens to engulf the job they feel passionately about, consigning the profession they joined with high expectations of making a difference, to the collective trash can for apparently letting our young people down.

The government’s recent school comparisons show that three-quarters of kids in England who make a slow start in the “Three Rs” at junior school fail to catch up when they complete.

Teachers then have to suffer the embarrassment as well meaning not for profit organisations and govt. initiatives ‘ride to the rescue ‘ to save kids by taking matters into their own hands. This hisheartens the teachers and calls their abilities into debate.

As the originator of a group that produces a reading toolkit made by a teacher that consistently brings a reluctant reader to a quality of reading competency that would usually take at least 18 months at school, you’d think we would be coining it in with such a demand for our programme. Unhappily this isn’t the case, and it’s down to a vital design element that is both the wonderful thing about the scheme and the target of government literacy discrimination.

What’s this critical issue? It does not use the artificial phonics strategy mandated by the government, and you pay a price quality when you dare to express doubt in this hallowed area. Week Julia Donaldson, the Gruffalo writer, had the audacity to state that one reading methodology doesn't suit each young person and found her books excluded from the govt. suggested reading list.

This tide of negative literacy stats is not down to bad teaching. We are being let down by the government’s heavy handedness in freezing out strategies that should be available to teachers. If teachers will join the reading book writers and force the astonishing effects that I have witnessed many times, then maybe the UK government will eventually give teachers the credit they have earned.

Reading Revival is a method of teaching children how to learn to read that uses reading games and recognition to encourage fast learning.