I've just checked out the Joseph Rowntree Foundation page and cannot see my 'comment' so it could that it has not been approved, or not been approved 'yet'. We'll see.
I tried to wade through the full report re the poverty/attainment gap and lost the will to live as it was so long and convoluting, full of acronyms with little to say of any immediate practical use (it seems to me).
Glance at this report and you'll see what I mean:
http://www.jrf.org.uk/sites/files/jrf/e ... d-full.pdf
Surely if you want to reduce the poverty/attainment gap you irradicate poverty which is a political/economic/community issue and you train teachers to teach reading and writing by research-informed methods which are fit-for-purpose.
So, what is really being done to address 'poverty' and what is really being done to train teachers in Scotland well enough with research-informed content and methodology? The best and perhaps only hope for many of these youngsters is to teach them to be literate and to teach them thoroughly.
I suggest that Scotland should not ignore or undermine its Clackmannanshire research but, instead, see how they can be even better and more rigorous still with their basic skills literacy teaching.
How many so-called 'foundations' such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation spend a lot of time and money writing such reports to not much practical avail?
I was utterly dismayed to see Sue Ellis doing damage yet again to undermine the Clackmannanshire research - see page 31 of the full report from which I've copied the paragraph below:
Decoding and fluency
There are strong correlations between low socioeconomic status and low letter and vocabulary knowledge on starting school, and also between letter knowledge at the start of school and later reading attainment (Denton and West, 2002).
The arguments around phonics and teaching pupils to decode print have been fierce and often unhelpfully reductionist. Obviously, teaching alphabetic knowledge, and how to hear, to sequence, to isolate, blend and segment the sounds in words is important. However, large-scale longitudinal studies in the US show that mastering phonics alone does not improve the reading attainment of those children from low socioeconomic groups and that fluency is equally important (Denton and West, 2002).
In a cross-national study that included Scotland, Thompson and colleagues (2008) found that classes that focused heavily on phonics had less instructional time available to practice reading continuous text and
that over-prioritising phonics, or atomistic elements of reading, may not
be the best way to promote literacy in disadvantaged groups.
Nonetheless, the Clackmannanshire phonics study (Johnston and Watson, 2005) made headline-grabbing claims for phonics and has had a significant impact on Scottish practice through media publicity, local authority networks and commercial teaching materials, despite obvious evidence that the claims do not match reality (Ellis and Moss, 2013).
Research does indicate that children starting school with low letter and vocabulary knowledge (associated with socioeconomically disadvantaged groups) benefit from small-group, teacher- led, explicit literacy teaching at the start of their school career, with more open-ended literacy activities as the year progresses (Connor et al., 2004, 2007).
I think it is disgraceful that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is including this in the report about closing the attainment gap.
I suggest that what we read here is more about Sue Ellis's personal view and understanding (or lack thereof) of leading-edge synthetic phonics practice and less about what this could look like and what it can achieve.
Systematic synthetic phonics is not just 'important' for children, it is essential and life-chance stuff.
The comment about SSP not being about 'fluency' is a red-herring - not relevant - if teachers do not also provide repetition and practice with cumulative texts and literature to enable 'fluency', then that is the issue - not that SSP isn't essential.
Quite frankly, this is shocking and is in danger of leading teachers and others away from working out truly 'leading-edge' systematic synthetic phonics provision.
According to Anne Glennie's experience (and she has trained thousands of teachers in Scotland), many if not most teachers in Scotland are not all trained in systematic synthetic phonics and yet many are very eager indeed when given the chance to express their interest in professional development in reading instruction.
By the way, the USA trawl of the research led to the 'Five Pillars of Literacy' being:
1) phonemic awareness (which is addressed directly within phonics programmes)
2) phonics (which ought to include code to word to text level work and is ideal for repetition)
3) fluency (which is about repetition to build up fluency)
4) vocabulary enrichment (to be specifically taught)
5) comprehension (spoken language comprehension and reading comprehension which can be specifically taught)
So the comments about phonics as if phonics is 'anti' fluency are simply not relevant or taken out of context.