{"id":364,"date":"2015-03-13T09:02:35","date_gmt":"2015-03-13T09:02:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nisr\/?p=364"},"modified":"2015-05-15T11:51:27","modified_gmt":"2015-05-15T10:51:27","slug":"all-children-need-to-be-able-to-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nisr\/all-children-need-to-be-able-to-read\/","title":{"rendered":"All Children Need to be Able to Read"},"content":{"rendered":"

Professor James Law <\/a>(School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences<\/a>) presents Newcastle Institute for Social Renewal’s latest Idea for an Incoming Government: get all children reading well at age 11 by 2025. Using the findings of Save the Children’s Read On Get On<\/a>\u00a0report, Professor Law suggests that we are failing our children with the current system, and argues that change is needed to prevent further exclusion.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Children's<\/a><\/p>\n

What is the problem?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There has been a lot of hand ringing recently about our\u00a0addiction to screens, games consoles, tablets and all the rest of the gadgets which now permeate our lives. Yet this obscures a much more significant underlying societal problem which we overlook at our peril. Too many children are managing to get through school without being able to read.\u00a0<\/strong>This means that in our predominantly \u2018white collar\u2019 world they are pretty much excluded from school activities and ineligible for most employment.<\/p>\n

Getting children to read has been the focus of the National Curriculum for many years following the introduction\u00a0of the Literacy Hour. Indeed,\u00a0so dominant has this trend been that the word \u2019literacy\u2019 seems to have replaced \u2018reading and writing\u2019 in many children’s vocabulary.\u00a0\u00a0Yet once children reach the age of \u2018learning to read\u2019 it is assumed that they will be \u2018reading to learn\u2019 and support for poor readers fades away and they are largely left to fend for themselves. Evidence suggests that an inability to contribute in these later stages of primary school leads to disengagement in the whole process\u00a0of schooling well before the children reach secondary school.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s have a look at some of the figures, taken from the report produced by Save the Children<\/i> in\u00a0September 2014 called Read On Get On<\/a>. <\/strong>This report was designed to shed light on the data behind this issue and to ensure that these issues became an integral part of the manifestoes of all the political parties as they move towards the General Election in May 2015.<\/p>\n

Last year a quarter of all children left primary school without being able to read well. This figure rose to 40% in the most socially disadvantaged groups. Low income white British boys were by far the most vulnerable group. The reading gap between boys and girls is one of the widest in the world. Similarly, the gap between the most and the least socially disadvantaged groups is wider in the UK than it is any country on Europe apart from Romania.<\/p>\n

It\u00a0is almost as if we have deliberately engineered inequity into our educational system. This is directly related to employment prospects. A quarter of people earning less than \u00a310,000 per year are not functionally literate. The figure for those earning over \u00a330,000 is one in 25.<\/p>\n

The evidence<\/strong><\/p>\n

Underpinning this challenge is a need to understand how these difficulties emerge. We contributed a chapter in the report about the way that oral language skills – that is children learning their own language – have a bearing on children’s reading. Difficulties learning to read start in the preschool period as children struggle with basic language competency. In most cases it\u2019s not that they don’t speak, but rather they often start late and then don’t keep up as the language skills of their peers race ahead. Again this is clearly related to social disadvantage.<\/p>\n

Using data from 18,000 children in the Millennium Cohort Study, we showed that when you follow the children from three years\u00a0to five and then at eleven years the gap between the highest performers and the lowest\u00a0is 26 months at five years rising to 31 months at eleven years. Children do catch up, of course, but\u00a0equally\u00a0the\u00a0skills of some children seem to fall back\u00a0and this was twice as likely\u00a0for the more disadvantaged groups.\u00a0Whether a parent reads to their child has been consistently shown to predict more positive outcomes and there seems to be a special role for\u00a0dads in this, particularly\u00a0when children are in primary school, something that attracted a lot\u00a0of attention when the report was released.\u00a0It is also important to note that early child development fits into another cross party initiative called 1001 Critical Days<\/a> which focuses on the importance of child development up to two years of age, but the need to keep an eye of a child’s development doesn’t stop at two years.<\/p>\n

The solution<\/strong><\/p>\n

The ambition of\u00a0Read On Get <\/strong>On<\/b> is\u00a0simple enough: to get all children reading well at 11 years by 2025<\/strong>. Underpinning literacy are oral language skills.\u00a0And this has led to an additional aim of all children achieving good early language development by the age of five by 2020. <\/strong>The report\u00a0calls for a national mission to address these issues. <\/strong>This mission seeks to engage parents in reading to every child for just ten minutes every day, to encourage volunteers to give their time to help children with reading and language, to bring together voluntary sector, schools, policy makers and the private sector together to create innovative solutions with local schools leading the way. And finally that this be driven across\u00a0government, supporting these local initiatives.<\/p>\n

Clearly the Government\u00a0has a responsibility for the economic prosperity of the country and they are sensitive to international comparisons, as we see with the alterations being proposed for the A level system to raise Maths attainment to that of South Korea and other countries. Undoubtedly it is important to let our strong students thrive. Yet the fact that we appear to continue to fail students, who come out of school ill-prepared for the workforce, and thus vulnerable to external competition in a multinational world,\u00a0raises real questions\u00a0which are posed in Read On Get On and\u00a0it is very appropriate to look for solutions in the party manifestoes.<\/p>\n

Tweet @Social_Renewal using #Ideas4anIncomingGovt to join in the
\nconversation.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Professor James Law (School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences) presents Newcastle Institute for Social Renewal’s latest Idea for an Incoming Government: get all children reading well at age 11 by 2025. Using the findings of Save the Children’s Read … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5813,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[111,90,78,46,77,110,6,87],"class_list":["post-364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideas-for-an-incoming-government","tag-children-in-need","tag-education","tag-general-election","tag-literacy","tag-policy","tag-reading","tag-social-renewal","tag-young-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nisr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nisr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nisr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nisr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5813"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nisr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nisr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":368,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nisr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions\/368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nisr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nisr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ncl.ac.uk\/nisr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}