UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1269 -i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE

 

 

TEACHING CHILDREN TO READ

 

 

Monday 15 November 2004

DR MORAG STUART and MRS DEBBIE HEPPLEWHITE

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1-132

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Education and Skills Committee

on Monday 15 November 2004

Members present

Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair

Valerie Davey

Mr Nick Gibb

Helen Jones

Mr Kerry Pollard

Jonathan Shaw

Mr Andrew Turner

 

In the absence of the Chairman, Valerie Davey was called to the Chair

________________

Memoranda submitted by Dr Stuart and Mrs Hepplewhite

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Dr Morag Stuart, Reader in Psychology, School of Psychology and Human Development, Institute of Education, University of London and Mrs Debbie Hepplewhite, Reading Reform Foundation, examined.

Q1 Valerie Davey: May I welcome Dr Stuart and Debbie Hepplewhite to this, our first session? We have given ourselves the title of Teaching Children to Read which, as you both well know, has been the subject of debate for ever, it would seem, for those of us who have been involved in teaching at any time. It is something we want to look at specifically, following the government's new approach, given the literacy hour, given all the work they have done. Why we are having a debate now? That is the first question and it would be an opportunity that I should like to give both of you to say a few words, before we start the general questioning, as to why you think there is a debate now. Looking at the achievements or not, as you may see it, of the government's approach, what are the standards that you would expect young people to reach at the end of their Key Stage 2. I do not know who would like to go first, but we will give you each five or ten minutes, depending on what you would like to say to the Committee. Would that be helpful?

Mrs Hepplewhite: Good afternoon everybody. Thank you for holding this inquiry; I think it is much appreciated. I should like to say from the outset, that I am absolutely not an academic and I come to the Committee today very much a working teacher. This means that I have a really good understanding of the kind of training that teachers have had, perhaps at teacher training college and certainly since the National Literacy Strategy and whether that has equipped them to understand about the teaching of reading, also writing, spelling and handwriting. So I come originally from the point of view of the quality of the training and the content of the training. I should also like to include that I am alarmed by the climate for teachers, specifically with National Literacy Strategy training, which has differed from national numeracy strategy training in that if teachers raise questions during National Literacy Strategy training, these questions are not addressed and teachers are actually made to feel uncomfortable. There has been a much more open approach to the numeracy strategy, so there is literally a different climate in those two subject areas. I maintain that teachers do not have a common understanding of how to teach reading, or how best to teach reading and they do not understand that this is one subject area where it is not just about what you do do with children, but there is an area of what you should not do with children, which can be very damaging to children. I hope that perhaps we can address these things this afternoon.

Dr Stuart: Good afternoon. I am an academic now. I was also a Key Stage 1 teacher for a large number of years, so I also have experience of teaching children to read and write. I became an academic by accident, because when I studied psychology I studied under Professor Max Coltheart who was doing really fascinating work about reading and I became interested. When he suggested I did my PhD, I knew at once what I wanted to do because I had taught children to read for about 16 years and I had absolutely no idea how they learned. When I train teachers now, this is still a common experience. When I tell that anecdote to teachers, they immediately smile and nod and they know too, that although they teach children to read, they do not know how children learn. It is quite mysterious because you just breathe on some children and they learn to read. Other children you teach and teach and teach and teach and they do not learn to read. I wanted to know why and when I started my PhD I did a longitudinal study starting with children in their last term in the nursery and I followed those children up, having predicted how they would fare in learning to read, until they were 11. At the age of 11, my predictions held good and the gap between the children that I predicted would find it easy and the children I predicted would not had grown so that there was about a four-year difference in reading age by the time they were 11. I have been doing research into early reading development now for the past 20 years more of less. One of the reasons we are having the debate still is to do with Ofsted's continuing disquiet about the teaching of phonics in schools. In all the reports I have read, this is one issue which Ofsted raises. Ofsted's disquiet is also raised in a report of 1996-98 about what teachers in initial teacher training were being taught about reading and goodness knows why else. There is a paradox in that recent international comparisons such as the PIRLS study show English children doing very well comparatively by the age of 11, but we do need to look at whom they have been compared with. The international comparisons include children from countries where most of the teachers are not trained or are certainly not trained as much as teachers here are trained, where the countries are poor and therefore there are poor school libraries and poor text books in schools. We are thus not really comparing like with like. When we compare like with like, we see some rather dispiriting things about English schoolchildren which show that although our best children do extremely well, there is a larger range between our best children and our worst children at the age of 11, than in almost any other country. We are clearly not doing as well as we should by the children at the bottom, the children who are always there in classes, whom you taught and taught and taught. So we still do not know how to do it.

Q2 Valerie Davey: You indicated that in the research you have done, you had predicted. Could you tell us very briefly what the factors were?

Dr Stuart: Yes. When the children were in the nursery, I tested their phonological awareness. When I use terms that you do not understand, please let me know.

Q3 Jonathan Shaw: Give us the Beano version.

Dr Stuart: If I say to you "What rhymes with cat?" what would you say?

Q4 Jonathan Shaw: I would say hat.

Dr Stuart: You would say "hat". Well lots of four-year-olds would say dog, because they deal with words in terms of their meanings and not their sounds.

Q5 Mr Pollard: I said dog.

Dr Stuart: Might you have reading problems? I looked at their ability to recognise whether words rhymed or not and to tell me words that did rhyme with each other, asked them to tell me what words began with in terms of their sounds. Already in the early 1980s those were known predictors of the successful reading development. Children who, when they went into school, understood that words were composed of sounds had a head start in learning to read and that is largely because alphabetical orthographies, alphabetic writing systems, map onto speech sounds. If you know about speech sounds, you are prepared for the fact that letters will map on to them.

Valerie Davey: Thank you very much. I could go on, but I have promised my colleagues that I will not abuse the chair this afternoon. Nick, it is over to you.

Q6 Mr Gibb: Thank you very much. I got into this subject because when I first became the MP for Bognor and Littlehampton, I was discussing with the heads of my three different comprehensives why the results were as they were for those schools. They said "We have a problem with the intake". One particular school said. "60 per cent of my intake had a reading age below the chronological age and 30 per cent had a reading age two years below the chronological age". Why do you think this might be in an area like mine? It does have areas of deprivation but it is not totally deprived and there are prosperous areas. Why do you think there would be these problems?

Dr Stuart: What year were these children entering secondary school?

Q7 Mr Gibb: They were going in to Year 7, so they were eleven-year-olds.

Dr Stuart: In which year?

Q8 Mr Gibb: In 1997, 1998 and 1999.

Dr Stuart: So they had been through school prior to the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy.

Q9 Mr Gibb: Yes.

Dr Stuart: Well, I am not surprised then, because the National Literacy Strategy has made a difference, there is absolutely no doubt about that. Whether it has made as much difference as it could, or whether we could make more difference is really what we are here to discuss today. There is absolutely no doubt that the National Literacy Strategy has a major effect on the teaching of reading. Prior to the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy in many schools reading was not systematically taught at all.

Q10 Mr Gibb: So, what has the NLS brought in? I am a great supporter of the NLS.

Dr Stuart: The NLS has produced a framework for teaching which tells teachers that reading has to be taught and the prevailing ideology before the introduction of the NLS was that reading did not have to be taught, that reading was a natural human activity just like walking and talking. We do not teach children to talk, we do not need to teach children to read. In fact some authors in the early 1970s were absolutely against the idea that you should try to teach children to read and saw teaching children to read as counter-productive in terms of their learning.

Q11 Mr Gibb: Are you not exaggerating? If I were to ask primary teachers in my constituency if that was what they were doing prior to 1997, I do not think they would say that, would they? "We don't teach children to read here."

Dr Stuart: No, I do not think they would.

Q12 Mr Gibb: So in real terms, what does what you are saying mean?

Mrs Hepplewhite: May I speak from the point of view of the teacher? The National Literacy Strategy brought a huge impetus to the teaching of reading: massive influx of reading material in the form of big books and sets of reading books. A bit of a rod for teachers, saying "You need to teach literacy. You have to make it very high profile in your schools. You have to plan it very thoroughly. There is such a thing as word level, sentence level, text level and you must account for all these areas". The difference it made was that the middle to above-average children have absolutely flown on that extra impetus. In my opinion, what it did not do was still train the teachers how to teach reading in the most effective way and this is where the sort of, say, bottom third are still failed, because there is still a lot of grey area about how to do it. The very fact that you were making it so high profile and it was a case of Ofsted was looking for this and we must do this and we must account for it, was enough to have got the teaching profession into gear with the whole area of teaching of reading and a lot of teachers were learning as well, myself included. I know more about the genre now than I ever did as an adult before and I am still learning and these are all the pluses for the National Literacy Strategy. Unfortunately, in terms of the specific teaching of reading, the advice was not as it should have been, it was not scientifically tested, it was not compared to other leading programmes at the time. Because therefore the advice was not the best, admittedly, the actual government teaching material was not the best, but teachers were actually expected to use those materials, is why we have got this difference now between the bottom struggling children and children with English as an additional language, children from poor backgrounds, compared with the rest of the children. We have to be very careful that we do not therefore conclude, if we look at the improvement in this area, that it must therefore be the children's problem, it must be an aide to the children, it must just be the backgrounds because there are programmes out there where children, despite those difficulties are making some extraordinary strides. The level of comprehension may well be limited by their oral comprehension and the limit of their vocabulary, but in terms of the decoding of the words on the page, with certain programmes they really are now at an advantage and hopefully will be able to read more within their schools. That in itself will improve their vocabulary and their confidence and have a really good knock-on effect.

Q13 Mr Gibb: There have been huge improvements under the NLS, going from 56 per cent reaching Level 4 to 75 per cent; in fact last year it was 77 per cent. But you are both critical in your written submissions of the NLS. We are kind of skirting around what the debate is. What is the debate that is going on? Why are you still critical of the NLS, given the gains that have been made?

Dr Stuart: I am critical because I am actually worried, at the time when the NLS and the NNS have been subsumed into the primary strategy and there is talk about devolving responsibility to local authorities rather than central authorities, that we have not won the hearts and minds of teachers about how reading ought to be taught. That is partly because, as I said in my paper, the National Literacy Strategy represents this uneasy compromise between two completely opposing philosophies about the teaching of reading: on the one hand, the idea that reading is a natural human activity and, given time and exposure to books, all children will learn to do it and the idea that actually, from psychological research, we know an awful lot about how children learn to read and we know an awful lot about reading and we know about the cognitive processes that children need to develop and we know about ways of teaching them that will facilitate the development of those processes.

Q14 Mr Gibb: Can you, for the benefit of the Committee, just summarise how reading should be taught? We are talking about phonics, are we not?

Dr Stuart: Yes, we are talking about phonics basically. Children need to understand the alphabetic principle and children need to know three things. They need to know the correspondences between letters and their sounds and that goes beyond the single 26 letters of the alphabet to all the vowel diagraphs and consonant diagraphs, two vowels together; "ai" is a diagraph, "ch" is a diagraph. They need to be able to blend sounds that they recover from translating letters into sounds in order to form words for reading and they need to be able to segment spoken words into their sounds in order to translate them into letters for spelling. So once they have mastered the alphabetic principle, they become self-teaching because they can work out new words that they encounter in texts for themselves and the words that they encounter in texts are likely to be words that are already in their spoken vocabulary. They can therefore form sight vocabulary representations for those words.

Q15 Mr Turner: What does "sight vocabulary" mean?

Dr Stuart: The evidence about skilled reading is that we have two procedures for recognising words, which happen every time we look at a word in print. You would be amazed at what your brain is doing every time you see a word in print. Your brain is automatically translating it from letters to sounds and automatically looking it up in your internal dictionary of the spellings of all the words that you know. Okay? The self-teaching device is that if you know letter-sounds and you can work out unfamiliar words, once you have worked them out, you can pop them into sight vocabulary and they are available for subsequent instant recognition. Skilled readers largely rely on this instant recognition because they have this stored vocabulary.

Q16 Valerie Davey: Can we ask Debbie to answer the same question? Would you agree with that as the best way of teaching or would you like to add something?

Mrs Hepplewhite: No. Do not be cross with me. One thing, certainly from the point of the Reading Reform Foundation, is that we are absolutely not a philosophy; we are not promoting any philosophy. The beauty of the Reading Reform Foundation is that the stereotype of the sort of phonics proponents as being very sort of right-wing elderly ladies or whatever has gone. The Reading Reform Foundation is supported by an enormous variety of people, actually from across the world, who have the same debate in other English-speaking countries. The teaching of reading is a very emotional thing and we have tried to be very unemotional about it, although we are passionate about children failing, so emotion is definitely there. Basically we do everything by evidence and the Reading Reform Foundation's governing principles are that we promote evidence-based teaching of reading. At the moment, that evidence is pointing very clearly to something called synthetic phonics. It could be standing on your head and turning round three times and we would promote that. I should like to make it very, very clear from the outset that we are talking about a very scientific, objective approach to the teaching of reading, as opposed to a belief system. This is not a belief system. What is missing from the National Literacy Strategy is that same objective approach to what is being promoted. In the past, I have corresponded quite a lot with people quite high up in Ofsted and one letter to me was very much saying "Debbie, you need to be patient, things cannot be changed over night. We have politics and diplomacy to consider". Well, in my opinion, children's welfare has nothing to do with adult politics and diplomacy and it has everything to do with what works the best in the classrooms. If you would bear with me, I should like you all to imagine that you are four years old and I should like to take you through two different scenarios. You will enjoy it. Have fun. Let me take you through one scenario. Four years old and you go into an environment where you are surrounded by lots of passionate caring people, people who love literature and who are very keen to steep you in lots of stories and want you to play in the role play corner, reading and writing, wanting you to have all these experiences to enrich your life. Of course that is really important. One of the things that they do is actually show you cards with whole words on; this is the principle of sight vocabulary. They say to you "That word says" whatever it says, they might show you a picture with it. So your first experience might be looking at words which are just black squiggles on the page at the age that you are at and you might have an elephant up there and that word says elephant and you are taught that says elephant. In actual fact, a lot of the words you will be exposed to are the kind of words which you will need for the reading of real text. So it will be "the" and "said" and "was" and "they" and "their", the kinds of words that make text into sentences and not just odd words. So your first experience will be looking at books with Mum and enjoying the story, if you are lucky. Then you will be shown black squiggles on a page, perhaps with a supporting picture to tell you what that word is, then it will be books which are based very much on look and say "Here is a picture. Here is a word". Then you go through the book and you pretend to read it and the chances are that you are saying the correct words, but not because of the words themselves, which are very hard to take on board, but actually because of the pictures above. I am quite sure that if you swapped the pictures around, the children would get all the words wrong. You are also teaching the child not to look at the word by the alphabetic principle where you learn the letter-sound correspondences and you learn to track the word all through the word from left to right. You have some experience of that and then you may well get some letter-sound information and it is highly likely that at home you were taught your ABC and you were told exactly that. You were told a lot of names, not necessarily letter sounds and you are getting contradictory information yet again, because when you are reading, you may think automatically in terms of the letter name and not a sound. This is another criticism of the NLS, because you are doubling your learning and confusing the information. Then you may well get a little bit of phonics creeping in, depending on how old you are, or whether you hit a more formal setting. By now you have had lots of different ways of being taught how to read. Now the adult logic is that one of these methods will work and if something fails, something else will succeed and you are only little and you are loving the books and you are looking through and you are building up that information. Now, I want to park that child's experience for a moment, if I may, and I want to bring in another child going into a different setting. In that setting, you still have lots of books surrounding you when you have a literacy-rich environment and you hear stories and talk about books and see how books works and you still have a role-play corner. But when the adults talk to you and teach you, they find a way of explaining that when we speak, we have a way of writing a code and we are going to teach you that code and how to use it to be able to read and write. A lot of time and attention is given to just that, to getting a response to automaticity, so that you are taught at letter level and single unit sound level and you get a lot of that. You do not get a little bit of it mixed up with everything else. That teacher or that grownup is doing that all the time and building that information up quite rapidly and in the best synthetic phonics programmes, you might get six letter-sound correspondences a week including vowels and consonants. When you get those, you are taught two extremely important skills. You are taught the skill of sounding out and blending all through the word to be able to decode the word and you are taught the skill of listening to a simple word said very slowly. When it is said very slowly, the sounds pop out. So if you say "zzzzzzzzip" you can hear those distinctive sounds and you are trained to hear those distinctive sounds and then you can spell and if you are taught your handwriting as well, you have been taught everything. Now that has been shown to be unbelievably effective, no matter what the background of the child. Those elements of teaching are not yet in the National Literacy Strategy programmes. You are not taught contradictory messages and you are not given in the first instance, words which are awkward, words with complicated phonics, even if they are regular, irregular words, you are given the words that work. By the time you start to be introduced to more difficult words but useful words for reading text, you already understand the principles of the alphabetic code and how to decode words. Some pupils of four and five, and even three, are able to sound out and blend and hear a word within the first couple of weeks of being given that method and that is pretty impressive. Within a few more weeks, more and more children can do that, which means that within half a term, or a term, you can have a whole cohort of children able to do the most fundamental skill, which is sound out and blend for reading and segment the spoken word for spelling. Now that is very powerful and compared with the mixture that is here, where some phonics will be taught, the results are pretty dramatic. What we have to do is show that, because researchers like Morag Stuart, people in the Reading Reform Foundation know that, as do growing numbers of people around the country, but it would appear that the National Literacy Strategy team are avoiding the public act of comparing these programmes and passing that information to the teachers. Until the teachers get this information, they are not in a position to make the informed choices that they need to make to help their children.

The Chairman took the Chair at 4pm

Chairman: That is very helpful.

Q17 Mr Gibb: Yes, that is very helpful. I just want to bring in Morag now as well. On this long tail of underachievement which is talked about in PIRLS study and bringing in the points both you and Debbie have made about the phonics method of teaching, which Debbie has just said applies to all children, is there not an argument that some children have a different way of thinking? Indeed is it not the case that the type of children you have mentioned before, who, when you ask them to find a word which rhymes with cat, will say dog, some children with different kinds of minds, minds like that perhaps, do need a different method of teaching and we do therefore need a variety of methods of teaching reading and not just an over-emphasis on phonics?

Dr Stuart: No, I do not think that is what the research evidence suggests at all. What the research evidence suggests is that the best way to make a child, who at four thinks that dog rhymes with cat, into a reader is to play games with them, so that they understand that cat rhymes with mat and hat and so that they do become aware of sounds in words. There are obviously individual differences in the speed with which different children learn and in the success rate at which children get to targets anyway. I remember saying to Ofsted at the very beginning of the National Literacy Strategy that I thought it was extremely unlikely that 80 per cent of children would reach the level 4 target because the level 4 target is set on children's understanding of what they read and understanding of what you read is limited by your verbal ability and verbal ability varies among children. I think it is very reasonable to expect that every child should be able to recognise the words on the page and phonics teaches you to do that. However, when we are looking at understanding what you read, there are other factors which set limits on your ability. I have lost your question.

Q18 Mr Gibb: The long tail of underachievement. Who are those children and would they benefit from a different method from phonics? Where is there that long tail?

Dr Stuart: The evidence suggests that phonics teaching actually benefits children from low socio-economic status homes, children with English as an additional language, more than it benefits children from middle-class homes.

Q19 Mr Gibb: Are you not saying that you are simply teaching decoding? So this is all about decoding, it is not about comprehension. Do we not need comprehension? Why is decoding so important?

Dr Stuart: Because you cannot comprehend, if you cannot decode. If you are presented with a page of text and you cannot recognise any of the words and you do not know what any of the words mean or say, you cannot understand the text. So as children grow up, they learn language, they learn the language that they are surrounded by, they learn their mother tongue and they can speak and they can understand. When they learn to read, they need to get into that language comprehension system from the printed word, rather than from the spoken word. At the early stages of reading development decoding is essential.

Q20 Mr Gibb: If I were to go to any primary school in my constituency, they would say "But we do phonics. We use the NLS and we use phonics". What are you complaining about?

Dr Stuart: The fact that there are ways and ways of using phonics. That comes back to my worry about the hearts and minds of teachers. Teachers who have been trained in the whole language philosophy, the idea that, as Debbie says, if you present the right environment, the children will learn to read, reject phonics teaching. In fact in one study which I carried out in London schools, where we taught phonics for 12 weeks to one group of children and we taught another way of introducing early reading to another group of children, at the end of the first year when we went and reported back to the schools on how the children were doing, I nearly lost one school because the phonics-taught children were doing better than the non-phonics-taught children and this head teacher said to me that she was ideologically opposed to taking part in a study which showed that phonics teaching worked. That is the depth of opposition that was around when the NLS came in.

Q21 Mr Gibb: Why would teachers have this view? It does seem rather perverse, unless there is something more to it.

Dr Stuart: Because there is a very charismatic figure in the world of reading education called Frank Smith, who in 1971 produced a book called A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Reading and Learning and that book has been reproduced several times a decade and the latest edition of it came out in 2004. Frank Smith is attractive to teachers because he tells them that phonics is bad, and teachers find phonics teaching quite boring, that teaching words on flash cards is bad, and teachers find that quite boring. If you do it day after day, year after year after year it might well be boring, but it is not boring for children and it teaches them. I went to a conference where he spoke once, because I wanted to understand his mystic pulling powers and he is amazing. It is like attending a Billy Graham revivalist meeting going to a Frank Smith conference. He talks about teachers as the "keepers of the imagination". He flatters teachers about their important role in society, which most of us do not do, most of us criticise teachers quite a lot of the time. So he is extremely attractive to teachers and he has also made it a political and ideological thing. As Debbie says, there is a perception that phonics is a right-wing affair.

Q22 Mr Gibb: Is it?

Dr Stuart: No, of course it is not.

Mrs Hepplewhite: May I just say though, that an awful lot of teachers are really so keen to have information about what works best. Lots of newly trained teachers certainly have not had training in their teacher-training establishments, though I am sure some do. I think there are individuals in teacher training in universities who are up to date with research and keen to get this out to students, but mostly they are not. I think they are desperate for proper information and they are not involved in the ideological thing and, in any event, what we have to inform those teachers about is that to do this simple-step fast-pace phonics is not exclusive of doing all the wonderful literacy things, all that comprehension stuff. It is like an exchange. A lot of people think you need to teach reading by the context, by the comprehension, giving you the words, rather than being able to decode the words and bringing you a greater ability to comprehend the text. In actual fact, some children can get by whichever way and we have said that already. It is a fact that the better reader, and anybody can be a better reader in terms of decoding, is gained through the synthetic phonics approach, but that is simply not known by ordinary teachers out there. Most teachers are good people and if they fully understood that the methods they were or were not using in Key Stage 1 or even in a remedial capacity in Key Stage 2 and even in secondary schools, if they fully understood what to do for the best, I am sure their consciences would not let them do otherwise than the best for the children.

Q23 Mr Gibb: Just how long would it take to teach a child to read using phonics?

Dr Stuart: We do not know basically; we do not know how long the ideal time is and that is one of the questions which was identified as requiring further research in the National Reading Panel's report to Congress in the United States. However, most children can get off the ground after one term.

Mrs Hepplewhite: I was going to say one term.

Chairman: May I apologise for arriving at the session late? This was pre-planned. It was the inauguration of the chancellor of my university in Huddersfield, so it was something I had to be at and the only way I could do that and be here was to be 15 minutes late. My apologies to both of you. I have actually met Mrs Hepplewhite before and talked to her, so I am catching up on where we are in the questioning.

Q24 Mr Pollard: A couple of things I should like to pursue. How does Mr Smith debunk what you are offering? Debbie said it is unbelievably effective. If it is so unbelievably effective, how does he stop people believing the unbelievable?

Dr Stuart: I do not want to overemphasise Frank Smith, because I hope he is history, but I fear he is not. He does it by saying that there are so many phonic rules that there is too much for children to learn and he does it by saying that English is such an irregular language that even if you knew all the phonic rules under the sun, there would still be words that you could not read.

Q25 Mr Pollard: Is that all?

Dr Stuart: No, that is not all, but that is the basis of it.

Q26 Mr Pollard: How do we convince anybody and those who make the decisions? Is more research needed? Do we need a guru or a champion?

Dr Stuart: No, I am very much against gurus and champions.

Q27 Jonathan Shaw: A phonics czar.

Dr Stuart: No, no; we do not need a phonics czar. As a psychologist, what I believe is that teachers in training ought to be taught the psychology of reading and the psychology of reading development, so that they understand what reading is and how children learn to do it. At the moment, that is absent from teacher-training courses. Teachers in initial training are taught now to deliver the National Literacy Strategy. When they say to their tutors "What do we do if the children do not learn?", they are told "If you do this, the children will learn".

Q28 Mr Pollard: The Chairman does not allow me to say that I have seven children, so I am not going to tell you that. We used to use flash cards and that seemed to work quite well. All our children were reading before they went to school. I take the point that Debbie made about "was" and "is" and all those sorts of things.

Dr Stuart: We have some evidence about that.

Q29 Mr Pollard: How do parents then get involved in this? Debbie said earlier on that teachers often do not have a clue about how this. I am paraphrasing what you said but the essence of what you said is that many teachers do not have a clue about how this works. How do parents then link into this? What about things like Cbeebies, which I watch with my grandchildren? All these things are teaching children the essence of the alphabet, are they not? This is a "C" this is a kicking "K", all that business. How does it all knit together?

Mrs Hepplewhite: Sometimes parents are the sensible ones. When teachers are spouting off to parents with their "teacherly" advice on how they need to teach their child at home, for example, one of the main things that teachers are told about how children learn to read is by looking at the pictures and guessing, the parent will say "Well, you know, that is only guessing and I like to cover the pictures up and make the child look at the word". This is how I was alerted to the flaws in the NLS right from my first training day, when I was being told that this was a valid strategy and I said "Hang on, my weakest children are the ones that look at the pictures. They are looking at the picture and not the word and when they guess, it is the wrong word. That is a ridiculous way". How can it be that in 2004 the government of the country is still training its teachers to train its children to read by looking at the picture and guessing, guessing from the context and looking at the first letter, checking whether that is right and makes sense? Now that is strategy straight out of the early literacy support programme, which is not entirely in keeping with the progression in phonics programme. The Reading Reform Foundation has scrutinised the actual programme in unbelievable detail to flag up parts which are flawed according to research or contradictory one programme compared with another. Our difficulty has been the lack of engagement in that debate. There is not a debate; the debate is through the media or through correspondence: it is not through people sitting round a table looking at the programmes. So when we have asked for statistics to show the results, the consequences of following these programmes, when we have asked for comparative statistics, none has been forthcoming. There may well have been valid scientific testing, but the Reading Reform Foundation has not had the results and the teachers themselves have not. So when you attend training and you are told that the research says, you are not told which research, when you write and ask for that research, you are not told what research, therefore, you have a whole teaching profession taking the programmes up in good faith and I do not think that that good faith has been justified whatsoever.

Q30 Mr Pollard: In Finland and Norway where we went recently, children only start at seven. We were told that after a matter of a few weeks they were reading. Presumably they concentrate on reading to start with. Should we be doing that?

Mrs Hepplewhite: This is a very interesting one. There is a huge debate in the early years at the moment about whether we are too formal with infant teaching and a little while ago I was the infant teacher of Year 1s and Year 2s and I found the national curriculum absolutely onerous. Year 1s in particular are shut away in the afternoon; they need a little nap and there you are trying to teach them the whole range of history, geography, science and it really is very difficult. Yet I am someone who believes in teaching children to read quite rigorously from a reasonably young age because, when you use the right method, they can take it on board really, really well. It is not that we are saying what age they should start. In those countries I believe that the language is much more straightforward and it is the way they are taught; they are taught phonically. When you teach our children phonically and you teach them the simple transparent alphabet and the things which work before the trickier things, it could well be that we could teach them later. The worry is that a lot of children who are very able pick up all the wrong things on the way or get mis-teaching by parents or by teachers. If everybody were sufficiently informed about the teaching of reading, you could wait until they were nine for all I care. I suspect that getting it right is more important than the age at which they start.

Dr Stuart: I just want to point out that international comparisons are very dangerous because of the differences in languages. Finnish is one of the most transparent languages in the world, so that you can be very sure that if you see "F" in Finnish, it is always going to say "Fe", or whatever it is in Finnish. English is the most opaque alphabetic system in the world and evidence given to the Cost A8 dyslexia programme, which was an international comparison of reading across several European countries, showed that although English school children start being taught to read at least a year before children in any other country, they do not get to comparable levels of printed word recognition until about Year 6. It is much harder to learn to read in English. That does not mean to say that we should not try to use phonics because many words are phonically regular and many words that are phonically irregular have some regular correspondences. So "was" starts with "We" and has "W" at the beginning and we can go on from there.

Q31 Chairman: May I take you back to the reason that we have asked you to give evidence and that is that we are the Select Committee for Education and Skills and we represent people and we are interested to represent parents who would be looking at the kind of discussion that we have been having this afternoon and would probably be totally confused that there is so much passion on all the sides of this argument. What we would normally do as a select committee is say "Here is the establishment" which I think you are linking to the present National Literacy Strategy "and you are really the radicals who are challenging the establishment". In a sense what we would normally do and I guess parents would want us to do is say "We have many fine departments of research in this country in education, the London Institute, Cardiff and many others. What is the body"? You pointed at one particular writer, Mr Frank Smith. You are an academic. What is the body of assessment of what is going on at the moment? What quality? Lots of people are out there researching. Can you point out to the Committee where you would look, where you would guide us? I know you gave us a reading list, but give us some balance from just that one book.

Dr Stuart: I am not sure that I understand your question.

Q32 Chairman: Let us put it very bluntly then. You are an academic. What is the best research on this that you can guide us to, the very best, for evaluating what is going on in the National Literacy Strategy and evaluating phonics? What is the best?

Dr Stuart: For evaluating, I think you could look at the reports of the National Reading Panel in the United States, which actually demonstrates a very different approach to the one that we have taken here. In the United States, they convened a panel of academics to look at the evidence about the teaching of reading and how reading was learned and should best be taught and that panel trawled through the research literature and found 100,000 research reports that had been published over the past 25 or so years and assessed the evidence. This is a detailed document which provides evidence on lots and lots of aspects of the teaching of reading. With regard to the teaching of phonics, they showed clearly that in every case, where comparisons had been made, children who had been taught phonics in a systematic way ---

Q33 Chairman: Learning English?

Dr Stuart: Learning English. Children learning to read in English who had been taught in a programme that used systematic phonics did better than children who had been taught in programmes that did not use systematic phonics.

Q34 Chairman: Would you be confident that that particular compilation of research includes most of the research that we know of?

Dr Stuart: Absolutely.

Q35 Chairman: What about from our own country? What research would you rate here?

Dr Stuart: Mine.

Q36 Chairman: Research is always evaluated by your peers.

Dr Stuart: Absolutely. Mine gets published in peer review journals, so it must have something going for it. Important teams are doing research in the University of York and the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge.

Q37 Chairman: None of those is a five-star department.

Dr Stuart: York is for psychology.

Q38 Chairman: I was thinking of education.

Dr Stuart: The research on reading goes on in psychology departments and they are all five-star departments.

Q39 Chairman: So we should listen to psychologists more than educational researchers.

Dr Stuart: Yes, you do have to. This is all psychological research.

Q40 Chairman: How would you describe your group in terms of the balance of the argument? Is it 80:20? Are you winning the argument? Is it 50:50? In the intellectual struggle between academics do you see yourself as a small minority trying to dent the overwhelming majority which is resisting?

Dr Stuart: Psychologists are all singing from the same song sheet. Psychologists are all saying that children need to understand the alphabetic principle and they need to be taught phonics.

Q41 Chairman: So, any psychologist we got here would say that phonics is the way.

Dr Stuart: Any psychologist; I think so. I should be surprised if there were psychologists who did not say that.

Q42 Chairman: I am sorry to bear down on this, but we represent people; we are not specialists. We need to know what the evidence is. Mrs Hepplewhite, how long has your group been going?

Mrs Hepplewhite: Since 1989.

Q43 Chairman: How big is it? How influential are you?

Mrs Hepplewhite: We have contacts across the English-speaking world and we have people ranging from parents to psychologists to educationalists, to classroom teachers, the whole range of people, supporting that. It is actually, in a sense, officially quite a small group of people, but it is quite a significant committee because it is the way that people have come together to support one another. They may well have different research or different phonics programmes, but they wanted to show that it is not about being the best, this is the best research. These people have reached a consensus, one about synthetic phonics ---

Q44 Chairman: What I am trying to draw out from you is that from the evidence that I have read you still seem to be regarded in terms of - this is not a criticism - being slightly on the edge of the normal accepted ways of teaching English. I am not saying anything about who is right and who is wrong, but you are always the persecuted minority against the establishment.

Mrs Hepplewhite: It is trying to break through to the establishment to do things properly. It is very much about the testing and the comparisons and the transparency. There is a worrying lack of transparency. I hear from a lot of ordinary people about what the climate is in their local education authority and we have talked about hearts and minds. I want just to stick to technical information. I have just heard from someone who has now been made to do a programme by their authority which is Ruth Miskin's new programme, but these people have not had explained to them that it is different from the National Literacy Strategy, because it is politically incorrect to be critical of the government.

Q45 Chairman: Let us come back to that in a moment come back to that in a moment with some of the other questions. The last thing I want to ask you, just to be clear, if phonics is the absolute wonderful way to teach English and every teacher, every head, every parent out there wants the best way, the most effective way to introduce children to the English language, why has this copper-bottomed gold-plated wonderful method not been welcomed everywhere? Why has everyone embraced not it and changed their way of teaching?

Mrs Hepplewhite: I should like to throw that right back at you who are in the heart of London. I should like to know why there has been this lack of transparency and this lack of engagement. It is almost verging on the edge of "Is it egos? Is it people feeling embarrassed because they have not promoted things properly or tested things properly?".

Q46 Chairman: That becomes a kind of conspiracy theory does it not?

Mrs Hepplewhite: It is not so much a conspiracy. We have talked about charismatic people and gurus. I do not know the set-up in the Department for Education and Skills or in the National Literacy Strategy team, but when people do things, they might do things with good will and good heart and then if it receives criticism, you have to be a very big person to know how to handle that and how to go about addressing that criticism. The reason that the Reading Reform Foundation perhaps seems so cutting edge or very critical is the inability to reach people and penetrate and get a proper debate going.

Q47 Chairman: You were recently with the Department for Education at a very high level seminar I remember you telling me.

Mrs Hepplewhite: Yes, and I was highly critical of that seminar because it was nothing like I imagined where you ---

Q48 Chairman: But you got into the higher echelons.

Mrs Hepplewhite: Yes I have and it took an awful lot of letters to get there.

Q49 Chairman: But you got there and you felt rejected?

Mrs Hepplewhite: Yes. In there, believe it or not - I do talk a lot, we know that - I had loads of opportunities to speak because nobody spoke up. Each researcher got a very short period of time in which to present their research. The conclusions did not correspond with that research or open it up further discussion. I mentioned one programme in particular, the early literacy support programme, which is absolutely not similar to what the research is showing us children should have and that we needed to say "Is this something which needs discussing? Can we look at the details of what it is promoting for real teachers, for real children in real classrooms?". The message that gave and the videos and statement that gave was the exact opposite to the way that teachers need to teach reading. It was not even of the flavour of progression in phonics which was the prior phonics programme. That is so extraordinary, if I may say so.

Q50 Chairman: Mrs Hepplewhite, you are saying you have gone into the higher reaches of the Department for Education and Skills across the road here and all these people had their say.

Mrs Hepplewhite: Yes.

Q51 Chairman: But ...?

Mrs Hepplewhite: No response. Is it not very clever? Is it not very clever that the way you can dissipate an argument or a challenge is by not responding to it? I am maintaining that this is the way that this has gone on for several years now. The criticism has been there for years and no one has actually said "Well OK then, let's embrace the critics and let's see what we do need to do to compare". There is a shroud of 'Let's not be open about that criticism'.

Chairman: Can we hold it there? What I want to do is just tease out some of things in very common language if you like.

Q52 Helen Jones: May I say that having seen fashions in teaching come and go over the years, some of us here would like to concentrate on the research evidence rather than on the conspiracy theory. Mrs Hepplewhite, you said in your journal that the National Literacy Strategy and its programmes directly lead to underachievement in literacy for a substantial number of children. Can you tell the Committee the research on which that is based?

Mrs Hepplewhite: The actual research is mentioned in the newsletters themselves. There are studies, for example, of how children respond. I shall just backtrack. There are different ways that people can learn to read. So even as we sit in this room now, when I look at a page of print I may see that print in a different way from someone else in this room. If I have been brought up or taught to have that reflex of going left to right through the word and seeing it phonically, I will see it one way. There may well be people in this room who have a different reading reflex and have to recognise those words as wholes. That type of reader may well be less accurate in their reading, have a lower saturation point than people who can read phonically.

Q53 Helen Jones: Before you go any further, give us the research that backs up that statement.

Mrs Hepplewhite: There is research in there.

Q54 Helen Jones: How do you know that people are less accurate? Let us take a personal example. My son learned to read without anyone teaching him; we were very lucky, he was one of the people whom Dr Stuart recognises. Tell me what the research evidence is to show that people who learn to read like that are less accurate readers than people who learn to read phonically. That is what you just said.

Dr Stuart: May I come in there? I think there is a little confusion here. The fact that your son learned to read without anybody apparently teaching him does not mean to say that he is not a phonic reader. There is lots of evidence that some children hardly need to be taught phonics.

Q55 Helen Jones: Fair enough, but the statement that Mrs Hepplewhite gave us, and this is what I am trying to tease out, is that people who learn to read phonically are more accurate readers than people who do not learn to read phonically. Now please tell us what the research evidence for that is.

Mrs Hepplewhite: What I am saying is that some people who are taught to read by a more whole-word approach and not taught with systematic phonics are put on the track of becoming failed readers, not being able to read in the first place. Now there is research in there, Charles Richardson's research, which shows how people can see words differently: either they are trying to look at a whole-word recognition or they are tracking through the word. As long as their reading reflex is the whole-word reflex, they are more likely to have struggles if they fall in that bottom third.

Q56 Helen Jones: Now hang on, because that is not what you said in the first place. You did not talk about the bottom third. You said that people who did not learn to read phonically were less accurate generally. Now, can we be clear on what we are talking about here? Are you saying that the research shows, and if so which research, that children who have more difficulty learning to read will read less accurately that way? Or are you saying that it is a general thing that people who are not taught phonically will be less accurate readers?

Dr Stuart: I did explain earlier that research into skilled reading suggests that every skilled reader using two kinds of processes. We simply do not know the extent to which teaching contributes to whether you are a Chinese or a Phoenician reader; this is an old distinction. Phoenician readers read mostly alphabetically and Chinese readers read mostly ideographically. There are individual differences in that and we do not know to what extent teaching contributes to those individuals differences. What is certainly known is that unless you, either by being taught or by your own natural instinct, learn to cope with the alphabetic system and to be able to decode words alphabetically, you are extremely unlikely to become a fluent reader of words. Although there are case studies in the literature of people who have turned up in psychology departments, for example, studying for psychology degrees and who get quite good psychology degrees, who turn out to be completely unable to read aloud any simple three-letter non-words like BUP, because they have no idea about the sound system of language and their spelling is appalling, so that is where it shows up. There is another interesting case study in the literature of an 85-year-old lady who was in the control group for a study of some stroke patients. It turned out that she could not read any non-words at all either, but she had problems with reading throughout her life. She probably had problems with spelling. So you can learn to read in exceptional circumstances without any understanding of the alphabetic system, but this is unusual.

Q57 Helen Jones: Can we go back to the National Literacy Strategy then? The statement which you made, Mrs Hepplewhite, was not simply that it is not successful for a number of children, but that it actually leads to underachievement in a substantial group of children. Now there is a difference between those two statements. Perhaps you could clarify for us what you mean. Do you mean that it actually leads to underachievement or do you mean that it simply is not successful with a certain group of children?

Mrs Hepplewhite: It leads to underachievement and even if it is only a third of those children, at the bottom third, that is leading to underachievement.

Q58 Helen Jones: No; no. Leading to underachievement is a different thing from not being successful. You said it directly led to underachievement. What I am trying to tease out from you is how it does that and where your research evidence is that shows that it is responsible for that.

Mrs Hepplewhite: The research evidence is very much linked to the concept of dyslexia. I am not an expert on dyslexia, but what I should like to suggest is that in this country there is a debate about what it is exactly and how it arrives. I should just like to throw in some seeds of thought. For example, in a recent book, Professor Diane McGuinness pointed out that you do not get the instance of dyslexia in countries with a more transparent alphabet. Whereas in this country, even the Dyslexia Association tends to try to explain dyslexia as something which is innate to the person, in actual fact it is related to the English language and how it is taught. For example, if you have different methods of teaching within schools, some schools may have a very high special needs with regards to literacy, a very high failure rate of the children, maybe up to a third of the children are identified as having special needs in literacy which some people may call dyslexia or may say some of those children are dyslexic. In other schools, where a different method is used, you just do not get that incident. It always comes back to statistics whereby you are demonstrating that the way that children are taught leads to a manifestation of difficulties with reading and that difficulty is usually at the word level. Brain scans are done of dyslexic people where you can actually track how the brain is working in what we might describe as a dyslexic way. Those people are given very intensive phonics remedial programmes which actually changes their brain scans; it changes the way in which they are looking at words, this concept of a reading reflex. What I am suggesting is that we need to teach children so that all children have the best reading reflex which will set them up to be more accurate decoders. It may or may not help their comprehension in that comprehension is not something you can guarantee, it is to do with your oral comprehension, but you are giving them the best possible chance. I am suggesting that the National Literacy Strategy, with its promotion of getting from pictures, from context, from initial letter clues leads to people manifesting this dyslexic symptom where they do not see words in a phonic way all through the word and they have had that created; it is not something they have been born with. They may have been born with less ability to learn than the next child, but it is exacerbated or caused by the way that they were taught to read. If you can take children from the same intakes, like Ruth Miskin's school in Tower Hamlets, where she put her intensive phonic programme in for all children because she knew it was something they would do with children with literacy difficulties, and she can get children, as she did in her school up to extraordinary levels of literacy and they had English as an additional language and you have sister schools with special needs at 30 and 40 per cent and it is about a teaching method, that in itself is evidence of a method causing a problem.

Q59 Helen Jones: It is not quite, is it? Let us try to tease out this evidence. First of all, you would have to have a study of groups which were absolutely comparable when they first came into the school, would you not? You have now gone on to make a different suggestion, which is that it is actually leading to the symptoms of dyslexia. Do either you or Dr Stuart know of any studies which have been done which might shed light on that, where you are taking comparable groups of children, they do have to be comparable to start with, teaching them in entirely different ways? I think, Dr Stuart, you referred to some work you have done on this before and looked at the results.

Dr Stuart: May I disentangle this from dyslexia? Can we forget about dyslexia?

Helen Jones: Yes, please do, since we cannot all agree a definition of dyslexia.

Q60 Chairman: What do people like the National Dyslexia Association think of your phonic methods?

Dr Stuart: Dyslexic children are almost invariably given structured phonics teaching, because it is the best way to teach dyslexic children to read.

Q61 Chairman: It is highly rated by them.

Dr Stuart: Structured phonics teaching: proof that it works. There is the proof from the national reading panel's survey of the literature which suggests that structured phonics teaching works better than no phonics teaching or less structured phonics teaching. It is very difficult in the real world to do the kind of research that you would like to be done. It is terribly difficult to match children so that they are comparable on all possible things. We did try to do that in the study that I conducted. We had 50 children taught for a term using Jolly Phonics which is a very nice programme for five-year-olds and it is fun. We had 50-odd children who were not taught. We pre-tested them on a range of measures of language and phonological skills and letter-sound knowledge and various things that we did not expect to change as a result of the teaching and other things that we did expect to change as a result of the differential teaching. We managed to match our groups on almost everything and where we were unable to match groups, we took account of that in the statistical analysis we did. So it is not impossible to do that sort of research, but it is difficult. What our research showed was that the Jolly Phonics teaching was definitely much, much more successful in making children fluent readers of words than the non-phonics teaching. However, that is not the sort of comparison that you are asking for, which is comparing the phonics as taught in the NLS with different phonics teaching programmes. I do not know of any research that has done that.

Q62 Helen Jones: We have heard a lot about the National Literacy Strategy and the debate about phonics within it. Has that debate meant that other issues are overlooked? You mentioned the difficulty of actually designing research. You said that one thing you can never design into the system is the effect of a very good charismatic teacher and the problem is that you cannot measure that. Are there other aspects of the National Literacy Strategy that either of you either thinks work extremely well or that do not work well but have been overlooked in the debate we have had about phonics?

Dr Stuart: Where I am a single issue politician is on the model of reading which is presented to teachers in the National Literacy Strategy. The model of reading which is presented to teachers which is this black hole of four things operating and disappearing into a text is completely and utterly misleading and bears no relation to any research on reading that I know of. This is tragic because it has missed an opportunity to get a generation of teachers who understood about reading. I should like to see different models of reading adopted in the National Literacy Strategy guidance to teachers which were in accordance with research evidence and knowledge about reading.

Mrs Hepplewhite: Solity says in his paper for the DfES phonics seminar that his research was the only piece of research that was really compared with the national literacy project and the National Literacy Strategy. According to his research the results from using his early reading research programme were much higher than the National Literacy Strategy. So there are statistics where there is a direct comparison. I also believe that with the Clackmannanshire research, which is synthetic phonics in Scotland, where the Scottish Education Minister has now recommended to schools that they may well like to use that synthetic phonics approach so impressed were the Scots with the results of the research, which was in a very poor intake area and I believe the statistic was 50 per cent school meals, with Solity's research with, yes, some individual schools like Kobi Nazrul when Ruth Miskin was head and like St Michael's at Stoke Gifford, with the effect of programmes which are very similar to synthetic phonics, like phonographic where it has been used in a remedial capacity and there are schools and studies around the country where people will show that improvement ratios were substantial, I have just heard about one in Norfolk with sounds discovery which is related to St Michaels, it is Dr Marilyn Grant's programme, which created a 3.8 ratio, meaning that for every month that the children were put on that programme, they gained 3.8 months in terms of their reading age, there are other types of phonics, I believe there are some in Manchester, there is sufficient current research going on around this country and in Scotland and there are sufficient numbers of teachers ---

Q63 Chairman: What do you mean by "sufficient"?

Mrs Hepplewhite: Let me just finish and then we can argue about "sufficient".

Q64 Chairman: If you list all of it we shall be here a long time.

Mrs Hepplewhite: What I am saying is: at what point do you get some kind of momentum or a significant statistic for something or movement of something whereby someone has to take notice of it? I believe that, at the moment Solity's research is long-standing and it is on quite a few hundred schools. I believe Ruth Miskin's programme has now moved into quite a few hundred schools. I am suggesting that there are sufficient numbers of schools with sufficiently impressive results that this should now be an open debate whereby the Department for Education and Skills is prepared to organise comparative programmes. I believe in any event that the Department for Education and Skills should have ensured that their programmes were tested with comparative studies even if they were difficult to achieve. Other people have managed to achieve it. I am suggesting that the debate has got to the point where phonics is not in question: phonics teaching is good for children. So then we have to look at which are the best phonics programmes, because we cannot continue to fail any of our children and we want all of our children to get the best possible start.

Chairman: We would all agree on that.

Q65 Jonathan Shaw: Are the names of the schools that are operating these phonics techniques available?

Mrs Hepplewhite: Yes and they are the kind of schools where they want to promote the effectiveness of what they have done.

Q66 Jonathan Shaw: Would we be able to get hold of that information?

Mrs Hepplewhite: Yes, you will.

Q67 Jonathan Shaw: Then we will be able to make comparisons of their plans with the schools that are not doing this.

Mrs Hepplewhite: Yes and that is what we have been trying to push for.

Q68 Jonathan Shaw: Perhaps we might be able to have a look at that in terms of evidence. I should like to ask Dr Stuart about teacher training. Do you have any interface with the Teacher Training Agency?

Dr Stuart: No, I do not have an interface.

Q69 Jonathan Shaw: Are you cast out?

Dr Stuart: I do not think that they know about me at all.

Q70 Jonathan Shaw: Why is that then?

Dr Stuart: I have no idea.

Q71 Chairman: Does the Teacher Training Agency not know about you?

Dr Stuart: Nobody from the Teacher Training Agency has ever approached me to talk about teaching.

Q72 Jonathan Shaw: Do you ever go into teacher training colleges?

Dr Stuart: I work in one.

Q73 Jonathan Shaw: Then you must do.

Dr Stuart: I work at the Institute of Education and I go in there every day. However, I work in the School of Psychology and Human Development and I teach on Master's courses for already qualified teachers and the continuing professional development programme. I moved to the Institute of Education because I recognised that I now knew an awful lot about reading and my knowledge was useful to teachers. However, I have never been invited to give so much as a single lecture on the initial teacher training course which runs in my own institution. That is the extent of my failure to make a difference.

Q74 Jonathan Shaw: What is the name of your vice chancellor? Go on, that was a rhetorical question.

Dr Stuart: Things are changing because the course leader has changed and I am going to be allowed to teach next year.

Q75 Jonathan Shaw: Are you?

Dr Stuart: Yes.

Q76 Jonathan Shaw: The design of the NLS. Would you say it was broadly correct?

Dr Stuart: It is broadly correct to the extent that it recognises that reading should be taught and that there is a role for some kind of phonics teaching in how reading should be taught.

Q77 Jonathan Shaw: So does it follow that it is broadly correct, but it is what happens, it is what is implemented?

Dr Stuart: Yes I think so.

Q78 Jonathan Shaw: Do you approve of that?

Mrs Hepplewhite: I do not think it is broadly correct. I think programmes are contradictory. I do not think it has been good training and what worries me also is that at the moment we still need teachers in Key Stage 2 to be trained in how to improve children who are struggling or failing with their reading. It is more likely that teachers in Key Stage 1 have had training in progression phonics or early literacy support and they are now rolling out training in the latest supplement which is called Playing with Sounds. I have just done a review on that programme with another lady and should like to find out whether any testing was done on that programme.

Q79 Mr Turner: One hundred years of compulsory education and we have just discovered that reading needs to be taught. Was it really Frank Smith who put about the idea that reading did not need to be taught? He sounds pretty demagogic from your description of him, Dr Stuart, but presumably there is something behind what he says, some academic research, some influence that led to that conclusion.

Dr Stuart: He did some experiments in the 1960s where he distorted texts in various ways and made it difficult to read. He showed that people could read it despite the distortions. He used that as evidence that people do not need to pay very much attention to the actual print in order to get the meaning of the message. However, the fact that people can do something does not mean that that is the way that they do do something. Research since then has shown that people, when they are reading, do pay attention to every letter in the print, not just to the words but to every letter in every word in print.

Q80 Mr Turner: Judging by the amount of research that has been done to come up with this report, for example, was there any equivalent level of research which led Mr Smith to believe that he was right?

Dr Stuart: No.

Q81 Mr Turner: So we changed the whole way in which reading was taught in this country on a whim.

Dr Stuart: Yes.

Mrs Hepplewhite: It was actually many years before that when, I forget the person, someone thought we could learn words as wholes through teaching deaf children. So we are talking about many-centuries-old debate. Historically the teaching of reading has changed on these whims of charismatic people bringing in different ideas. You have had whole word teaching, you have had something called whole language which is bring in lots of enrichment and read lots of books and they will pick it up, you have had phonics and different types of phonics, a mix of methods. I would suggest that the National Literacy Strategy is still very much a mix of methods although at is the DfES phonics seminar Professor Brooks was trying to conclude that it was synthetic phonics using Sue Lloyd, who is co-author of Jolly Phonics, saying it is synthetic phonics in her sense, when she wrote a paper for the seminar saying how it was not synthetic phonics. So there are some extraordinary stories to be told throughout the history of teaching of reading and a lot of those methods are absolutely not science based. What we are trying to do now in 2004 is totally change the climate in which we work and inform teachers properly and allow them to make informed choices, but also to ensure that if government is going to play a large role in education, they bring in those scientific principles. One of my little things is that we are supposed to teach our five- and six-year-olds about fair testing and we are not doing it at the top of the country, which I find extraordinary.

Q82 Mr Turner: So teacher training institutions were training teachers according to what one of you called the whole language philosophy without any evidence that it worked.

Mrs Hepplewhite: Yes.

Q83 Mr Turner: Just remind me, when was the National Literacy Strategy? I know it was introduced before 1997 and then rolled out after 1997. What research was there between institution and roll-out to demonstrate whether it worked?

Dr Stuart: The national literacy project was evaluated by NFER.

Q84 Mr Turner: What conclusions did they come to?

Dr Stuart: I think they probably concluded that it worked.

Q85 Mr Turner: You never know.

Mrs Hepplewhite: It is my understanding that there were some improvements, but they were not dramatic improvements and it was not compared with anything else; that is my understanding.

Q86 Mr Turner: What is this ideology? I find it extremely hard to understand. One of you said that every head and teacher wants the best way, but it appears that not every head and teacher does want the best way.

Dr Stuart: It depends on what they are being told is the best way.

Q87 Mr Turner: So they do want the best way, but they are not prepared to accept that what you say is the best way is the best way.

Mrs Hepplewhite: They do not know; they have not been told. There is no information out there.

The Committee suspended from 5.05pm to 5.15pm for a division in the House

Q88 Chairman: A couple of other people will be wanting to get your train of thought. Let me just come in and keep the thing ticking over with something I picked up from your language. This whole area of the teaching of English is very ideological, is it not? Over the years - Andrew makes it 100 years and certainly 100 years of public education ... People have been teaching English for hundreds of years in schools. It is one of the most ideologically charged areas, is it not? Why do you think that is?

Dr Stuart: It has to do with the fact that however you teach reading some children will always find it much more difficult than others. Debbie would disagree with me here, because Debbie thinks that an ideal synthetic phonics programme will take everybody along with it and maybe that is the case. My experience as a teacher was that the longer I taught the less well I thought I was doing it. The more you teach, the more you realise how much you cannot do it well. That is badly expressed, but you understand what I mean. The same thing happens with the teaching of reading. It is very difficult to learn to read. The miracle is that we do it. When you start to look at what is involved in reading, it is quite an astonishing feat. Reading and writing are the high point of human achievement actually. We should not be surprised that children sometimes find it difficult to do. I am a psychologist and psychology is a relatively young science. It is really only in the last 30 years that psychological research into reading has actually taken off. We now understand much more about what reading is and how it develops than we used to. We are in a very good position now to have a scientifically informed curriculum for the teachers.

Q89 Chairman: Are you saying that here is the Department for Education and Skills (DfES), all those 4,500 civil servants who are desperate? I should have thought that Charles Clarke would be so delighted to embrace a new methodology which could get the literacy figures steaming up the curve.

Dr Stuart: You would, would you not?

Q90 Chairman: Would you not think that?

Dr Stuart: I would, yes.

Q91 Chairman: The other caution is something Mrs Hepplewhite said. You are discontent with the National Literacy Strategy, because it has lots of ways; it is a mixed bag, is it not? It is not pure enough for you. If you were in charge, would there not be a bit of you which said that there had been so much ideological turmoil about the best way to teach reading that to be safe you would have a variety of methods to reach a variety of children?

Mrs Hepplewhite: That is the logic which has persisted for a number of years and it is a logic which is persisting still. However, we have to get away from logic, from ideology, from philosophy, from preference. There is so much measuring which has been done. You can measure how well children can decode words; you can measure how well children can comprehend. What you cannot do is understand their full measure of comprehension if they cannot decode well. They might not do well in a comprehension test, but actually their oral comprehension would be better, they are just not sufficiently competent at reading the words on the page. We can certainly measure thoroughly how well and efficiently they can decode at word level. If I were in charge of the National Literacy Strategy, I should have a completely different approach towards the teachers of this country and I should engage them in professional development, which we are supposed to do, by informing them about what is out there, what children are capable of doing and at the moment what type of teaching has reached these results. I should keep refining it. I should bring teachers along by treating them like intelligent human beings, giving them information and engaging them educationally. What has happened is that they have been told that they will teach this, it is implied that it is research based, but I would argue that it is not, or it is possibly not and then they are afraid of Ofsted and they very much feel that this is what Ofsted wants to see in their schools. I suggest that many schools are not teaching in the way that their instinct or their prior training tells them they should be teaching. They are teaching in a way which they think will be seen to succeed by Ofsted.

Q92 Chairman: Thousands of teachers out there in the country value themselves as professional people, professional teachers. Would they not be rather offended by some of your remarks in the sense that they believe they are professionals, they know about teaching children to read, some of them have been doing it for many years and many of them pride themselves on their successes. Is it not a bit arrogant for you to say that they do not know what they are doing, you are going to introduce a way of transforming their teaching ability?

Mrs Hepplewhite: No. What has already happened is the thing which has been arrogant, because lots of teachers have had their National Literacy Strategy training, asked questions during that training, only to be made to feel embarrassed and the questions have not been answered or addressed. That is what is arrogant. Some of those teachers have been teaching for many years and have had great success.

Q93 Chairman: What I am trying to get at is who the villains of the piece are. One of your villains is this man Frank Smith, who wrote this book and has imbued teachers and teacher training in a certain way. Let us put him to one side. There is another villain, which is the National Literacy Strategy.

Mrs Hepplewhite: No, the National Literacy Strategy is not a villain. There is a lack of testing and then openly letting teachers know about those results and enjoying the teaching profession coming together through online forums, for example. It is going on in a casual way in The Times Educational Supplement online forum. Teachers are sharing their practice and ideas and wanting to know. We need that kind of facility where people can genuinely relate to people across the country and share information. I am suggesting that needs to be properly organised.

Q94 Mr Turner: Somebody had said: does not every head and teacher want the best way. Dr Stuart had agreed with that. On the other hand you had also said that you nearly lost a school because the head was ideologically opposed to hearing what was the best way. What is this ideology?

Dr Stuart: I should like to think that it was history and I think that the National Literacy Strategy has gone some way to making it history. However, people are subject to ideology when they do not know and when they do not understand and that is why the OISE report, which is the Ontario Institute which evaluated the National Literacy Strategy, also says that teachers do not have enough subject knowledge about reading. Teachers simply do not know what reading is or how children develop it. They are not exposed to this in their initial teacher training courses and the National Literacy Strategy training does not expose them to it either, because it is a technical training in how to deliver the National Literacy Strategy. When teachers ask questions during training sessions, they are not answered because the literacy consultants who are delivering the training do not know.

Q95 Mr Turner: Right. They do not know, because the research has not been done or was not done.

Dr Stuart: They do not know what because the research was not done?

Q96 Mr Turner: They do not know what works because the research has not been done.

Dr Stuart: We have some inkling of what works: we do not know the fine details of how best to do things. We have not had proper comparative studies looking carefully at the best way to do things and the best way to do things for different sorts of children, because children differ.

Q97 Mr Turner: Why has this been left to psychologists? Why are education departments, or whatever you call an education lecturer, not doing the research? Is it not fundamental to being an educationist that you work out how to educate?

Dr Stuart: It is two sides of the coin. Psychologists look at learning, educationists look at teaching. Both are needed and that is why psychology is needed in education, because psychologists have done research into learning.

Q98 Chairman: Are you telling this Committee that in the way in which we train our teachers they do not have lectures from psychologists to talk to them about how students learn as well as how to teach?

Dr Stuart: I find it terribly difficult to understand what is taught in teacher training courses. In fact recently I have applied to several teacher training colleges so that I would be sent information about the course and information about the course in the brochures you receive is scant. Teacher training courses do claim to teach about child development and learning, but I do not know what is taught in those courses or how it is taught. I should really like to know.

Mrs Hepplewhite: On behalf of the Reading Reform Foundation I have actually tried to ask that question via some of the online forums that we use. A lot of students respond that no, they do not feel that they have been taught the details of teaching reading. They have not been introduced to the idea that there are pockets of research round the country and that there is a debate. It tends to be a mix of methods. When you go into a school you are going to do the National Literacy Strategy. The assumption across the country is that teachers going into schools will teach the National Literacy Strategy and there are the manuals and that is what you will do. There is no engagement on an intellectual level or on a scientific level.

Q99 Mr Turner: Whose job is it? I am a teacher by trade, but it is so long since I taught, let alone went to college, that I cannot really remember anything I was taught at college. In some professions it is clearly the responsibility of the individual to know the essentials not only of how they deliver, but what they are delivering, yet it appears that this is not the case in the teaching profession. They need to have their subject knowledge, and some sort of method, but it does not seem to matter what the method is, so long as they transmit a fair amount. I may be being very unfair, but whereas there are leaders of a profession, like the medical royal colleges in medicine, I am not sure who the leaders are in the education profession.

Mrs Hepplewhite: I should like to know who the leaders are and what their credentials are. One of our criticisms is that we do not see who the authors are of the programmes. We need to know.

Q100 Chairman: Authors of which programmes?

Mrs Hepplewhite: The National Literacy Strategy programmes. In the Reading Reform Foundation we have Sue Lloyd whose Jolly Phonics programme has really revolutionised teaching with young children. When teachers have taught for many years and they say that they have taken on this programme and they wished they had known about it 20 years ago and it has revolutionised their teaching, which is happening over the whole country, this is an extremely important programme which is designed on the basis of research and has been researched itself. We have Sue Lloyd, we have Ruth Miskin,who has had extraordinary results and we have had other researchers on the Reading Reform Foundation. What we want to know is: who are the people who have written the National Literacy Strategy programmes, based on what research, testing in which schools, to what effect? The Reading Reform Foundation is a very small group which has tried extraordinarily hard to raise awareness and raise attention to these matters, which is why we are here now. I am just a teacher and I have done the newsletter from my lounge. Really to have reached this is raising important questions and it should be incumbent upon people whose profession it is to train teachers and to bring programmes into schools which work. The responsibility is theirs to show that these are the better programmes, not really for us to say they have not done it properly. Such is our concern about this lack of debate that, for example, Ofsted, when it reports on schools reports as though all schools follow the National Literacy Strategy advice and they are covert about reporting on schools which do not. For this school, St Michael's, which I have mentioned, their last Ofsted report said that they do a very good structured reading programme. That programme is Jolly Phonics and Sounds Discovery and is different from the National Literacy Strategy approach. What I am trying to raise your awareness about is a singular lack of open, honest examination.

Chairman: We have some very good hints for the next batch of interviews we are going to be doing.

Valerie Davey: I should like to be pragmatic. We have a situation now where reading levels are certainly improving. Let us be thankful for that and say yes, the National Literacy Strategy did focus on the need for a method, on the need for teachers to be trained, so benefit number one. How do we then build on that? I find it quite difficult to hear you saying we need to start almost from scratch. I do not think Dr Stuart was saying that, but the move forward has to be from where we are, with some recognition that more children leave at Key Stage 2 learning than they did a few years ago. In that pragmatic area, what would you say we ought to be doing now to add onto something, or are you saying that we actually have to go root and branch and start again? I am beginning to hear from one of you that we can be pragmatic and from the other that we have to be root and branch and really go for it. Is that true, or am I misinterpreting?

Q101 Chairman: Dr Stuart, are you the pragmatist or the ideologue?

Dr Stuart: I am definitely a pragmatist. I am a pragmatist and I should like to see what I have been talking about all the time: I should like to see proper training, a different kind of training, not a training which teaches teachers to be technicians, to deliver a programme which somebody else has thought up, but teachers who understand what it is that they are trying to teach and understand how children learn what they are trying to teach so that they can adapt their teaching to suit their children?

Q102 Valerie Davey: Are you saying that is not possible within the National Literacy Strategy or that it is?

Dr Stuart: It would be.

Q103 Valerie Davey: It could be done within the National Literacy Strategy.

Dr Stuart: Yes, it could be done within that.

Q104 Valerie Davey: Are you saying that is possible, Debbie, or not?

Mrs Hepplewhite: I am saying that of course I am practical and I should like us not to be telling teachers which programmes to use. I think we have to give them some professionalism back. However, I should like them to be informed with simple leaflets or newsletters which will reach them all as to what the situation is in different pockets of the country and basically we need standardised reading tests even in Key Stage 1 which are simple snapshots of the effectiveness of those programmes, to be able to compare, but not to compare in a threatening light, in a league table type of approach, but in a professional will to do the best for the children. At the moment if schools are doing better than other schools, even schools in diverse circumstances, Ofsted flags this up. Teachers need to know therefore what other schools are doing which is working so much better. Baroness Ashton asked for a list of schools which we should like her to investigate. We gave her a list and we never heard from her again, so we do not know whether she investigated them. We are just trying to promote this good practice where the same schools, same teachers, same intakes, have changed their approach and had a very much better result in the teaching of reading.

Q105 Valerie Davey: Again being pragmatic, we learn to speak before we learn to read and, as you quite rightly highlight, it is a hugely complex and amazing thing that any of us learn to read, particularly you gave this Phoenician/Chinese example and the fact that people learn to read Chinese, Mandarin script and all the rest of it, is just mind-boggling. So there are not only different ways of teaching but different ways of learning and different scripts to learn and a huge complexity presumably for the psychologist to analyse in due course. However, we learn to speak and what I have always been concerned about is that we get that enrichment of language before we learn to read. I am really concerned about the axis of comprehension and reading. I cannot believe that you learn to read without the comprehension. I am absolutely fundamentally for the enrichment of the language first and then come forward to the reading. I am also one of those who feels you should not start before six and I am just wondering whether either of you know whether there is anything in the physical makeup which makes the eyesight and the co-ordination as well as the psychology dictate to a general level of growth before all this very complicated analysis you gave us earlier comes into play?

Dr Stuart: There are certain things which are pre-reading skills, but they are more likely to be in the domain of phonology, the sound systems of language, than in vision. Most children have adequate control of their visual apparatus to learn to read at the time when they are normally taught in England. I should definitely like to see programmes which enrich children's language. I am coming from doing an awful lot of work in Tower Hamlets where 90 per cent of the primary school population are English-as-an-additional-language learners. I was horrified when I did my first reading study there and we measured their knowledge of spoken vocabulary in English to find that they were coming into school as five-year-olds with the levels of vocabulary that English monolingual two- and three-year-olds would normally have achieved and they were five and they had been in nursery classes for up to two years. Because the population of the nurseries was entirely Sylheti speaking, Sylheti was the language in the nursery as well as the language in the home and the only English input they got was from adults in the nursery classes. We have been doing some work there now in nurseries, trying to help teachers to boost the children's knowledge of English. It is not just EAL children who need that sort of boost; it is children from lower socio-economic circumstances as well. There is plenty of evidence that indigenous monolingual English children come into school quite a lot in some circumstances with inadequate English.

Q106 Valerie Davey: Is there any psychological research to show that you actually have to be proficient in your mother tongue before you can learn a second language. I know that there are bilingual children but in the circumstances you are describing, is it not important that a child is competent in their first language before they start a second?

Dr Stuart: Presumably they are. We have not yet managed to find anybody to translate our tests into Sylheti so that we can assess their knowledge of Sylheti. So the assumption has to be that they are as competent as any normally developing five-year-old would be in their mother tongue. The recent evidence on bilingualism and children learning more than one language suggests that it is not detrimental to learn more than one language, it is enriching and it is particularly enriching in terms of developing your phonological awareness, your understanding of sound systems, because you have two different systems to keep apart.

Q107 Mr Pollard: I have an open mind to all of this and I have been listening very carefully when you say "unbelievably effective" and all that. Then you start using words like "instinct", "teachers' instinct". If you want to convince people of the zeal you have for this system and you believe it is unbelievably effective, you cannot use words like instinct.

Mrs Hepplewhite: It was one mere slip.

Q108 Mr Pollard: My colleague and friend tried to tease out the evidence. Without evidence you are not going to overturn the system which has been in there for a long time and the vast majority seems to be able to support that. Allied to that, there has been an improvement in literacy over the last two or three years which is unavoidably and unbelievably there. I am trying to get at what the block is. If it is as unbelievably effective as you say - and I take your word for all that; I do not doubt that for a second - who is blocking it? Why can we not get it through? What is the trouble?

Mrs Hepplewhite: May I just say that when I commented about teachers' instincts, in a way that was a bit of a personal slant because there was a fine line between the kind of training and prescription we get in education and us wanting to do our own thing or following our instinct. You cannot have that luxury, but there is a fine line between training people, asking them to do things and actually making them into robots. That issue was not just about reading; that was a comment about education today.

Q109 Mr Pollard: Your argument seems to be that DfES must show you why their system is working. The shoe is on the other foot.

Mrs Hepplewhite: If they cannot show teachers why their system is working and I do not just mean from things like the results in the country ---

Q110 Chairman: Are you not disagreeing on what I think is a better point you have, that this is a government committed to evidence-based policy? What you have been consistently saying in this hearing is that the government's policy in this regard is not based on evidence. Is that not what it is?

Mrs Hepplewhite: Not that I am aware of. Ordinary teachers are not getting any evidence and the Reading Reform Foundation on asking for it has not been given any evidence. That is not to say that they have not done various tests, but I do not believe that any piloting has been done with control and comparison groups.

Q111 Chairman: So you are challenging.

Mrs Hepplewhite: I am challenging the basis on which they are telling the nation to use certain programmes. Going back, I think teachers and other people just do not know what is possible. Until they see evidence with their own eyes and statistics - so we are talking about all children in Year 2 getting level 2 or above ... Anyone who has managed to have a look at the Reading Reform Foundation newsletters will see that we do try to include statistics and details wherever possible. I am now in a difficult position, because we are having a general conversation, but I can show, through the very nature of the newsletter, that we talk statistics. Talking about developing a vocabulary, I am really not someone who wants to get sidetracked into the battle of when and how young? All I can tell you is that surprisingly young children, with evidence-based teaching fare remarkably well in statistical terms, how many letter-sound correspondences they can learn, whether they know the skills of sounding out and blending for reading and segmenting spoken words for spelling. All of that can be measured. There is also research to show that when you develop what we call their phonemic awareness, it is very much aided by seeing the letters. You are teaching them a sound. For example, you can learn how to spell without seeing letters. Cat is C-A-T. You do not see letters. We just learn the break-up of the sounds. We have learned that if you actually show them the C-A-T they are on their way to learning to read and write better. It is also another ballgame to say let us not give them print, let us not teach them to read and write. I am not arguing that we should not do that, but once again it needs to be tested so that if the government decides that we are going to make more changes in the early years, then it needs to be done sensibly and it needs to be done on a testing type basis to show not necessarily that we always get the better results, but that children are not damaged by wrong methods or different methods. If a school can take a synthetic phonics approach and get in the top five per cent of the country as indeed Ruth Miskin's EAL school did, then there is something in that when another school in Tower Hamlets has 40 per cent special needs. How often do we have to flag that up and how many research programmes do we have to flag up before someone does say that there is something in this?

Chairman: Well you have got yourself in front of a select committee so that is a step in the right direction, is it not?

Q112 Mr Gibb: May we just talk about the pupil, Helen Jones's son, who learned to read by osmosis? Will they benefit from this methodology? An associated question is: why is writing a problem in this country? I notice from the figures that last year 63 per cent of children were reaching level 4 in writing, which means 37 per cent are not. Is that linked to the lack of phonics?

Dr Stuart: No. I think the reason for that is that I have no idea how the targets for writing, how the level 4 descriptors of what a child should be able to do in writing by the age of 11, were reached. Research into writing development is in its infancy. We know very little about writing development and we know much less about it than we do about reading development. I think the government simply has the targets from there.

Q113 Mr Gibb: What about the osmosis child? Will they benefit from this or will they be held back by this?

Dr Stuart: They will not be held back because they learn it all immensely quickly. If you can do it all in 12 weeks, it is not going to damage any child to do 12 weeks of succeeding at something that they can do.

Q114 Mr Gibb: Earlier on you talked about Professor Smith. You were saying that his argument for not using it would be that there were too many phonic rules to learn, that English is too irregular a language to learn using this method. How do you address those two arguments?

Dr Stuart: For the majority of children who make a good start in learning to read, you do not need to teach them every phonic correspondence because we have research evidence that by the age of seven children who are reading at an age-appropriate level are inferring unknown correspondences from their reading experience. We knew that these children had not been taught any vowel diagraph, like "ai" or "ea"; they had been taught single letter-sounds for the alphabet and when we showed them words, non-words, made-up words which they could not read in any other way than by sounding them out because they had never seen them before, containing vowel diagraphs, they could read them and they read them better the more frequently they had been exposed to that diagraph in their reading. We have a database of children's reading vocabulary, so we can count how many times they have seen "ai" and "ea". Children who made a good start do not need to be taught everything. The problem with this long tail of underachievement and the fact that we now have wave 1 and wave 2 and wave 3 and we are constantly giving children at various points in time 12- or 15-week bursts of catch-up programmes is that probably there is a need for research into what works best with children who find it more difficult. The likelihood is that those children need continuing support throughout school and not quick bursts of this, that or the other to catch up.

Q115 Mr Gibb: May I just ask you about the US? You mentioned this report, which we shall look at. Did they not have a whole language teaching of reading at some stage in the United States?

Dr Stuart: Yes. This is the result of the reading wars.

Q116 Mr Gibb: Do they still have it in the States?

Mrs Hepplewhite: And Australia and New Zealand.

Dr Stuart: Psychologists in Australia have just got the government to agree to do a national inquiry into the teaching of reading in Australia for precisely the same reason.

Q117 Mr Gibb: Debbie, could you just tell us a bit about the Clackmannanshire research, the St Andrew's University research you talked about earlier? Can you just briefly summarise this?

Mrs Hepplewhite: Yes. We have just got some more results hot off the press where children in Year 5 have now taken on another spurt where they are now three years ahead of their chronological age in reading.

Q118 Mr Gibb: How many schools are we talking about or classes?

Mrs Hepplewhite: Thirteen. May I refer back to a question which Morag was asked?

Q119 Chairman: You may.

Mrs Hepplewhite: Do children who are naturally gifted at learning to read and write need this phonic approach? It is always very inadvisable to me in a debate this size to talk about your own children or your own teaching, so I try very hard to take that out because it clouds your judgment. If you say "My children ..." it is not a very sensible way forward. So I have never used my teaching results, because they will use the argument "charismatic teacher" and it is not for me to prove anything about my teaching, it is to look at everybody else's teaching and everybody else's children. What I will say is that I have four children with a range of different literacy abilities: one who taught herself to read at three and a half. I would still have given that child full knowledge about the English language because phonics is about knowledge of how the alphabetic code works and it is a wonderful thing. Children who are not taught that thoroughly have been short-changed in our education system.

Q120 Mr Gibb: Tell me about the Clackmannanshire study. What does it show in these 13 schools?

Mrs Hepplewhite: They were taught through systematic, fast-paced phonics, where children were not taught a sight vocabulary first, they were taught a type of phonics which we call all-through-the-word phonics. Where you learn a sound you do not just focus on it in an initial position, you actually teach it in a medial position and in a final position in a word and you are taught to sound out and blend all through the word without this emphasis on first sounds and hearing it and identifying it and then last and then middle.

Q121 Mr Gibb: So it is phonics.

Mrs Hepplewhite: This is where it is different from the NLS phonics. NLS phonics still teaches a sight vocabulary, still teaches children letter names along with sounds. Synthetic phonics may do that through an alphabet route, so you are actually teaching them singing the alphabet song, so they are exposed to names, but not as an automatic response to seeing a letter shape.

Q122 Mr Gibb: What were the results of these tests? That is what I am trying to get at.

Mrs Hepplewhite: I cannot tell you the exact statistics off hand, but it is now a longitudinal study and the reading age, spelling age of most children is way above their chronological age and certainly the statistics have sufficiently impressed the Scottish minister that he is now recommending it.

Q123 Chairman: Who is evaluating this research?

Mrs Hepplewhite: I do not know off hand.

Q124 Chairman: But it is being evaluated, is it?

Mrs Hepplewhite: Yes, it is being done properly and professionally.

Q125 Mr Gibb: It is St Andrew's.

Mrs Hepplewhite: That is it; it is St Andrew's.

Q126 Mr Gibb: Do you know anything about this particular study, Dr Stuart?

Dr Stuart: I have not read the recent reports.

Q127 Mr Gibb: Do you have any statistics from the earlier results which came out which you can relay to the Committee? Perhaps we ought to have the full results of this sent in writing.

Mrs Hepplewhite: Yes and it is on the web.

Chairman: Could you give our staff the details of that?

Q128 Mr Gibb: We should be very happy if one of you could send that in to us. Secondly, for the St Michael's school. Did you say that was in Lincolnshire?

Mrs Hepplewhite: It is in Stoke Gifford.

Q129 Mr Gibb: Bristol?

Mrs Hepplewhite: Yes; Bristol.

Mr Gibb: Do you know that school?

Valerie Davey: It is South Gloucestershire.

Q130 Mr Gibb: Could somebody send those results to us, if you have them?

Mrs Hepplewhite: They are in one of the newsletters I have sent to you.

Q131 Chairman: That is almost the end of the questions. We have 20 per cent of underachievement; a lot of countries which do not speak English also have a very similar problem. We found it in France, we found it in Norway; 20 per cent functional illiteracy in Norway. Are the comparisons you are making all fair? Why Norway? Are they not into phonics? I thought they were. Twenty per cent functional illiteracy. We told them that we just could not buy it.

Mrs Hepplewhite: The comparisons I personally am making are mainly within schools and studies within our country. There is a vast history of reading and debates are going on in other English-speaking countries, but we have enough things going on in our country to arouse more interest than has been aroused.

Q132 Chairman: Dr Stuart threw this whole American experience at me in terms of international experience and one of you mentioned the Finnish use of phonics being very successful. Now you are retreating and saying you do not worry about international comparisons.

Mrs Hepplewhite: No, what I meant was that the way forward is to look at our country. My understanding is that the debate in America is far huger than it is in this country. They called it the reading wars and it is something that more ordinary teachers are more aware of. I am not sure that ordinary teachers in our country are even aware that there is a debate.

Chairman: You have been on television today, so a lot of people may well have heard about it. You will also know that a teachers' TV commences in the New Year. I am sure this sort of debate will be widely broadcast at that time; so you have great opportunities. May I thank you for your contribution today? We have pushed you sometimes to try to get the answers. I hope you did not find that too uncomfortable. We have enjoyed listening to your answers. Thank you.