https://theconversation.com/how-to-give ... g-up-38924
The comments are worth reading - I have made a couple of contributions with some of my thoughts about 'closing the gap'.Able young people from disadvantaged backgrounds lose out at every stage in our education system. By the age of five, the poorest children are already 19 months behind their richest peers in how ready they are for school. A new report published by the Sutton Trust has revealed that this gap is cumulative: those who are shown to be bright in national tests aged 11 are barely half as likely as their more advantaged classmates to get the A Levels they need to go to a good university.
Surely we need all schools to be 'the best schools' to compensate for any lack of cultural literacy from the home environment.
In order to 'love reading' as is referenced in this article, we need to ensure all children get off to the best possible start with learning to read - that is, being taught to read with research-informed practices.
It is clear from the NFER report below, commissioned by the DfE, that not all teachers' practices are informed well enough with the findings of a body of research regarding reading instruction - many teachers following their beliefs or usual practices of teaching children to guess words from multi-cueing reading strategies such as picture and context clues:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/s ... _FINAL.pdf
This is particularly worrying for disadvantaged children who are likely to have fewer words in their spoken language and who depend on the technicalities of phonics decoding to increase their vocabularies independently.
The current thrust of many academics and organisations is to diminish the importance of the Year One Phonics Screening Check which has already demonstrated that some schools, regardless of intake, aspire and achieve the goal of teaching all their children to read successfully.
I end as I began my comment, that we must not only aspire, but ensure, that all schools are the 'best schools' and that all children are taught to read effectively to raise the likelihood of them gaining a 'love of reading' - thus enabling them to expand on their own knowledge and understanding of the world and to improve their options for higher education.