How to give bright but disadvantaged kids a leg-up...

Post by **debbie** » Wed Mar 18, 2015 4:41 pm

Pam Sammons writes about 'How to give bright but disadvantaged kids a leg-up' in 'The Conversation'.

https://theconversation.com/how-to-give ... g-up-38924

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.

The comments are worth reading - I have made a couple of contributions with some of my thoughts about 'closing the gap'.

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.

Post by **debbie** » Wed Mar 18, 2015 4:46 pm

Dick Schutz's comment is very interesting and I know that he, too, values the advent of the Year One Phonics Screening Check - referring to it as 'a natural experiment'. He contributed this to the comments:

The report replicates the fallacy of relying on correlations as the basis for future initiatives. Certainly, each human being is unique from conception, and the Matthew Effect has been known since biblical days. Is re"discovering" and "proving" these matters a contribution?

IF we want to Do something about instruction, THEN we must change/fix the instruction. Ameliorating instructional gaps/deficits is very difficult to accomplish, and if/when it's successful for the gap/deficit of concern, other gaps will have arisen during the time it took to accomplish the amelioration.

The point is abstract and general, but it has concrete and specific applicability here. Instructing parents and caregivers how to teach "Baby Signs" to pre-speech infants will advance the communication capability of all infants and accomplish baby-equity for all. Differences/gaps will arise by the time the children enter Reception. However, if a child can speak in full sentences and participate in everyday conversation, the child has the prerequisites to be taught how to read. (Consistent with the current National Curriculum). So although the "gap" is there, it is of no consequence/obstacle in equalizing the instructional status.

The data to date from the Yr 1 Screening Check are evidence that the "gap" is in the instruction: its the instruction that is disadvantaged, not the children. Remediating the instruction in the marginal schools and classrooms where such initiative is needed is feasible in a short time and at no incremental cost, but the database has yet to be examined from that perspective.

As long as there are transparent income differences, the rich and the poor will live different lives. But this is not an obstacle to equalizing the opportunity for schooling accomplishments. That's the available evidence, but it has to be acted upon to be evident.

Post by **debbie** » Wed Mar 18, 2015 4:50 pm

I could not resist adding a further comment below:

I agree with Dick Schutz that a great deal can be improved by greater understanding of how to improve instruction in literacy in the early years and infants.

Phonics and reading instruction is my field, and I see many teachers teaching very hard but learners not getting the right kind of opportunity to practise well enough - and I mean individual practice - not 'fun games and activities'.

Whilesoever we have the mindset that little children do not gain instrinsic satisfaction, reward and growth from paper and pencil content and activities and that they must take part in 15 to 20 minutes of 'fun games and activities' to 'learn' (regardless of their individual needs), then we are not off the starting block with regard to what can be achieved.

Over and again I see little children sitting on the carpet in their 'phonics lessons' trying to write with markers on mini whiteboards. The teacher cannot properly oversee 30 children doing such an activity, the teacher is unlikely to pick up on issues such as correct letter formation - per child - at the end of the short session, all the work is rubbed off anyway (usually with hands or sleeves, or left till the next session). Such sessions, which are commonplace in this format, do not provide the quality teaching and learning opportunity that is necessary for closing the gap.

There may have been no words provided for each child to practise blending (decoding) in these mini whiteboard sessions - and there may be no 'apply and extend' to sentence and text level work. Teachers do not understand about the balance of decoding, encoding, handwriting - plus how best to develop the vocabulary and language comprehension.

The alternative type of lesson that is commonplace is that after an initial phonics flash card routine, the children go into groups for some phonics 'fun games and activities' which are very limited indeed and if you track each child, little practice is accomplished.

This is not untypical, and there is nothing to track, monitor or to 'show' from the child's or adult's perspective following these sessions - and nothing of the child's for revisit and review - and nothing to share with home.

Then, if the NFER report is correct and most teachers still believe in multi-cueing reading strategies, the children may be given books to read for their home-reading which enforce multi-cueing guessing unless the school takes care to provide cumulative, decodable books for practice.

These are not small details, they are fundamentally important.

If people aspire to closing the gap, the country needs to get to grips with far greater understanding of the role of basic skills and phonics provision alongside higher-order literacy provision according to research-findings and the very best practice.

You see we have some schools in England aiming for every child to become a reader and the mindset of teachers in those schools is that every child will succeed.

They achieve this through their rigorous and systematic synthetic phonics provision with plenty of language, literacy and literature enrichment.

Such schools get 100% of their children reaching the 32 out of 40 benchmark in the Year One Phonics Screening Check - in fact, many of these children score 40 out of 40 or nearly score full marks.

These schools are not necessarily in advantaged areas at all.