Britain celebrated World Book Day today. Actually 84% of Britain celebrated, the rest? Well... According to the National Literacy Trust 5.2 million adults in the UK can be broadly described as functionally illiterate. That is 16 percent who have skill levels, in reading and writing, equivalent or lower than those that will get an 11 year old through their SATs exams at Level 4. (literacy skills in English schools are measured on a scale of levels 1-8, where 1 is first steps in reading and writing and 8 is complete proficiency. Success at age 11 is designated at Level 4)
That is 16% of adults who probably don't access newspapers and websites, who cannot easily fill in all kinds of forms, and who almost definitely don't read books.
Being a high school English teacher for ten years has shown me just some of the problems that help perpetuate this situation. Any high school teacher will tell you that most disruption is caused by pupils who are avoiding doing the work they are set. Avoidance is the easiest tactic to use if you want to hide the embarrassment of inability. There is a definite link between illiteracy and poor social behaviour.
In high school, the only time when you can really intervene and improve someone's literacy skills is in Year Seven, when the pupils are eleven. The National Curriculum gives a little room for a teacher to put in some extra skills work. In Years 8 and 9 the curriculum is too pointed towards the Year 9 SATs tests. Those few pupils who are unable to read become more and more alienated from the Curriculum content. Let's face it. It is hard enough to get middle ability, decently skilled students to engage meaningfully with Shakespeare at age 14. Those who have yet to read more than the simplest sentence have no chance.
Several times I have come across teenage pupils who are behind in their literacy development for reasons that are easily identifiable. There are students who changed schools in early years and took a while to settle in, or students who were ill in early years and simply missed the bit where everyone was taught to read. In some ways these issues are avoidable. But there are two reasons that are not only unavoidable, but inexcusable.
Almost all high schools have an intake that comes from a small selection of primary schools. For about every four Primaries there is one high school. It is common to find groups of studentsin high school who have a similar lack of skills, and sure enough, upon further investigation, these students all attended the same Primary School. One time I found five students who told me they had been taught by a series of temporary teachers for almost three years of their early education. Nobody had taught them how to read and write. In plain terms, the management of their school had allowed them to pass through without learning the basics. The worst case scenario is a student with special learning or behavioural needs. In high school you will often meet students of great potential who are stuck in the bottom set and written off, and have been on that track ever since they were routinely ejected from class when they were five or six. Nobody cared enough to tackle their underlying problems and uplift them. Or people did care but the systems to help simply weren't there.
The high school Curriculum is predicated on a certain set and level of skills. Yet the GCSE grading system acknowledges that some pupils reach 16 without making much progress. The two things are contradictory. High schools expect a certain skill level yet know they will not get it. The existence of Grade G at GCSE (the grades are A to G) is an admission of this failure. The extremely low threshold of skills and knowledge needed to pass at G grade sometimes gives schools the excuse to write off a swathe of difficult or underperforming students.
The second is one is more controversial. But the evidence I have seen suggests that sometimes whoever is teaching early reading and writing is simply not doing a good job. This may be down to incompetence and laziness or lack of training and experience. But whatever the reason it is not good enough to send pupils off to high school with a patchy and incomplete skills base.
Because at High School the same thing happens.
The notion that every teacher is a teacher of literacy is fine in theory, but in practice simply doesn't pan out. I've met few, other than English teachers who are trained to systematically improve literacy and many who have poor spelling and grammar skills themselves. There is no room in the system for remedial work and even many English teachers are not routinely trained in remedial literacy.
The bottom line is that, for those who struggle with learning for whatever reason, the system lets them sadly down. I don't assume it is easy to give everyone the skills they need, but it seems absurd to not invest money in making sure every Primary School pupil has the best trained specialist teachers and intervention with basic skills. It also seems absurd that the High School Curriculum is designed in a way that means 15- 20% of students flounder their way through it and leave school functionally illiterate. School is the best place for people to learn to read and write. Schools should be set up to do this job before any other. How else are we to break the cycle?
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