And, of course, the roll-out of the programme led to a game of professional Chinese whispers in which the already limited focus on phonics was further weakened. The fact that progress has stalled should surprise no one.Now, a month after telling us that there was no magic formula and that synthetic phonics was there at the heart of the national literary strategy anyway, Ruth Kelly has called for a review and commissioned Jim Rose to look at the evidence.God knows what Jim must be thinking. None has taken the thinking back to the drawing board and placed synthetic phonics at the heart of the initial teaching programme. It was not, and, as everyone knows, they weren't.The programme was, therefore, flawed from the start.
Over the years, various attempts have been made to rectify the problem. The problem was that Michael Barber, who was in charge of the Department for Education and Skills' newly formed Standards and Effectiveness Unit, did not understand that the phonics war had to be won if Government targets for literacy were ever to be met. None had any real experience of teaching children to read, and all were committed to an eclectic approach that played down the importance of phonics.Labour won the 1997 election and sensibly decided to implement the National Literary Strategy. They did not know because they hadn't been taught.That report led to the national literary strategy. I went to see the Secretary of State for Education, then Gillian Shephard, and she agreed that something had to be done. Work began on a programme that would give teachers the knowledge many did not have.Immediately, predictably, the rows started.
I remember a meeting with Ofsted colleagues responsible for the inspection of teacher training. Back in 1996, I asked Jim Rose, the director of inspection at Ofsted, to organise a survey of the teaching of reading in 45 London primary schools. It confirmed our worst fears; large numbers of children were making little or no progress Why? Because they were receiving little or no teaching. Sure, teachers sat listening to children read, but any kind of teaching, by which I mean formal instruction, was conspicuously absent.Interviewed by inspectors, teachers said that they did not have the faintest idea how to teach reading. Those that are successful would prosper; those that were not would fail and be closed down. Synthetic phonics would very rapidly become the norm. But the world of state education isn't organised sensibly. The Secretary of State for Education tries to run 24,000 schools from Whitehall; a bloated bureaucracy consumes 40p in every pound that is spent on education; the reading "experts" continue to defend their discredited theories; and "competition" is, of course, a dirty word.The national literacy strategy is a nice example of the seemingly inevitable failure of centralised initiatives.
