Sad News

I will take time to reflect on the demise of one of the icons of the past few years, the death of which affects us all in some way. I do of course mean the ending of Labour's National Strategy for schools - the basic upshot of the "Education! Education! Education!" speech by Tony Blair all those years ago. I didn't realise until today, that this strategy is implemented as part of a contract with Capita who I see have a website with a picture that looks like a publicity shot for Joy Division. The end of an experiment which tried to create a nation of clones, all reading the same books at the same time, all doing the same sums at the same time - a sort of worker-bee class with no depth. Of course this isn't what really happened - human beings are real and a social experiment such as this was, born of what I like to call Tavi trash, was always doomed to failure because people don't like being treated like numbers all the while being talked at with jargon. You'd almost think that the Government didn't want parents to understand what the teachers were going on about.

While we are on the subject I would just like to share with you my utter hatred of Synthetic Phonics. To be honest, I think any method of teaching reading which tries to break down the process into tiny elements is rubbish. The world is not made up of discrete entities, rather it is a fuzzy whole with variations in structure, a messy conglomeration and we learn to understand this as whole by osmosis, not by being told to concentrate on different parts. Anyway, if you have read any books used to support Pathetic Phonics, you will know what I mean. I hate the meaningless repetition of sounds which lead to completely surreal and meaningless stories. make the story interesting and simple and children will want to read. SP is like beating the words into the child, like drumming in the Time Table by repeating it over and over. I still do not know all my times table - it was not beaten into me because I was part of the wishy-washy sixties generation which avoided this sort of indoctrination.

I've had too much coffee this morning. Can you tell?