John Bald: William the Conqueror made it harder for children to learn to read

John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He is Vice-President of the Conservative Education Society.

In Australia, visiting my wife’s family, I read that the phonics check has been introduced in Victoria and welcomed by teachers. Good. A technical point is important. The original version, using non-words to check that children were reading from letters and not guessing, caused confusion, as they tried to turn groups of letters that were not words, into words they knew. Adding a cartoon character, to indicate that a particular combination was not intended to be a word, solved the problem, and the check is now accepted by most parents and schools.

It is now almost a century since an international conference on dyslexia found that countries with a fully regular spelling system, notably Finland, never encountered the problem. We now know from brain research that there is a good reason for this. Languages with a highly regular system rely exclusively on phonics for reading, as they provide all of the information we need. This does not work in English, where a specific area of the brain, described by Professors Blakemore and Frith (both FRS), as the “word-form area”, enables us to identify what letters represent in particular words, to distinguish, for example, between should and shoulder. Their book, The Learning Brain, appeared almost 20 years ago, but has been ignored on all sides of our current reading war.

More recently, the French Neuroscientist, Stanislas Dehaene, whose work was recommended to me by Professor Frith, has provided evidence to demonstrate that learning, from babyhood, is a process of adjusting thinking to take account of new information that does not fit our existing understanding and experience. This applies to phonics in French and English in different ways. French uses silent letters, almost always at the end of words, to tie them together grammatically. In English, the adjustment is in some respects greater, as the language has evolved over more than a thousand years, including a massive injection of French following the Norman Conquest, and major changes in pronunciation and usage that are often not reflected in spelling.

The issue is considered in government guidelines in terms of “common exceptions” – and “high-frequency” words. This, though, does not explain to children why they should suddenly abandon the word-building method they have been taught, or how things have come to be as they are. It is made worse by introducing terms derived from Greek – digraph, phoneme, grapheme – that are far removed from their experience and have to be separately taught. Most children can cope with this imposition, and some even enjoy it, but for many, including the weakest readers, it causes confusion that leads to many being labelled as “dyslexic”, when the problem lies with the teaching rather than the pupil.

It is easier and more effective to explain English spelling in terms of children’s own experience. Do they behave perfectly all of the time, or most of the time? Most will agree that they are not perfect, and we make a joke of it. Is Mummy (or teacher) in a good mood all, or most of the time? Ditto. Languages are human constructs too, so they are not perfect either. Most children have met bullies, and will agree that bullying is bad. William the Conqueror was nothing if not a bully, and he spoke French. It paid to do things his way, and English was flooded with French for 300 years. David Crystal’s Spell It Out has the full story of this and later changes.

So, we can’t always rely on the letters to tell us all we need to know. As I put it, borrowing from my driving instructor’s use of the mirror, “We use what the letters tell us, but we don’t believe the letters tell us everything.” I usually add that the language is a thousand years old, and that, if we were a thousand years old, we’d have a few wrinkles. This simple conversation, in the first lesson, avoids creating the impression that every word can be read by blending the sounds represented by individual letters. It allows us to teach the regular features of language, without presenting so-called “tricky” words as having no rhyme or reason.

Still, each departure from the expected correspondence requires an adjustment to the learner’s thinking, and we need to manage this. My current 12 year old pupil tried to read ‘this’ one letter at a time – and broke down. The official guidance, that the word is a common exception, does not help with the thousands of other words containing th. I therefore explained the origin of th, to replace the Anglo-saxon and Viking letter thorn, þ. Pupil then quickly learned to read then, this, that and the.

Government guidance on this aspect is inconsistent with the brain research evidence. Explaining these common features in irregular words, and in spelling variations, constructs new neural networks. Systematic practice – games and quizzes, not grinding – deposits layers of myelin on the new connections, speeding them up and building long-term memory. As we proceed, we do not teach a word that is misread in a text, but another with the same pattern of letters and sounds, so that we get behind the error to adjust the thinking that has caused it, and practise until it is understood before returning to the original word, which is then usually read accurately. Finally, we return to the text and practise until the whole is read accurately, fluently and with confidence, much as a new piece of music is not expected to be played perfectly at first sight. This provides satisfaction, and leaves the child wanting more.

This approach, developed over half a century of teaching, is supported by case studies that include a prize-winning medical student, a physicist with a First class degree and PhD, who learned to read at 10, using Alice in Wonderland, an early years teacher with distinctions in BTech, and a customs officer who saved HMRC £150m as a fraud buster. Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood, and the late Sir James Rose, who investigated phonics and dyslexia on behalf of the last Labour government, understood their importance and said so publicly. If the present government and its advisers are serious about improving provision for pupils in all types of school, including those with SEND, they need to give them more serious consideration than they have to date.