It’s understood by anyone in education who is not politically predisposed, that one of few things the Tories accomplished in their fourteen year reign of error was substantially improve levels of literacy, especially in primary schools. Education Minister Nick Gibb dedicated much of his energy over an unusually lengthy time in office, and under four different Prime Ministers, itself an astonishing accomplishment in a world where Education Ministers number their tenure in months, to making sure children were taught to read by professionals who knew what they were doing. His phonics check was a clever, simple approach that, whilst being far from arduous for primary schools and teachers, nevertheless guaranteed that time and effort went into making sure as many children as possible were taught to decode words, from the very outset, in a way that credible research tells us actually works.

So successful was Gibb, that what you really have to do in school classrooms to ensure children learn to read, is now the subject of intense discussions by American educators, all too aware that they have a serious literacy problem. Many American children are still far too often the victims of reading alchemy. Programmes like Reading Recovery, which insist children can learn to read by guessing, are still used by teachers when there is nothing to support their use but wishful thinking and woefully misplaced kindness. The latter is absolute poison to education. It is also food and drink to the Blob.

I still struggle to understand how I ever sat through a presentation given many years ago by a senior English examiner of one of the UK’s main exam boards, in which teachers were shown a range of illiterate GCSE work and instructed how to award it marks. Every example shown was illegible because of incompetent hand writing, impossible grammar, incorrect spelling or a combination of all three; yet teachers were in effect told how to guess at what was intended and to award marks based on their guesses. In my infinitely sceptical head space, I can see how some of Starmer’s cabinet successfully navigated the education system right to the top, when they quite clearly have all the intellectual capacity of a potato.

One interesting development in the US suggests that patience is wearing thin in the wider community. Besides intense debate and even legislation by many States mandating phonics for reading instruction, a group of parents in Massachusetts have unusually decided to sue the publishers of literacy teaching materials. Their targets are big names. Greenwood Publishing Group, Heinemann Publishing and HMH (formerly Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) are all accused of selling materials that were not sufficiently rigorous in terms of what researchers know about how to teach children to read successfully.

All of these disputes tend to centre on whether or not teachers ignore the explicit use of phonics, which is widely regarded today as being essential. The three publishers are accused of marketing and selling material that has no credible backing, other than the say so of a small team of teacher training academics at Columbia University. 

Although a novel situation, I’m surprised someone hasn’t targeted an educational publisher or software business before on the grounds that their products are untested or untrustworthy. Especially software, since the sales pitch from educational technology companies is so often an unquestioning, innovation is always good.

One of the most commercially successful reading products, sold widely in the US and in the UK, which began life in a frustrated parent’s garage as quizzes on books, comes with supporting guidance about reading levels based on something called the Lexile Scale. The Lexile Scale is basically a software program that scans a text and serves up a “reading level,” which teachers are supposed to use as a guide for book choice, when teaching young children to read. The only trouble is the Lexile Scale is alchemy, not science and is certainly not a tool anyone should seriously claim has its origins in research about either text difficulty, or reading development. All it does is use sentence length and word frequency to determine how difficult to read any given text is. It does not address syntax or content, never mind meaning in any way. It’s a bit like evaluating the difficulty of a piece of music on the basis of it having too many notes. The Lexile Text Analyzer the company sells also decides on a book’s reading level on the basis of a mere … 500 words of its text.

Tech companies know ministers are complete suckers for their ‘innovation is always good’ pitch

But it’s important to understand that the Lexile Scale is not unusual in this. Almost all the tools or scales that purport to measure text levels, to guide teachers in their book choices, rely on some combination of word difficulty and sentence complexity. The trouble is word difficulty is measured merely by the number of letters or syllables, and sometimes frequency of use, whilst sentence complexity is measured by sentence length, or maybe the number of phrases. Clause type recognition, just for example, is unimaginably beyond the scope of these tools.

So when people engage in these intense discussions about phonics and reading, they are doing so whilst trapped inside a well-established infrastructure that combines technology and teacher practice, which is already about as “scientific” as astrology or crystal healing. 

The point of all this is to warn those many genuine professionals who work in the education sector, but who do not wish to see fourteen years or more, of slow but impressive success erased. Politicians are every skilled technology sales director’s favourite customer. They know ministers are complete suckers for their ‘innovation is always good’ pitch, and that they regard money spent as a measure of success. Only the NHS has a maw more gargantuan than state education’s. I would remind any doubters that biggest annual educational event in the UK every year, that increasingly attracts exhibitors and delegates from all over the world, has nothing to do with education at all and is actually a technology trade show called BETT.

So don’t expect money to find its way any time soon to a school or classroom near you. An entire architecture made up of businesses, researchers, but hungriest of all; family, friends and Labour party supporters, is already standing between you and the magic money tree. Whilst the tree itself is about to be throttled to within an inch of its life — yet again.