Every Child A Reader and national phonics developments 

The Independent review of the teaching of early reading (Rose, 2006) refers to the home experiences that support early literacy, and also to children who ‘for one reason or another, do not start with these advantages. Some children also have neuro-developmental disorders and other special educational needs that may present formidable obstacles to learning to read and write. Providing effectively for all such children is an ever-present challenge that is being met with different degrees of success by various intervention programmes.’

The review discusses effective approaches to support children at risk of underachievement and endorses the National Strategies’ model of three ‘waves’ of teaching and intervention, with, in the case of early reading, high-quality phonic work forming a key feature of provision at each of these ‘waves’:

• Wave 1 –  the effective inclusion of all children in daily, 'quality first teaching'
• Wave 2 - additional interventions to enable children to work at age-related expectations or above
• Wave 3 – additional, highly personalised interventions, for example, specifically targeted approaches for children identified as requiring SEN support (on School Action, School Action Plus or with a statement of special educational needs).

Every Child A Reader is the government’s proposed approach to the provision of coordinated, high quality Key Stage 1 intervention at Waves 2 and 3.

Every Child A Reader provides literacy interventions of different degrees of intensity to six and seven year old children who require them, with the aim of ensuring that every child achieves age related expectations at the end of Key Stage 1 – other than a tiny minority who have a pervasive developmental disorder that was evident before they started school, or are very new to English at the time of their end of Key Stage 1 assessment. These interventions are provided in addition to day to day high quality literacy teaching designed to include all children and to promote achievement and progress for all.

For some children, those with the most severe difficulties, intervention within Every Child A Reader will involve daily one-to-one Reading Recovery teaching as ‘Wave 3’ provision.

Assumptions
The Every Child A Reader programme is predicated on the principle that, as the Rose Review concludes, ‘While interventions for children with reading difficulties will always be necessary, the need for them is likely to be much reduced by ‘quality first teaching.’ In terms of early reading, the improvements to quality first teaching that can be achieved through effective synthetic phonics teaching can be expected to impact significantly over time on the numbers of children likely to require additional targeted support through Every Child A Reader.

The programme is grounded within the ‘three waves’ model and within the core principle highlighted in the Rose review:  ‘ The prime purpose of intervention programmes is not to shore up weak teaching at Wave 1’ The programme operates within the key principle that every child is entitled to quality first inclusive teaching, with some requiring additional targeted support tailored to their needs - the intensity of that support being based on detailed assessment of barriers to learning which are apparent despite high quality first teaching.  The principle that intervention support must always be closely linked to day to day class teaching is also maintained throughout the layers of intervention promoted by Every Child A Reader and, as such, high quality teaching of phonics features within each of the three waves of support within the programme. 

Reading Recovery and synthetic phonics
Such high quality phonic work is fundamental to Reading Recovery, which forms the most intensive intervention at ‘Wave 3’ of Every Child A Reader. Reading Recovery teachers are trained to use close observation and assessment of what an individual child already knows in order to carefully tailor how best to extend their phonological skills and phonic knowledge by the fastest possible route.

Initial assessment identifies the grapheme – phoneme correspondences that the child knows. Children are quickly taught the correspondences they do not know, using multisensory methods where needed.

Every lesson with every child includes phonic teaching. Prior to reading the teacher will, for example, help the child think about the sounds in a new word and locate the appropriate letters and words in the text.  During reading, teachers will use masking cards to help the child to focus on details within a new word, drawing the child’s eye across the word from left to right. After successful reading, teachers will select an appropriate word to model construction using magnetic letters. The child will learn to segment words into their constituent phonemes, enabling them to spell and write the words they need for their own sentence or paragraph. Later, children learn to use common digraphs, adjacent consonants, long vowel phonemes and 2 and 3 syllable words to read and write more complex words.

The programme provides personalised help with phonic problems that are common to many children with literacy difficulties:

• Poor phonological awareness, linked to dyslexia, speech and language needs or a history of hearing loss. Reading Recovery lessons provide repeated, supported practice in thinking about the order of sounds in spoken words, and linking those sounds with appropriate letters. Gradually, the child is helped to ‘hear’ the sequence of sounds in order and on increasingly complex words.
• Slow speed of lexical retrieval. Many children with literacy difficulties recognise letters and sound out words too slowly. The aim of letter learning in Reading Recovery is to have the child recognise letters as rapidly as the proficient reader.
• Difficulties in short term memory, which mean the child struggles to ‘hold’ a sequence of sounds in mind in order to blend them. In Reading Recovery children are helped to identify and use chunks that they already know , in order to reduce the load on short term memory when blending  (for example, the word ‘and’ when reading ‘stand’).

The use of other teaching strategies
Reading Recovery does not, however, only teach phonics in its daily lesson structures. It should be remembered that this is not classroom instruction for all children, but a one to one tutorial for children exhibiting the most extreme difficulty in learning literacy skills. While it needs to be consistent with classroom instruction, it also needs to address specific gaps in skills and knowledge that do not have to be addressed for the majority of children. These include essential but frequently overlooked forerunners to being able to make use of phonic knowledge – the development of visual discrimination skills; the establishment of basic concepts about print, such as the difference between a word and a letter; the understanding of directional principles in written English often at the very simple level of what ‘first letter’ means. It is often also necessary to address weak oral language skills, often linked to home background. Children may be able to sound out and blend the phonemes in a printed word, but this will not help them if the word is not in their oral lexicon. For these children Reading Recovery provides language-rich sessions that support comprehension and reading for meaning.

Using insights from the Rose Review to contribute to the continued development of Reading Recovery
Reading Recovery is not a static, fixed programme but one that has always evolved to take account of new research findings. The Rose Review and the new Framework for literacy in England will inevitably influence the way teachers in Reading Recovery need to ensure that their pupils’ learning in the individual setting and in their classroom experience are closely aligned.  Reading Recovery teachers will work closely with class teachers and others to ensure that the process of letter learning is systematic, thorough and as fast as possible.  Teaching in Reading Recovery will be embedded within a consistently taught, explicitly secured approach to blending, with a left to right approach to word analysis secured early.   Reading Recovery teachers will develop new professional insights into the teaching of phonics for reading and spelling (and the reversible nature of reading and spelling).  The children will be taught to use phonic knowledge as the prime approach as soon as they have developed the knowledge base to do so.

These shifts are already partly reflected in new theoretical insights underpinning the revised core texts of Reading Recovery, and current professional practice is being developed to support these changes. Further conferences and training events will be provided to accelerate and embed best practice, as we move into the national roll-out of Every Child A Reader in the coming years.

May 2007