English teachers might be feeling inspired after a recent speech from the head of OFSTED in which he said: ‘There can be no more important subject than English. It is at the heart of our culture and literacy skills are crucial to pupils’ learning for all subjects.’ I do feel guilty that I have not yet congratulated Sir Michael Wilshaw on his appointment (on January 1st this year) as Chief Inspector. He has a distinguished record, although the OFSTED press release on his appointment, after praising his success as a secondary Head in London, ended with the rather sinister sentence: ‘In addition to leading Mossbourne Community Academy, Sir Michael was Director of Education for ARK, a charitable education trust running a number of academies across England.’ Call me a cynic (some have) but I reckon that a major involvement in promoting academies was a big tick on Govey’s short list. Before you get too heartened by Wilshaw’s support of English, the next sentence in his speech was: ‘Yet too many pupils fall behind in their literacy early on [and] struggle to catch up as they progress through their school careers.’ Yes – new OFSTED chief; same old message!
His complaint was that schools should be more ambitious. ‘Last year 45 per cent of those pupils who just reached level 4c at the age of 11 did not achieve a grade C in their GCSE English exams.’ Of course, he could have said that 55 per cent of pupils who just reached average at the age of 11 did achieve a grade C or above at GCSE – but he didn’t. He pointed out that last year, 100,000 pupils did not achieve the expected literacy levels by the end of primary school. He also highlighted evidence that one in seven adults lacks basic literacy. It was at this point in his speech that I began to wonder if his numeracy skills were similar to those of Govey, whose maths I impugned in my last article. When I was writing SATs there were around 700,000 children in each year group, so 100,000 would be ‘one in seven’ – the same proportion of adults with reading problems. If Wilshaw had said that the same proportion of children and adults had literacy difficulties it would have provoked no surprise at all. In plain English he could even have said that maybe one in seven people (of any age) are a bit thick.
At present, children are expected to reach level four in tests at the end of primary school, but finding a definition of what level 4 means is like trying to pin down fog. Officially it means that children are active readers who are capable of visualising the meaning of a text. They should also be able to write extended sentences and use commas. ‘Level 4’ is often defined in the press as ‘average for a typical 11-year-old’. The actual figure for English last year was that 81 per cent of 11-year-olds reached level 4. With only 19 per cent below this ‘expected level’, it doesn’t sound as if Level 4 is even close to an average.
Of course, you don’t have to have an average which is around the 50th percentile. If you did a statistical analysis of Snow White and her seven dwarves, 87.5 per cent (i.e. seven out of eight) would be below average height. But this would be a small and specialised sample. As a rule, the bigger the sample the more likely it is that an average score or measurement will have 50 per cent above and 50 per cent below. With the school population in any given year, you actually have a sample which is almost 100% (less a few off sick, a few home-schooled and a few private schools not doing SATs), so statistically, you could almost guarantee that in any area, such as height, weight or literacy skills, about 50 per cent would be above and 50 per cent below average.
Anyway, Wilshaw announced 10 steps to improve literacy. Step one is that the literacy target in primary schools will be raised, just as any PE teacher knows that if you want pupils to jump higher, you just raise the bar a couple of notches. Another new step is that inspectors will hear children read when they visit schools (like they did in the 19th and 20th centuries). Perhaps the boldest step is that schools will report to parents on their child’s reading age.
He didn’t say whether schools should report a reading quotient (e.g. 86), a percentile ranking (48th percentile) or an age-average equivalent (eight years five months). It was before his time, but back in April 2011, OFSTED published a survey, ‘Tackling the challenge of low numeracy skills in young people and adults” in which they claimed that ‘around one in five young people enter the workplace without the numeracy skills they need’. They also suggested that around 25 per cent of ‘economically active adults in England’ were unable to cope with basic maths. Roughly one in seven adults (that number again!) have a very weak grasp of basic maths – so however Wilshaw decides that their child’s ‘reading age’ is reported to them, it won’t matter — they won’t have a clue what it means!