The following article appears in this week’s copy of TES Scotland (8th December) Do I have to spell it out? Synthetic phonics works Last month I gave evidence at the Scottish Parliament on my petition to improve literacy standards in
The Winner Takes It All
As 2016 drew to a close, Strictly Come Dancing, X Factor and The Apprentice all crowned new champions, as the losers clapped to hide their misery in the side-lines. In PISA, the biggest education tournament of them all, Scotland recorded
I’m not angry, I’m livid (TESS article)
According to a recent Guardian article, a group of children’s authors is writing to the UK government, to complain that primary teachers are “damaging children’s creative writing” by encouraging them to use language that is “too elaborate, flowery and over-complex”. Cecilia
Read Between the Lines (TESS article)
Recent comments from Nicola Sturgeon suggest that national testing might be about to return to Scotland. I do support our forward-thinking curriculum, but I also feel there are bits of it where we could do better. We cannot ignore the
Identifying Reading Problems: How will I know?
I’ve just finished an interesting article in TESS: ‘When will literacy get its fairy tale ending?’ by Emma Seith. It has a great graphic showing the depressing SSLN results compared with two years ago, and there’s some super stats about