Hallelujah! Reading standards are up. It shows what can be achieved when liberal dogma is defeated

ANYONE who studies international league tables of educational attainment will know that over the years this country has slipped farther and farther behind its main foreign competitors.

So it comes as something of a shock that English primary school children have achieved the highest reading standards for a generation, according to a test that placed them joint eighth in the world.

Not an incredible achievement, perhaps, but better than 2011, when English primary school children were placed tenth, and 2006, when they were rated 15th. What explains this almost unprecedented — if admittedly modest — improvement?

Universal

Without doubt it is the introduction of phonics as the preferred method of teaching young children how to read. The Labour Government announced phonics programmes for primary schools in 2008, but it was the Tory-led coalition that made phonics tests mandatory and universal in 2012.

Phonics is a way of teaching reading which involves matching sounds with individual letters or groups of letters. For example, the sound ‘k’ can be spelt as ‘c’, ‘k’, ‘ ck’ or ‘ch’. It was the prevailing system in this country from the late 19th century until the Sixties.

You can guess what happened then. Trendy educationalists, who wanted to make the process of learning to read less exacting, favoured allegedly more relaxed approaches such as ‘look and say’. The teacher shows an object, says how it should be spelt and expects the child to remember.

Actually, I should have thought the old method of phonics was far easier but that is not how the self-appointed experts saw it. For them, phonics was a form of learning by rote, imposed on children by over-prescriptive teachers.

Here we have a perfect example of how the education establishment, which sees itself as enlightened and forward-looking, is, in fact, frequently narrow-minded and dyed-in-the-wool. A theory is promulgated — that children must be allowed to develop in their own way and at their own pace — and everything has to be subjugated to that notion.

A combination of teaching union leaders, often third-rate academics with over-inflated egos, and Leftist writers united to fight the supposed scourge of phonics. It became a totemic issue for these people, an article of faith that had to be desperately defended.

Christine Blower dismissed the phonics test in 2011 when she was general secretary of the National Union of Teachers. In 2012, Steve Iredale, then president of the National Association of Head Teachers, called the test ‘ an absolute nonsense test with nonsense words’ and added: ‘ I’m not going to be telling six-year-olds that they are failures.’

The former children’s laureate Michael Rosen suggested that phonics would frustrate ‘a book- loving culture’ while Michael Morpurgo, the author of War Horse, suggested that it should not be imposed as ‘ a solution for everyone’.

For Andrew Davis, of Durham University’s School of Education, teaching phonics to children ‘who have already gained some maturity in the rich and nourishing human activity of reading is almost a form of abuse’.

And so on. The ‘ experts’ united against the Coalition’s plans. It is to the enormous credit of its first Education Secretary, Michael Gove, that he persisted with them — very ably supported by Nick Gibb, a passionate proselytiser for phonics, who is still a middleranking minister at the Department for Education.

I am not so naive as to suppose the doomsayers will attribute the improvement in the reading skills of primary school children to the introduction of phonics. They will claim it is a statistical blip, or that it is due to other causes, and that in any case the enjoyment of children must always be paramount.

But I think most fair-minded people will conclude that phonics is working, and that it must be a good thing for children and this country if reading skills are at long last improving. If a child is a better reader, isn’t he or she going to enjoy books more?

The wrong-headedness of the opponents of phonics, and the splendid refusal of Messrs Gove and Gibb to kowtow to them, should serve as an object lesson. Again and again these ‘ experts’ have clung to their theories in defiance of common sense.

Michael Gove is an intelligent man with a reasonable amount of common sense who came to the Department for Education with a burning desire to help disadvantaged children let down by the system.

He encouraged the expansion of academies independent of the dead hand of local authorities. He introduced a more testing curriculum for primary and secondary school children, and ended grade inflation in GCSEs and A levels. The teaching unions, remember, had preposterously claimed that better exam results every year indicated smarter pupils.

All of these welcome reforms — of them — were opposed by the same line-up of trade unionists defending their patch, Left-wing teachers and academics who tried to kill off the teaching of phonics. Mr Gove called them ‘the Blob’.

Money

And, of course, when Theresa May had the temerity to advocate the expansion of grammar schools on becoming Prime Minister, members of the Blob rose up in outrage, busily quoting their academic studies which purport to show (almost certainly wrongly) that new grammar schools would benefit onlythe middle classes.

So how would they promote the interests of clever workingclass children cruelly betrayed by the present education system? Why, more money, of course. Money, money, money is always their first answer. The problem with the Blob is that its members exist like a sect, remarkably detached from the anxieties of parents and the problems of children, spouting and re-enforcing their theories at teacher training colleges, on usually obscure university campuses and at aerated trade union conferences. No wonder Mr Gove has come to distrust ‘experts’!

The incredible thing is that it never seems to occur to the Blob that a large part of the blame for this country’s plummeting standards of education in relation to the rest of the developed world might lie with them and their misguided education theories, which could be summarised by the belief that ‘all must have prizes’ and that no one can fail.

Courage

It would take a Hercules to stand up with any measure of success to these people, and in due course Michael Gove was carried bloodied from the field minus a limb or two. He had offended the Blob more than the then prime minister, David Cameron — a man not famous for the courage of his convictions — thought wise.

We don’t know yet what fruits Mr Gove’s reforms — in particular the dramatic expansion of academies — will yield because not enough time has passed since their inception. Sooner or later there will be a meaningful international comparison, and we can only pray that our decline in standards has been stopped.

But for the moment, let us rejoice at the slight, though very precious, improvement in the reading skills of our primary school children. For the first time in living memory, the failings of a vital part of our education system have been remedied.

And it happened because, for once, the self- appointed experts did not get their own way and robust ministers had the courage of their convictions. I hope that Justine Greening, the not obviously very impressive Education Secretary, will get the message.

Phonics is a great boon because it can bring the gift of reading to more children at an earlier stage. The exhilarating lesson of this story is that the self-satisfied and unaccountable Blob can, after all, be defeated.