Lewis literacy consultant petitions parliament
A FORMER primary teacher from the Outer Hebrides gave evidence at the Scottish Parliament last Thursday as the public petitions committee considered her call to provide national guidance and professional learning for teachers in how to teach children to read.
Anne Glennie from the Isle of Lewis, who has worked as a literacy consultant for the last seven years, has become increasingly concerned about the decline in literacy standards in Scotland and the lack of knowledge within the teaching profession about current international research on reading instruction.
Anne, who has trained more than 10,000 teachers in all aspects of literacy across Scotland, said it was ‘deeply shocking’ that teachers in training were not being taught how to teach children to read -and is campaigning for the Scottish Government to include the Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) system in the curriculum.
The SSP method teaches children the knowledge of the letters and sounds, Anne explains, which they then learn to sound out and blend these letter sounds together.
Explaining why she petitioned the Parliament, Anne said: ‘It is a surprising and deeply shocking fact that many teachers working in primary or secondary schools in Scotland today have had no formal input or training on ‘how to teach children to read’, either as part of their degree, post-graduate teaching qualification or career-long professional learning.’
She continued: ‘There is no reference to the alphabet, the alphabetic code, (the very basis of our reading and writing system), all-through-the-word sounding out and blending, oral segmenting (or identifying the sounds in words) for all-through-the-word spelling.’