I totally disagree with the conclusions of this report and how the government are handling it.
These almost illiterate young people have NOT come through ‘progressive’ education.
That is simply not true.
The battle for literacy was lost by the progressives in the 70’s and 80’s and what we have had since then has been phonics ad nauseam.
Frank Smith wrote the very best book on how the brain reads and how young children learn to read. It does not take a genius to work out that children not only learn to read by reading – like any other skill but that they need to understand what reading is about and how books and language work.
In other word, they need to be around books from birth and they need to be read to consistently. (Any libraries still open and do parents have money for books???)
Then they will learn to read with ease before they go to school – because as we see from these results – schools ain’t no good at teaching reading and pretty well nothing else as well – except teaching children how to fail.
amnesiaclinic 