Dyslexia

Debate between Sarah Teather and Graham Stringer

Wednesday 14th December 2011 Westminster Hall

[Sarah Teather]

All sorts of young people fall behind. The fact that so many young people born in the summer are in the school action category is particularly good evidence that we do not at the moment necessarily label the right children. Other children who may have specific needs go through school without being identified. That is not good enough, because such children do not get the support they need.

The Green Paper made some radical proposals to change the system. As several Members, including the hon. Member for Portsmouth North, said, we have just finished a consultation and will respond to it in the new year. The rest of what I say now on the matter will pick up on what we have already said, rather than announcing what we will do. Hon. Members will have to wait a few weeks, until we have finished crunching through the detail of the consultation. We had an enormous number of responses from parents, charities and teachers. That is very helpful detail and we need to work through it.

As I said during my introduction, many pupils with dyslexia receive most of their support in the classroom through high-quality, personalised teaching. We know from the independent review led by Sir Jim Rose that the early identification of problems and the right teaching support are critical to helping dyslexic pupils achieve. Alongside the special educational needs reforms we are also working with schools to support teachers to identify and respond to pupils with dyslexia. Difficulty with phonics and the ability to identify and manipulate the sound of words is central to the challenges that dyslexic pupils face. It is also a critical element for all children learning to read.

We are introducing a new phonics screening check for children in year 1, which should pick up children struggling with early literacy because of dyslexia. I think that the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West slightly misunderstood some things about the statement at the weekend by my colleague the schools Minister. When he highlighted the fact that inadequate numbers of young people were passing the screening test at the relevant stage, he was trying to make the point that phonics, as a system for teaching reading, had not properly embedded in teaching at the earliest stages of schooling. He was not labelling half of children as failing. He was recognising how much further we need to go to embed the practice clearly in the way teachers teach the youngest children to read, from the beginning. We know that phonics is particularly helpful for identifying difficulties in children who have dyslexia.

[Graham Stringer]

The Minister has been speaking an enormous amount of sense, recognising that teaching children to read is one of the most important things that the state does. I think she has recognised that Jim Rose recommended in his report that systematic phonics should be at the heart of good Government strategy for teaching children to read. When the Select Committee on Science and Technology considered the scientific basis for the Government’s policy, we found from the written and oral evidence that there was still, in the wave 3 reading recovery programme, a continuing practice of word memorisation and the use of whole language theory. That does exactly the opposite of what the Minister has been saying about recognising phonics and the transferability of the sound and the letter. Has she had a look at what is happening in wave 3 reading recovery?

[Sarah Teather]

I certainly looked at the reading recovery programme, Every Child a Reader, most of which is based around phonics. There are some other, more flexible, practices. We must recognise that although the evidence suggests that systematic phonics is absolutely the most effective way to teach children to read, some children for various reasons will not respond to that system, and it is important to have some flexibility at the margins to pick up the children who have fallen through the net. However, almost all the programme is still based around systematic phonics.