Inside the reading crisis leaving thousands of children in Wales unable to read
An ITV News investigation has found that primary schools in Wales are using discredited methods to teach reading, which risks making thousands of children “functionally illiterate.”
"Keep reading and it will click eventually."
This is the true story of how thousands of children in Wales are being left behind by teaching methods that have been proven not to work.
An ITV News investigation has found that Welsh primary schools are still encouraged to teach reading in the wrong way.
When Lisa’s daughter Poppy started struggling with reading, she wasn’t too concerned.
Lisa told me her daughter’s teachers would say: “Oh she’ll pick it up, it will come eventually.”
Poppy’s books encouraged her to “look at the pictures” or “skip the word” when she became stuck. But no matter how much she tried to catch up at home, Lisa soon came to the painful realisation that her daughter couldn’t read.
Now 11, Poppy has the reading age of a four-year-old.
“I just worry how will she cope if I wasn’t here. Who’s going to tell her how to read that sign or how to read a packet?”
Poppy is one of the tens of thousands of pupils across Wales leaving primary school functionally illiterate. They are victims of the fact that methods of teaching reading which have been discredited for decades are still encouraged by the Welsh government.
In this method, children are told to use pictures and context to tackle unfamiliar words. This technique has been proven to damage the ability of many young children to learn to read.
ITV News has analysed hundreds of primary school inspection reports, school websites, and teaching resources and found that not only are these methods commonplace in classrooms across Wales, but their use is praised by school inspectors.
A small minority of schools and parents are taking matters into their own hands and ignoring the guidance of the national curriculum, but several reading experts have shared their fears with ITV News that this confused approach to reading instruction is damaging the futures of thousands of Welsh children.
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The crisis
In the most recent international education tests known as PISA, the reading scores of Welsh 15-year-olds plummeted to their worst-ever level. They have been significantly below the rest of the UK and the international average for decades.
The poorest children are also falling further behind their classmates.
Unlike the rest of the UK, Welsh children don’t take part in the international primary reading test known as PIRLS, and there is no national test data. But, in 2012, the schools’ watchdog, Estyn, said that a fifth of children were starting secondary school “functionally illiterate”.
The effects of illiteracy can be devastating. Studies have found that people who are unable to read are more likely to suffer from mental health problems, go to prison and die younger.
The problem
Wales’ new curriculum continues to encourage young children to use pictures and context to tackle unfamiliar words in the initial stages of reading. This teaching method is often referred to as “cueing”.
It is based on an old, discredited assumption that learning to read happens naturally, like learning to talk, and that expert readers don’t read every letter of a word.
But neither of these things are true. Learning to read does not come naturally, and half a century ago eye movement studies proved that the best readers process all the letters in a word, it just happens so quickly they don’t notice.
It is in fact the worst readers who depend most on context.
Hundreds of studies have shown that young children need explicit instruction in how the letters they see on the page connect to the sounds they make. This is known as phonics.
A method called systematic synthetic phonics has been found to be one of the most effective methods of teaching reading.
“Those that are capable, confident readers, you can show them a word that is in their vocabulary completely in isolation and they'll be able to work out what it is,” says Christopher Such, an experienced teacher and author of The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading.
Reading scientists say that the cueing methods found in Welsh classrooms lead to children guessing words rather than sounding them out. These kids tend to read the first couple of letters of a word and guess the rest, a habit that becomes increasingly hard to break as they get to trickier texts.
“Cueing is not based on any empirical evidence of how children learn to read, it’s just a wish list,” says Professor Emerita Rhona Stainthorp OBE, one of the UK’s leading experts on reading development.
“All the evidence from masses of work in America, Australia and the UK, is that you must teach young children to read the words. The pictures might be nice and pretty, but they don’t help you to read.”
Some children will learn to read however they are taught, but many will fail without explicit teaching. Advocates of systematic synthetic phonics say that as it is impossible to predict which children will struggle, explicitly teaching all children phonics is vital.
It has been described by leading educational psychologists as “helpful for all children, harmful for none, and crucial for some.”
Education systems across the English-speaking world have been turning their backs on cueing. In England, it used to be known as the “searchlights” model. Following a parliamentary inquiry in 2005, it was abolished, with the UK government mandating the teaching of systematic synthetic phonics instead.
Since the abolition of the cueing method in England and the introduction of a phonics screening check, reading test scores in England have risen, taking them to near the top of international rankings.
What is being taught in classrooms in Wales?
What we’ve known for decades about how reading should be taught has still not reached most Welsh classrooms.
In our analysis of primary school inspection reports, we found more than a hundred examples of the schools’ inspectorate, Estyn, praising the use of these discredited methods in the last five years.
In one local authority, official “catch up” reading resources encourage teachers to “help the children read unfamiliar words” by “using picture cues”.
School websites from across Wales are also littered with posters encouraging parents to use these strategies at home.
We shared our findings with Professor Emerita Stainthorp, including one Estyn report from this year which praised a school for encouraging the use of “a range of strategies” to read unfamiliar words, including “picture cues".
“I'm speechless. I really am speechless,” she said. “I think that is unbelievably awful. It suggests that they haven't got any skills to read the unfamiliar words themselves. Because if you've got the skills to decode unfamiliar words, you don't need a picture.”
“That is not something that I would expect to read about teaching in a school in the 21st century. We’ve just moved light years away from that,” she added.
Another concern of reading researchers is that phonics is not being taught early enough in many classrooms. In Welsh language schools, children do not start learning English literacy until they are six or seven years old.
Mixed methods
The Welsh government insists its curriculum does include the systematic teaching of phonics. This is true. In fact, you would struggle to find a school in Wales that doesn’t teach phonics. But cueing strategies are mandated alongside it.
One headteacher in Cardiff told me that using picture and context cues can cancel out the benefits of teaching phonics.
“Using cueing undermines this process,” Gareth Rein, Headteacher of St Peter’s R.C. School says, “as a child is led to believe that contextual clues are a fix” for not being able to properly sound out the whole word.
Scientists have also found that using both methods can overload the cognitive abilities of very young children. The pictures, for example, distract kids from the words, harming their ability to read text in the long term.
Experts are keen to stress that enjoying pictures with children is not a problem, but that encouraging children to try and guess unfamiliar words by using the pictures should be avoided.
“It is essential,” says Christopher Such, “that they are not discouraged from first looking at all the letters within the word and considering the related sounds to try to work out what the word might be.”
The poor get poorer
There is concern that the poorest children and those with learning difficulties are harmed the most by cueing strategies.
Children who are already good readers improve more quickly than their classmates, while poor readers fall further behind. This phenomenon is exacerbated as those struggling get increasingly frustrated and avoid reading entirely.
“It’s pretty intuitive,” Christopher Such tells me, “it’s hard to get a kid to love football if they fall over every time they kick the ball. It's hard to get a kid to love reading if they can’t actually make meaning from the text because they can’t recognise the words on the page.”
National test data released by the Welsh government this summer showed that by the time they reach Year 9, the average English reading levels of children from poorer households are now two and a half years behind their peers.
The result, say teachers, is that tens of thousands of Wales’ most disadvantaged children can’t read when they leave primary school.
“We just have a widening attainment gap as a result of these poor reading strategies being taught in our schools,” says Rob Randel, a primary school teacher in Wales of two decades, and member of the Reading Reform Foundation.
“We are just completely letting down our children at the moment by continuing to use these discredited approaches.”
Taking matters into their own hands
Parents and schools are beginning to ignore Welsh government guidance.
Tracy, from the Neath Valley, told me that when she raised concerns with her son’s school that he couldn’t read the letters confidently, she was told that “boys are slower than girls” and “not to worry” as he would “get it in his own time.”
Tracy decided to buy a phonics set online and taught him how to sound the words out herself.
“We used to do it every morning before school… within two years, he was reading Harry Potter books confidently. I’m confident that wouldn’t have been possible if we’d continued with the school’s learning trajectory.”
Another mum from Carmarthenshire, who didn’t want to be named, has resorted to teaching her daughter a phonics programme at home.
“I found out that my daughter wasn’t having explicit phonics lessons at school,” she said.
As a former primary school teacher, she said she was “fortunate” she had the knowledge and resources to buy the programme and teach it. “Many parents cannot do this and it really shouldn’t be their responsibility in the first place.”
A small minority of schools are also taking things into their own hands. At St Peter’s R.C. School in the centre of Cardiff, results have improved significantly since teachers stopped using cueing methods.
The average reading age of a child from St Peter’s moving to secondary school last year was 13 years and seven months.
“This provides them with a head start in Year 7 and will likely be the foundation for achieving academic success later on,” headteacher Gareth Rein tells me.
“When the schools in which I have worked have moved away from multi-cueing…greater numbers of children have achieved success.
In Twynyrodyn Primary School in Merthyr Tydfil, teachers also follow a systematic synthetic phonics programme and do not use cueing to teach reading in early years.
Headteacher Alec Mills told me that since adopting this approach, reading levels have improved markedly, especially for the most disadvantaged learners.
“Our outcomes are much stronger than they were. It has been really effective in ensuring that all our children maintain pace with their peers.”
Mr Mills said that teaching reading using systematic synthetic phonics “will change the lives” of his pupils.
“They are going to leave here with such a key literacy skill unlocked for them that whatever their aspirations are for life, reading isn’t going to be the thing that holds them back, and we’re really proud of that.”
What does the Welsh Government say?
We asked to speak to the Welsh Government’s Cabinet Secretary for Education Lynne Neagle about this story multiple times, but she refused.
We also sent a list of questions to her department, but these were not answered specifically.
Instead, a Welsh Government spokeswoman said: “Literacy is a top priority within the Curriculum for Wales. We do not advocate any one specific method to teach reading, rather we enable teachers to use their professional judgement and knowledge of their learners to use the best tool to meet the individual needs of their learners.
“The Curriculum for Wales guidance is clear that the systematic and consistent teaching of phonics must be a key part of the toolkit in our schools, alongside vocabulary building and comprehension to ensure learners are able to understand and make sense of what they read and become fluent and effective readers.
“We recognise there is a need to improve reading outcomes for our learners. Earlier this year, the Cabinet Secretary for Education set out a range of extra support for schools including further support for literacy. This support will be based upon the latest evidence and co-constructed with experts and practitioners.”
If you would like to share your story with ITV News, please email Rhys.Williams@itn.co.uk
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