l THE brief report on the results of the first phonics screening test in England (Phonics results at national standard, September 29) might have mentioned this point.
Surveys from teaching unions reveal that 91 per cent of primary school teachers involved in the tests do not believe this screening exercise told them anything they didn’t know already about their year one pupils’ reading levels.
Worse, of the 40 words children must assess, half are made-up non-words. They were designed to check decoding skills but, in reality, hindered and perplexed the less confident readers while confusing the more confident, who “decoded” the made-up non-words as spelling mistakes that required correction. They turned ‘strom’ into ‘storm’ and were marked down accordingly.
An educational and diagnostic triumph, it would seem! What would Alan Turing have made of this utter nonsense?
BRUCE ROSS-SMITH
Bowness Avenue
Headington
Oxford
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