REGARDING the letter (February 26) from John Walker “Teaching children to be literate the way forward”.
John is absolutely right that not one of the ‘experts’ has the remotest idea about what can be done and city council leader Bob Price admits failure.
John Walker says Oxford should invest in rigorous investigation but falls short of the detail to be investigated.
All we need to understand is how literacy teaching for pupils aged five to seven has become dependent on parents or expensive schemes – ie why does the classroom fail?
The reason the classroom fails is due to the huge loss of literacy teaching hours ‘actually received’ by pupils in the classroom, creating a dependency on parents. A simple classroom count of literacy tuition hours ‘actually received’ by pupils with a comparison to the KS1 timetable/wholeclass/1950s will show huge reductions, explaining the failure.
Finland has less divided classes creating more teaching time ‘actually received’ by the pupils and also whole-class, bi-partite, interactive methodology predominates in Finnish schools for pupils aged six as reported in the Ofsted 2003 Three Nations Study that visited schools in England, Denmark and Finland.
I was taught in England in 1958 as a five-year-old, in a whole-class, bipartite, interactive way that Finnish kids enjoy today.
I have challenged Oxford City Council’s inequality panel on this matter and am being ignored.
STEVE NICHOLSON
Campbell Road
Oxford
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