I suggest that the Department for Education’s official ‘criteria for assuring high-quality phonic work’ neglects to pay specific attention to handwriting – and Ofsted clearly hasn’t understood the principle of avoiding ‘circuitous routes’!

References are made in the DfE’s official ‘core criteria’ to the use of a ‘multi-sensory approach so that children learn variously from simultaneous visual, auditory and kinaesthetic activities which are designed to secure essential phonic knowledge and skills’ but invariably this is interpreted as all sorts of play-based activities which do exactly what is warned about in the core criteria at point 5 which states:

5. Multi-sensory activities should be interesting and engaging but firmly focused on intensifying the learning associated with its phonic goal. They should avoid taking children down a circuitous route only tenuously linked to the goal. This means avoiding over-elaborate activities that are difficult to manage and take too long to complete, thus distracting the children from concentrating on the learning goal.

A number of phonics specialists, me included, have taken Ofsted to task for uploading video clips with precisely the kind of ‘circuitous route’ which is ‘distracting the children from concentrating on the learning goal’. Ofsted – Is this a bit of an ‘own goal’? We see children trying to do a bit of phonics spelling on mini whiteboards whilst sitting on the playground and at the same time trying to play the parachute game. It’s all rather bizarre.

Ofsted, methinks you may be trying to soften your image perhaps?

Ofsted has paid insufficient attention to the DfE ‘core criteria’ and certainly hasn’t helped teacher-trainers and programme-authors in their endeavour to clarify what ‘multi-sensory’ looks like for the most effective and appropriate phonics teaching!

A break-down of the phonics components required for teaching and learning illustrates how handwriting is linked heavily to both teaching the alphabetic code and the alphabet and is essential for high-quality phonics provision. It’s a great pity that I seem to be swimming against the tide when it comes to children using actual paper and pencils to practise their skills when mini whiteboard ‘activities’ (and carpet sitting) dominate educational practice in England from the teenies right up to the teens! But what could be more fit-for-purpose than paper and pencil practice sitting comfortably at tables when teaching reading, spelling and handwriting?

Also on the Ofsted videos we see, sorry to say, some Y1 teacher’s handwriting which is not great (lovely chap though) and some worrying infant practice. We see one lovely little girl writing on her mini whiteboard from bottom to top! Ofsted – is this really your definition of ‘outstanding practice’?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeVlJxthnZc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmM9KqmQhcs

Ah, that explains it, you tell us you weren’t looking to scrutinise ‘handwriting’ on this occasion. After all, it’s not mentioned in the ‘core criteria’ so it’s clearly not important.

See ‘Debbie Hepplewhite’s Model of the three phonics core skills and their sub-skills’ – you may find this useful to see how much is involved with the teaching of handwriting.

Go here for free alphabet resources and guidance on my handwriting website.

Here is the official ‘core criteria’ provided by the Department for Education (DfE) in England:

Criteria for assuring high-quality phonic work

The core criteria provide schools with clearly defined key features of an effective, systematic, synthetic phonics programme.

Published programmes for phonic work should meet each of the following criteria. Further explanatory notes are offered below.

The programme should:

• present high quality systematic, synthetic phonic work as the prime approach to decoding print, i.e. a phonics ‘first and fast’ approach (see note 1)
• enable children to start learning phonic knowledge and skills using a systematic, synthetic programme by the age of five, with the expectation that they will be fluent readers having secured word recognition skills by the end of key stage one (see note 2)
• be designed for the teaching of discrete, daily sessions progressing from simple to more complex phonic knowledge and skills and covering the major grapheme/phoneme correspondences (see note 3)
• enable children’s progress to be assessed (see note 4)
• use a multi-sensory approach so that children learn variously from simultaneous visual, auditory and kinaesthetic activities which are designed to secure essential phonic knowledge and skills (see note 5)
• demonstrate that phonemes should be blended, in order, from left to right, ‘all through the word’ for reading
• demonstrate how words can be segmented into their constituent phonemes for spelling and that this is the reverse of blending phonemes to read words
• ensure children apply phonic knowledge and skills as their first approach to reading and spelling even if a word is not completely phonically regular
• ensure that children are taught high frequency words that do not conform completely to grapheme/phoneme correspondence rules
• provide fidelity to the teaching framework for the duration of the programme, to ensure that these irregular words are fully learnt (see note 6)
• ensure that as pupils move through the early stages of acquiring phonics, they are invited to practise by reading texts which are entirely decodable for them, so that they experience success and learn to rely on phonemic strategies (see note 7).

Explanatory notes

1. Phonic work is best understood as a body of knowledge and skills about how the alphabet works, rather than one of a range of optional ‘methods’ or ‘strategies’ for teaching children how to read. For example, phonic programmes should not encourage children to guess words from non-phonic clues such as pictures before applying phonic knowledge and skills. High quality systematic, synthetic phonic work will make sure that children learn:

• grapheme/phoneme (letter/sound) correspondences ( the alphabetic principle) in a clearly defined, incremental sequence;
• to apply the highly important skill of blending (synthesising) phonemes, in order, all through a word to read it;
• to apply the skills of segmenting words into their constituent phonemes to spell; and that
• blending and segmenting are reversible processes.

2. Teachers will make principled, professional judgements about when to start on a systematic, synthetic programme of phonic work but it is reasonable to expect that the great majority of children will be capable of, and benefit from doing so by the age of five. It is equally important for the programme to be designed so that children become fluent readers having secured word recognition skills by the end of key stage one.

3. The programme should introduce a defined initial group of consonants and vowels, enabling children, early on, to read and spell many simple CVC words.

4. If the programme is high quality, systematic and synthetic it will, by design, map incremental progression in phonic knowledge and skills. It should therefore enable teachers to: track children’s progress; assess for further learning and identify incipient difficulties, so that appropriate support can be provided.

5. Multi-sensory activities should be interesting and engaging but firmly focused on intensifying the learning associated with its phonic goal. They should avoid taking children down a circuitous route only tenuously linked to the goal. This means avoiding over-elaborate activities that are difficult to manage and take too long to complete, thus distracting the children from concentrating on the learning goal.

6. The programme should not neglect engaging and helpful approaches to the more challenging levels where children have to distinguish between phonically irregular graphemes and phonemes.

7. It is important that texts are of the appropriate level for children to apply and practise the phonic knowledge and skills that they have learnt. Children should not be expected to use strategies such as whole-word recognition and/or cues from context, grammar, or pictures.

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