The Time Machine Next Door

SUNIL lives in Manchester next door to a teenage inventor called Alex. Her greatest invention so far is a slightly unpredictable time machine that she keeps in the downstairs loo. In Explorers and Milkshakes, Sunil and Alex travel to the past and meet Ernest Shackleton and Neil Armstrong. In Scientists and Stripy Socks, they meet scientists including Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton.

These fast-moving, quirky stories are filled with eccentric characters, both real and fictitious. The footnotes are educational, but written in the same snappy, humorous style as the main text. Rebecca Bagley’s illustrations complement the text perfectly. A fun and informative read for seven- to 11-year-olds.

Katrina Reilly

My Beautiful Voice

THIS charming story from Children’s Laureate Joseph Coelho and Allison Colpoys is a wonderful celebration of individuality and an inspiration to all who are looking to find their voice.

Vibrant colours and clever word play help to tell the story of a young boy scared by the prospect of the school poetry performance. Slowly

Creating a school library with impact: a beginner’s guide AN accessible, comprehensive guide to creating a library in primary and secondary schools. It covers a range of vital topics, including reading environment, working with teaching staff, information literacy, and equality, diversity and inclusion.

The wealth of expertise and ideas on offer make it indispensable for those new to the profession, veteran librarians and anyone working within schools who wants to create the best possible resource for their students.

Owen Clements

Creating a school library with impact: a beginner’s guide, by Caroline Roche et al. Facet Publishing. £32.99.

Redcap

WHEN Redcap becomes a young carer, he finds himself grappling with challenges around illness, healthy eating and the need to ask others for help. This book explores these issues with a light touch. Redcap and his new-found woodland friends work together to support Redcap’s household at a difficult time.

but surely, aided by his nurturing teacher, he pieces together his poem. Line by line and verse after verse he finds what he wants to say and how to say it. This book would be wonderful to share with primary age pupils.

Sian Collinson

My Beautiful Voice by Joseph Coelho and Allison Colpoys. Frances Lincoln. £7.99.

The accompanying online printable worksheets allow children to test their comprehension of the story and complete word searches and games on themes in the book. The teaching resources offer activities for children at different levels of development.

This sweet story is published in support of ActionAid, an international charity that works with women and girls living in poverty.

Katy Iliffe

Redcap, by June Mari Louise Lipka. Purple Mash Publishing. £7.99.

Learning phonics?

Pour yew, sew tough! ENGLISH is a wonderfully simple language grammatically. As a modern foreign languages teacher and adviser for over 35 years, I dealt with many languages other than English.

English has barely any verb conjugations that matter. There are no noun cases to decline. Adjectives do not need to agree either in gender or number. No wonder it is easy to grasp the basics. But to expect words and sounds to match to spelling is a step too far in English.

Watching the political shifts around the teaching of reading has always been interesting. People with no experience of teaching have decided they know best and insist on phonics when we all know that English spelling is inconsistent.

Let’s take some simple words. Sometimes they follow a pattern. Bad cad lad mad fad tad sad. Bog cog dog fog log.

But so often they do not follow the pattern. Even at basic levels there are unexpected swerves.

To too two. For fore four. Poor pour door dour. Paw saw raw roar tor lore. Sew so sow unreliable.

And when we get to OUGH then the world explodes… Cough bough rough trough slough though through thorough.

Then add a t. Sought. Bought. Thought. They follow a pattern. Until you are caught.

Enough. English is not a phonic language.

Glynis Rumley, Faversham

Time better spent reading actual books

I REALLY enjoyed reading the article by Molly Hall (Educate, March/April, page 29).

I have been a teacher since 1989 and have always taught phonics as one of the skills to help children learn to read as part of a ‘balanced instruction’. However, I have found the current obsession with systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) to be frustrating and unhelpful, particularly for children who are struggling.

In our school we are under a huge amount of pressure for children to pass the phonics screening check (PSC). Teachers and learning support assistants spend a ridiculous amount of time practising decoding examples of words found in the PSC, to ‘hothouse’ children to pass. Our precious time would be better spent listening to children read actual books.

English is such a complicated and irregular language, and I just cannot see that SSP is the best approach. I hope that in the future, government ministers and senior leadership teams will begin to listen to experienced teachers, rather than continue to bombard the profession with new initiatives which may well be based on the results of questionable research.

Alison Francis, Bristol

Robustly challenge destructive Ofsted

I AM a retired teacher and NEU member. My grandchildren attend the school at Caversham. It was horrible news about the suicide of the head there. Does the NEU intend to lend its weighty support to the outrage this has generated concerning the way in which Ofsted conducts its inspections?

Ofsted has been confrontational and destructive instead of helpful and constructive for far too long. Given the pressures under which our teachers bravely work and the outstanding commitment they display to the children in their care, it is high time that such power and negative influence is robustly challenged and brought to account.

Terry Adlard, Wirral

Teacher’s pet Jaz

Jaz is the treasured pet of Dawn Sargeant, a French and Spanish teacher from

If you have a treasured pet you’d like to show off, email a high-resolution photo with 50 words about what makes them so special to educate@neu.org.uk

Please write The editor welcomes your letters but reserves the right to edit them.

Write to Letters, Educate, NEU, Hamilton House, Mabledon Place, London WC1H 9BD or email educate@neu.org.uk

Please note we cannot print letters sent in without a name and postal address (or NEU membership number), although we can withhold details from publication if you wish.

Support not inspect for happier, valued staff

IN education, children are, rightly, at the centre of everything a teacher does. However, all teachers want to keep their pupils safe and give them an excellent education. With such a dedicated workforce, perhaps the focus should be on supporting and caring for these professionals rather than the intense scrutiny favoured by the current system?

Perhaps if Ofsted prioritised supporting, rather than inspecting, head teachers, they would feel valued. In turn, a head teacher’s priority should be ensuring their staff feel valued and supported.

This would still be a childcentred approach as happier head teachers and teachers would provide even better provision for young people.

Sarah Tandy, Staffordshire

The editor writes: The NEU believes Ofsted is an unfair and unreliable inspectorate. The NEU is sponsoring an independent inquiry, chaired by former Schools Minister Lord Jim Knight. Beyond Ofsted aims to develop a set of principles for underpinning a better inspection system and proposals for an alternative approach.

n Visit beyondofsted.org.uk

When every grade matters, not every child

I READ the article New report highlights the dangers of a MAT system (Educate, March/April, page 15) and it reinforced my decision as to why I quit the profession having served one term shy of 31 years.

My school came out of local authority control and became part of a multi-academy trust. Rather than leave, which is what many colleagues did, I thought I’d give it a go to see what it would be like. The mantra ‘Every child matters’ was ditched and

Star letter Be inspired, get active

I ATTENDED my first south east LGBT+ conference last summer in Brighton. It was a fantastic experience which inspired me to look at what else I could do to support our LGBT+ students and educators. So I was back this year in Portsmouth (pictured right), this time as a trainer.

Teaching attendees and seeing them work together on new resources was satisfying, but what was most rewarding was to see how quickly the torch could be passed. The impact these events have by providing a safe space for members, increasing participation and growing support for our community, cannot be measured.

And activism can be infectious. By the end of the management was solely interested in getting decent grades. Why? It looked good in the league tables.

Those who weren’t academically inclined could either sink or swim, irrespective of the fact that, for some pupils, passing their GCSEs is an achievement no matter what the grades are.

Every young person has something to offer this world and there’s more to a school leaver than high grades. I was spending alternate weekends marking test papers – my students were becoming test automata. It got to the stage where ironing was more attractive, so it was time to get out.

That was in 2010 and, 13 years later, not a lot has changed.

Teresa Bullock, Northants

In defence of EEF

I WAS disappointed by the misrepresentation of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) research in your phonics feature (Educate, March/April, page 29).

While it mentions session, we had signed up potential new LGBT+ officers for various districts, individuals who could go on and share the positivity in their own areas. We also recruited a team

‘difficulties’ it neglects to mention that what should have been an excellent tool for gauging Read Write Inc properly was fatally compromised by the pandemic. EEF has published what it can, but is not attaching any of its usual gradings of value and months gained/lost to it.

Equally, describing the intervention progress around Fresh Start in secondary schools as ‘disturbing’ is unhelpful when EEF freely admits that this research was flawed and did not reach its usual standard. There is definitely more room for quality research here, and the use of nonsense words in the phonics screening remains a waste of time needing overhaul.

Aside from that, the fact that reading standards have neither declined nor risen since the introduction of phonics-driven early reading shows it is at least equally effective to the previously dominant ideologies.

I would argue the structure of it is very useful for teaching of members willing to organise our next event. If you have never attended a sector conference, go along and be inspired to get active.

Graham Childs, Hampshire

children from low literacy backgrounds and learners with English as an additional language. As a year 1 teacher, I find it frustrating that the assumption is that comprehension and phonics are not linked.

In any decent phonics programme from the point children are putting sentences together they will be questioned about their reading on a regular basis. Phonics is an effective shortcut to decoding 52 per cent of the English language and it makes sense to heavy load it into early reading.

A balanced approach is important, but as I highly doubt any mainstream year 6 teacher is delivering reading through phonics, they most certainly get this throughout their primary school journey. If anything, phonics is disregarded and forgotten too early as a potential support strategy for a reader who did not secure early reading skills within the usual time frame.

Gareth Alder, Reading