Mischief on the Moors Own your Period

CHELLA Quint strives to take the embarrassment and worry out of periods with her informative and positive book. Aimed at girls who are about to start (or have just started) their periods, the author provides answers to everything young people need to know about menstruation.

Written with humour and straightforwardness, she empowers young people with knowledge and blasts the myths and superstitions of the past with scientific facts. Included are anecdotes about her own experiences growing up.

On every page, Giovana Medeiros’s vibrant illustrations complement the information provided. An excellent resource.

Cindy Shanks

The World is in Our Words

AWARD-winning author, editor and educator

Chris Searle’s captivating autobiography is a follow-up to his book Isaac and I.

Spanning 40 years, from 1979 to 2020, the book covers his life as an adviser in Sheffield, a head teacher at Earl Marshal Comprehensive (where he was later sacked), and his quest for racial equality and changing people’s negative attitudes towards race.

Interspersed with raw and thought-provoking poetry from pupils all over the world, the powerful messages have a wide range of themes. These include historical events such as the miners’ strikes and the Hillsborough tragedy, as well as personal experiences of loss and marginalisation. A compelling and inspirational read.

Cindy Shanks

The World is in Our Words by Chris Searle. Five Leaves. £12.99.

WITH contributions from a wide variety of professionals, Square Pegs outlines positive adjustments schools can make for their most vulnerable students. The authors cover a wide variety of topics including school attendance, building relationships, trauma-informed practice, and behaviour management. There are plenty of practical adjustments provided and I found the section on mental health and the brain particularly interesting.

What we must hold on to as educators is the “unconditional positive regard” we have for our students. It is these relationships that keep us in the profession.

Jo Allen

Square Pegs: Inclusivity, compassion and fitting in – A guide for schools by Fran Morgan, Ellie Costello and Ian Gilbert. Crown House. £19.99.

The Birmingham Book

THIS engaging book explores the Trojan Horse scandal of 2013, when an anonymous letter was sent to Birmingham City Council alleging a plot to take over and run local schools according to strict Islamic principles.

The letter was later determined to be a hoax, but only after it triggered a chain of events that had severe consequences for schools in Birmingham.

The book provides a range of perspectives on the event, from people who attended local schools to respected educationalists. It offers leadership takeaways at the end of each chapter and recommendations for rebuilding a model of governance and leadership that recognises the importance of nurturing and understanding staff, community and parents.

Ivy Scott

The Birmingham Book – Lessons in Urban Education Leadership and Policy from the Trojan Horse Affair by Colin Diamond. Crown House. £18.99.

The pay and pensions plight of supply staff

SHAME that the March/April issue of Educate, devoted to the strikes over pay, didn’t mention that invisible, forgotten army, education’s emergency service –also known as supply teachers.

We were excluded from voting in the ballot due to legal technicalities, no fault of the union. Due to changes in legislation, employers can now use agency staff to break strikes. Unscrupulous agencies offered huge bribes to entice supply teachers to work on strike days. As a result, two schools in my area stayed open.

As a life-long trade unionist I would never cross a picket line. We will never win any respect, sympathy or support from permanent staff if we cover on strike days. Agencies are not our friends.

Maybe the union could organise a supply teachers’ week to inform the wider membership just how bad our pay and conditions are? Decades of privatisation have left pay well below national scales, while pension contributions are one quarter of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme. Private agencies compete to offer the lowest rates possible. Richard Knights, Sefton

Coastal consolation

THANK you for the article on coastal schools (Educate, January/ February, page 26).

It is disappointing to hear from Helen Reader that the situation in Portsmouth has not changed since 1970. I trained at Portsmouth College of Education and her comments apply to that time – children had not left Portsmouth at all. Teaching on the Isle of Wight revealed a similar situation where children had not left the island. However, we did get to the sea for our swimming lesson when the tide was right. Meryl Harries, Devon

Correction

The editor writes: Apologies to Anmika Salter, whose name we misspelled in the last issue of Educate on page 9. We have updated the online version.

Teacher’s pet Ollie

n READING your article

Phonics isn’t the only answer was a breath of fresh air (Educate, March/April, page 29). Synthetic phonics is an important strategy in learning to read, but so many early reading skills are being lost by over-relying on it, like visual cues, prediction, comprehension and rhythm and rhyme.

I would like to see studies into the effects of phonics on reading for pleasure, as Government advice about reception children reading only phonetic books is enough to put them off reading for life. Reading is just a mechanical exercise unless there is enjoyable content with meaning.

Helen Toyne, Stockport n I READ your article on phonics with great interest as an experienced infant teacher in an area with high mobility, social and economic deprivation and many pupils with English as an additional language (EAL). While I agree that high-stakes testing in primary schools is unnecessary and negatively impacts on pupils, and so disagree with the existence of the phonics screening test, I also see the importance of a rigorous phonics programme.

The article asserts that “children learn these non-words to prepare for the test”. This is not the case. Children learn phonemes which they then apply to words in order to be able to decode them. This skill is vital and is used even as adults when required to read unknown words. All words that we do not know how to read by sight are ‘nonsense’ words at initial meeting. This is even more relevant when teaching children with EAL, and to some extent children experiencing social deprivation, as their English vocabulary can be limited. The confident use of phonics means no unknown word is scary. It can be broken down, decoded, put back together and read. It can then be understood, either by context or explicit teaching. continued opposite

Jess

Clearly phonics is only one part of a much broader and richer tapestry of skills that are needed to make a successful reader, but without the ability to decode words children are unable to access books or information independently.

Kate Thorgilson, Cheltenham

n OF course, phonics should not be the only method used to teach children to read. However, when I trained as a teacher in 1992, we were not taught how to teach reading. Books like Meg and Mog were read to children in the hope that they would somehow learn to read, magically. Naturally, it hardly ever worked, especially with children from homes where reading was not a thing that parents did for pleasure.

I remember being in complete despair about teaching my reception class how to read, feeling that I was letting them down and using an old teaching reading manual that I found in a jumble sale to teach my class about letter sounds. So please don’t let us ditch phonics again, as it really works. But, of course we should be teaching meaning and joy in reading as well.

Sarah Hope

n I STARTED teaching in the late 1980s when phonics was a dirty word and children were meant to learn to read magically, just by reading. Now we have gone to the other extreme.

Both positions are equally absurd as children respond to different approaches. In my experience, pupils with autism, for example, learn to read whole words with little attention to phonics. To make them decode nonsense words does not compute, with the result that they fail the year 1 phonics test despite being quite fluent readers.

We need to set teachers free to use their professional judgement in the teaching of reading. We should put far greater focus on creating a love of reading early on, rather than force-feeding phonics and making too many children feel like failures by the age of five.

Fiona Edwards, Staffordshire

n I BEGAN teaching in 1978 and have taught the whole primary age range. I bought Margaret Meek’s wonderful book, Learning to Read, when it was published. Her focus on reading for meaning right from the start impressed me.

Schools used different approaches alongside the belief that books were fun: non-reading scheme picture books, as well as various schemes, including look and say, flash cards, sentence makers, repetition within a story line, poetry and rhyme. Phonics were often extrapolated from words within context, and similar patterns sought out.

My granddaughter recently told me her teacher says the word ‘the’ is a bit of a problem (you can’t sound it out), while a friend’s eight-year-old stumbles over words that are clear from their context because she struggles to make sense of the graphemes before using contextual clues. I shall celebrate when we return to mixed methods as the great cycle of methodology revolves.

Amanda Warren, Ipswich

Star letter

AS a retired teacher, but active member of the NEU, I volunteered to be a picket line official and went along for the training session.

I met three wonderful reps from other schools who all turned out to be former students. On the day of the first strike, three more former students – now teachers –joined me on the picket line and I met two more on the march in Liverpool. This was one of the proudest moments of my teaching career when I realised that I had helped forge the next generation of trade unionists.

This experience has made me so delighted to have been a teacher.

David Moorhead, Liverpool