Why children need to be ready to read

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Home Schooling
ViewsSeptember 22nd, 2015

Mary Powell-Chandler, Head of Save the Children in Wales, explains why Wales’s poorest children are struggling with language skills before they start school

As a child growing up in a small mid-terrace, furnished with ‘pre-loved’ sofas, chairs and cupboards, in an area which decades later would be designated a Communities First area, money was tight but I enjoyed a rich and happy childhood.

My earliest memories involve my mother who, everyone enjoyed telling me, talked to me incessantly (and yet had the nerve to call me ‘chatty Cathy’!) and my books. Oh how I loved my books! From the earliest picture books, listening to my mother’s sing-song Irish accent, to the stories I started to read by myself before I started school. My mother talked and read to me instinctively; she would not have known that she was providing me (and later my sisters), with the best possible foundation for our future. We would not be held back by where we grew up but would go on to enjoy a university education.

Now, as a member of The Read On. Get On. campaign  in Wales – a coalition of national literacy and communication organisations, charities, libraries, teaching unions and publishing agencies including Save the Children – I am angry (yes angry) that children growing up in poverty are at the greatest risk of falling behind their better-off classmates.  Depressingly, one in four children growing up in poverty in Wales leave primary school unable to read well. This helps explain the persistent educational gap in Wales that each year, prevents thousands of our poorest children from fulfilling their potential.

Our most recent report provides evidence that speech and language in the early years, before a child starts school, is a key factor in their ability to read and thus to learn. The Ready to Read report shows how good quality support for children and parents in the early years can help improve language skills and ensure children start school ready and able to learn. The UK-wide coalition has set a goal to get every child reading well by age 11 in 2025 and in Wales we have set an interim goal to ensure that every child in Wales has good language skills by the time they start school by 2020.

Evidence presented in the Ready to Read report explains why children’s early language skills are so important for learning to read. The evidence shows that without an increased commitment to children’s early language development, particularly for the poorest children, we will never achieve our goal of all children leaving primary school being able to read well. Boosting children’s early language skills is critical to narrowing the attainment gap and improving the life chances of our poorest children.

Poverty affects children’s learning in different ways.

Struggling on a low income creates stress and anxiety which can make it harder for parents to engage with their children’s learning. A low income can limit the material resources available to support child’s early learning.

Our new analysis from the Millennium Cohort Study shows children in Wales who live in persistent poverty are twice as likely to score below average in vocabulary scores at age 5 as their better off peers,  and that these patterns persist as children grow up. The analysis has found that children living in poverty who had poor language skills at age 5 are much more likely to still be behind at age 11 than their better off peers and of course, children who read well by 11 do better at school, get better exam results and do better in the workplace.

This is why the Read On. Get On. campaign, whilst recognising the excellent initiatives introduced by the Welsh Government such as Flying Start, Time to Read and Education begins at Home, is calling for further investment in the early years workforce and support for parents during those critical, life-defining years. Specifically, we are asking for an increased focus on early language skills to reach all children, but particularly those living in poverty.

It is not acceptable that the future of a child born in Wales is decreed by where he or she happens to be born. And while we all recognise that there is only a finite amount of resource available in Wales, it seems patently obvious that increased investment in our children, especially our poorest children,makes the most sense of all.

 Mary Powell-Chandler is Head of Save the Children in Wales. To download a copy of their new report, Ready to Read, please click here.

One Response

  1. Tim Williams says:

    Excellent contribution. The complacency around education in Wales is scary given PISA results. In the first decade of devolution standards of achievement went backwards in Wales in relation to England. We have areas where 40% of boys are leaving primary school unable to read at the level expected of an 11 year old. They never recover. Leighton Andrews had a sense of urgency about this and introduced much needed reform. Is that momentum still in existence?

    I have to add: does anyone think that it’s wise to place the kind of disadvantaged children Mary Powell-Chandler writes about in Welsh medium education? I’d be interested to know the educational theory supporting this linguistic option for such kids when they don’t have their home language reinforced at school and learn in a language they never hear outside their class room – resulting also and frankly in an unconvincing grasp of that school language. Education is meant to break cycles of disadvantage not strengthen them – or to put nationalist linguistic aims before ‘child-centred-ness’. Whatever the claimed benefits of Welsh immersion education – inflated and ultimately deceitful it seems to me – it can hardly be said to put the child first.

    I add for those that don’t know me , I speak Welsh well as a second language (picked up in an English language school), I am a qualified teacher and my Ph.D was about the process of anglicisation in my home town of Pontypridd. And I want Welsh to survive and would give it an honoured place as a subject in all Welsh children’s schooling. But my priority as a progressive is to ensure no child leaves a Welsh primary school functionally illiterate in their mother tongue. It’s astounding that I even have to stress it’s a priority in a Wales whose elite talk loudly about our values being separate and better from those of our near neighbours. Separating and worsening ?

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