Literacy experts face the axe

08.07.09 Caroline Horn

From the Bookseller

Up to 550 literacy and numeracy consultant jobs could be axed following the disbanding of National Strategies announced last week.

National Strategies has been responsible for guiding how numeracy and literacy are taught since 1997. However, the Department for Children, Schools & Families (DCSF), which announced the news in the Education White Paper said schools will still need to focus on these subject areas.

National Strategies, managed by Capita, currently employs 550 people and its contract is due to end in 2011. The DCSF argued that the move will free up schools to teach literacy and numeracy more independently and save the government around £100m per year.

A DCSF spokeswoman said: “It is important that schools still spend time on good practice and they will remain accountable. What the White Paper introduces is a change to more locally controlled systems. There will still be a focus on literacy and numeracy, but more control will be given to teachers in some areas.”

Currently, a network of literacy and numeracy consultants is funded by local authorities to support the national literacy and numeracy frameworks, in addition to the Capita training staff. Now schools—in theory—will be able to commission services directly.

A DCSF spokesman said: “There won’t necessarily be one set of literacy consultants working for local authorities. There will potentially be a lot more diverse services available.” He added: “It’s about local authorities not directing schools in what they do, but allowing schools to choose from a range of services.”

Caroline Horn children’s Home literacy

Alan Gibbons comments:

“Words are wonderful things, aren’t they? They can inspire. They can explain. They can make your heart sing. Sadly, they can also confuse, obfuscate and twist the truth. The National Strategies are dead. Yes, let’s celebrate. Burn the documents, I say. Away with level descriptors and programmes of study. Isn’t it always the way however that the dead hand of the past weighs down on the minds of the living? Why am I worried? It’s something the DCSF spokesman is quoted as saying, the mention of: ‘locally controlled systems.’

“Come again? Surely, after this appalling waste of public money, these ludicrous literacy hours, this obsession with excerpts, it is time to start reading books again, whole books and nothing but books, and using them as the basis of English teaching. Systems? What on earth does that mean. I fear that the Government has abandoned these unloved strategies only to replace them with tracking and testing based on no pedagogy at all. Those of us who believe reading for pleasure is the essential heart of English have to scream and shout to prevent the philistines strangling progress.”

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