- A large, and perhaps growing, sub-class of people are getting increasingly out of step with the demands of the modern world. Only effective educational targeting offers the means of matching both their, and society’s needs. (Bynner and Parsons, 1997, p.84).
- Educational failure is underpinned by poor reading and lies at the heart of social exclusion. (Parsons and Bynner, 2002, p.21).
Introduction
English teachers seek to develop the literacy of all students, including those with special needs. For present purposes, the latter comprise:
- students who are underachieving in literacy
- registered pupils (i.e. those on various levels of a school’s special needs register, including those with the most severe difficulties for whom a ‘statement of special educational needs’ has been generated in liaison with a local education authority).
Both groups frequently share difficulties with literacy, and registered pupils may be underachievers too.
The registered group commonly comprises students with diverse challenges, including specific literacy difficulties. Their care will usually be a shared responsibility with a school’s special educational needs (SEN) department; the students may, on occasions, be accompanied to English lessons by special needs staff. Nationally, our greatest special need lies in underachievement in literacy. Too often, this is left to English staff alone; it will be the chief focus of this pack.
When literacy is tested in practical situations (functional literacy), the UK has a higher proportion of adults who, following compulsory schooling, perform poorly than many other industrialised societies. For example, our proportion of adults at the lowest level is 23%. On the same measures, Germany has 12%, the Netherlands 10%, and Sweden only 7% (DfEE, 1999, p.17).
International studies of school students show an unusually wide gap between the UK’s highest and lowest achieving students (PISA,2000; PIRLS 2001). Though intervention is usually effective at any age, (Brooks et al., 2001), longitudinal studies of adults (e.g. Bynner and Parsons, 1997) suggest that secondary schooling - and chiefly the first year - amounts, in practice, to the last chance for most to catch up. The most common difficulty is with spelling, then writing, and finally with reading, but reading underpins the others. And writing presents the greatest overall challenge; writing difficulties that are not remedied during schooling seem the least likely to improve with interventions in adult life (Brooks et al., 2001).
The thrust of what follows is drawn from the Basic Skills Agency’s (BSA) eight studies of effective practice with literacy; they targeted schools in challenging contexts (1997-2004; www.basic-skills.co.uk).
 
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