Phonics Check

[LGP]

First of all, for those not on Twitter, thank you for an excellent conference. Really interesting and useful, and great to meet some of my phonics heroes

Does anyone know, are the DfE (or anyone else) doing analysis of phonics check down to individual school level of the 611 high scoring schools, and is that data available? I've been thinking that it might be useful to know:
% scores
KS2 scores (in the future I know, as I read Jennifer Chew's comment about PSC kids now being in year 4)
% FSM
% SEN
phonics programme/framework used

Could helpfully tie-in with Debbie Hepplewhite's 'Simple View of Phonics Provision' slide ie. how do these 611 high score schools get their good results?

[JIM CURRAN]

You're absolutely right LGP,that's the type of data that needs to be collected and collated.It will give an overview of the bigger picture and hopefully produce the type of research based evidence that we need.

[kenm]

Does anyone know, are the DfE (or anyone else) doing analysis of phonics check down to individual school level of the 611 high scoring schools, and is that data available?

See my post half way down this page.
I sent a very similar proposal via my MP to the DOE last June, and he forwarded to me the replies he received, first from Gove, that merely referred to DOE papers that I had already read, and later from Nicky Morgan. Neither of these indicated that DOE was doing anything useful with this valuable information, which becomes even more so when combined with KS2 results for the children who took the 2012 phonics check.

In December, the Commons Select Committee for Education invited interested parties to submit evidence in relation to the current policy on Phonics "in order to shape future Committee work". They have neither held a committee public session nor published a report on the teaching of reading for several years.

[geraldinecarter]

Vital information, LGP and thanks also to KenM - perhaps this is an area that ResearchEd could advise on?

[LGP]

Hi. Going back to my original post about PSC scores and useful data:

(% scores,
KS2 scores (in the future I know, as I read Jennifer Chew's comment about PSC kids now being in year 4),
% FSM,
% SEN,
phonics programme/framework used)

If this is potentially useful data for RRF, how difficult is it to collect it?

I'm doing a little dummy run with Islington Council at the moment to see how easy it is to get hold of PSC results for each school in the borough, then sift out the ones scoring 95%+ and starting from there.

Anyone interested in the results/trying to expand it?

[Papermover]

Hi LGP,

I'd love to know about Islington schools and the PCS. All the Islington schools local to us teach Whole Word.

If you email me what you have sent to Islington I could try with Camden. Although both areas have a lot of VA schools, so I am not sure if the Boroughs would give out the scores at those schools.

Why did you chose Islington?

[LGP]

Hi Papermover - I tried Islington because I have a contact who works there and found out that it was the Head of School Improvement who holds the PSC data for the Borough so he could email them direct.

Fingers crossed. Then I'm going to try my local borough. Would be interesting to see any individual school results I think - Borough-wide doesn't give a detailed picture.

I'll post the text if you want but at moment we've just asked preliminary question. Otherwise I think key is to find out who holds the data in each council?

[Papermover]

Well good luck LGP

[LGP]

First response from Head of School Improvement at Islington - submit FOI request! We'll dig a bit deeper to see why but will submit one anyway.

[Papermover]

Surely the fact that you have submitted a request for information means Islington should deal with it under FOI rules; you don't need to say "this is a FOI" request?!

[chew8]

I see that the final NFER report on the phonics check is out:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/s ... uation.pdf

Jenny C.

[Debbie Hepplewhite]

There's a thread about this on the IFERI site - and Dick Schutz has some interesting comments to make re the NFER authors' analysis and other suggestions:

http://www.iferi.org/iferi_forum/viewto ... ?f=2&t=416

[chew8]

Has Dick Schutz sent comments direct to the NFER evaluators? I don't think he will be the first to raise certain points, but it would do no harm for the NFER people to hear from someone outside the UK. I can supply an appropriate e-mail address if necessary.

Jenny C.

[Debbie Hepplewhite]

Jenny, that would be great, thank you.