All children to read by age 6 according to Tories

I just looked at this article in the Observer. and my heart sank - politicians meddling in things they don't understand again!

As I see it, very few teachers actually understand how to teach (as opposed to delivering lessons) and even fewer politicians understand how children learn.

The government are constantly trying to find a single measurable solution that will teach all children most effectively and have introduced countless reviews / guidance / tests etc etc in pursuit of this ideal.

What they are missing is the fact that there is no single "best" method, each person (child or adult) is an individual and learns different things in different ways. This is what the best of the old fashioned teachers understood, they didn't blindly follow a curriculum or lesson plans, they followed the course but tried to tailor the lessons to suit the children in their class, following the lead of the pupils to determine the pace and detail of the lessons. Obviously there have always been good and bad teachers, but instead of seeking to encourage the good and weed out the bad, the gov't treat teaching just like any job and seek to impose top down uniformity thinking that everyone with a particular qualification is equal and needs only to follow the approved lesson plans in order to deliver the approved lesson which will result in the required level of education being received by the child - What a fantasy!

Our children have learned to read in different ways at different ages:-

My eldest was schooled all the way through, I remember pushing and prodding, the frustration (for both of us) and pressure because he "needed" to to keep up. It took him quite a long time to learn to read and I'm sure it turned him off reading for pleasure.

Our second struggled through the first few years in school and when we took him out he was at the struggling to read sentences stage, we took the pressure off and simply read to him and helped when he wanted - within 3 months he was happily reading Harry Potter :-) He was regarded as "backward" in school and not expected to achieve much, now at the age of 12 he has played in the Junior World chess championships, programmes his PC using visual basic, happily discusses physics with us and his mental arithmetic is way faster than mine.

Our third came out of school totally unable to read, she got by in class by memorising entire books when the teacher read them out and then reciting them from memory (using the pictures on each page as a trigger). The teacher was convinced she could read but was simply being uncooperative when faced with a new book! Again we stopped pushing and simply followed her lead, it took a while but when she was ready, she came to us for help and learned to read fluently within a few days.

No way will I let any teacher come in and interfere with my child's learning!