The Department for Education and Skills are interfering again. This time they are handing out one size fits all advice on how to teach our young children. They have produced a whopping 208 page document telling professional teachers how to teach. Unsurprisingly the NUT has described it as insulting and criticised it as another attempt to micro-manage classroom practice. The report, called the Rose Review (conducted by Sir Jim Rose, a former director of inspection at Ofsted) recommends that reading be taught through the use of synthetic phonics, which involves children learning individual letter sounds before blending them to form words. But it is the excessive detail with which teachers will be most frustrated - it even comes with a DVD which runs through a six phase programme telling them how to teach the children. Phase one tells teachers to take their pupils on "listening walks".
Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers has responded to the review by saying “Individual teachers should be allowed to do what they have always done, that is to make assessments of the individual children in their class and to make a judgment of what is the most appropriate way to get youngsters to read.” Yet the Tory's shadow Schools Minister Nick Gibb has said "What you really need is a programme that says, this is what you do on day one and this is what you do on day two.” Yes, Nick Gibb from the same party that has just given us the slogan "Our Society, Your Life". The same party that claims "people know best" and should be left to control their own lives, in contrast to the interfering "big government" policies of the incoming Prime Minister Gordon Brown. How can a party that wants to tell teachers how to teach on a day by day basis be anything other than controlling big government?