Surprised nobody other than HYUFD is interested in Justine Greening hinting at a leadership bid. What odds can be got on her?
Speaking as a great fan of Justine Greening as Education Secretary where her key talent was not to royally bugger things up a la all her predecessors and especially Nicky Morgan and Michael Gove, whatever they are they're still much too short. You need more than that from a PM.
I’ve* been doing some research into phonetics vs whole word and other trading approaches
No (and do you mean 'training' rather than 'trading')?
The best advice I could give you would be to find what method works for your(?) child and go with it. That may be phonics, or phonetics, or spelling out letter by letter, or a mixture.
One of the most damaging ideas of the National Curriculum, brought to its apogee with those stupid Literacy and Numeracy hours, was that all children learn the same way, and therefore teach them the same way and they will all learn the same things at the same rate - with predictably disastrous results.
Without wishing to sound all Vygotskean, this idea was such obvious and total bollocks that you wonder even somebody of the limited intellectual calibre of the average official at the DFE would entertain it for more than a second.
In Scotland we have the delights of the very badly named Curriculum for Excellence. This involves listening to a story tape of the book before the children “read” it with the consequence that a child with a good aural memory, like my son, doesn’t need to learn to read at all. It was L2 before we worked that one out.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immurement#Human_sacrifice_when_constructing_buildings
It is sometimes said that the nursery rhyme 'London Bridge is falling down' relates to walling up children in the construction.