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Thoughts and ideas on education, culture, psychology, social science and more from our academics, students, alumni and wider community to create lasting and evolving change. Podcasts brought to you by UCL Institute of Education (IOE), the world's leading centre for education and social science research, courses and teaching, and a faculty of University College London (UCL).
More from us: https://ucl.ac.uk/ioe
[Male Voiceover]
You're listening to IOE Insights. The UCL Institute of Education podcast at University College London.
[Charlotte Hacking]
The problem with reading and writing now is when you have dominant ideologies that take over the teaching of reading and writing, and we have had a very dominant ideology about a specific way of teaching phonics that has led to some of this imbalance that we wanted to rectify through the work. And again, for teachers in the classroom, that's really problematic because you've got that dominant ideology then coming into the curriculum, being then assessed in the assessment system that you've got, but also then being inspected from the inspecting system. So teachers are bound to actually teach in that way. And you know, what when we started to develop the model together, it was in response to teachers coming and saying to me things like, I know this is wrong, but I just have to do it.
[Female Voiceover]
This is Research for the Real World. Conversations about education and social science research and its impact on policy, practice, and our everyday lives.
[Mark Quinn]
This is Research for the Real World. Hello, I'm Mr. Mark Quinn, and I'm the Deputy Programme Director for Early Career Teacher Entitlement Programs in the Centre for Educational Leadership at the IOE. In this season, we're highlighting the work of the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy, or HHCP for short. The centre focuses on children from birth to 11 years, and its aim is to influence change and educational policies in order to nurture a more equitable society for all. One of the centre's focal points concerns the curriculum. So with this in mind, I'm delighted to welcome back to the Research for the Real World studio Professor Dominic Wyse, and for her first time, Charlotte Hacking. You're very welcome, both of you. Dominic is Professor of Early Childhood and Primary Education and the Centre's founding director, internationally recognized for his influential work on the teaching of reading and writing. Dominic co-developed the award-winning theory, the double helix of reading and writing, with Charlotte, who is the teacher engagement lead at the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy. Her special interests lie in early years education, early reading development, the development of writing, and the use of picture books and poetry to raise children's engagement and attainment. Don, we're going to kick off with you. So the first question really is: why is language such a central feature of the curriculum? Why does it matter so much for children's learning?
[Dominic Wyse]
Yeah, I think the main importance of language is it's everywhere. So in every subject of any curriculum, it's all developed, mediated, taught, and learnt through language. But not only that, pupils, you know, for example, even when they start their nursery education these days, maybe as young as two, three certainly, it's all about language. Their language is very what will be well on its way, but crucial point at which they can develop more diversity, sophistication in their language and enjoy it more. So and as I think we'll come on to more later, language, of course, is the is the foundation of literacy. They're inseparable, but as we will make clear, there are really important distinctions, especially for how you teach it most effectively.
[Mark Quinn]
Okay, okay, so you've used the literacy word, and we might, as you say, talk about how we distinguish between literacy and language. And maybe Charlotte, you might start us with that because I'm really interested in what you can tell us about what literacy really means for children as they grow up. Because you know, we hear obviously that literacy is like sort of key to every door, it opens up all the all the uh possibilities for young people as they go as they go through their lives. So, can you explain what it really means in practice for children as they grow up?
[Charlotte Hacking]
Yeah, absolutely, and there is that important distinction. Language is a part of literacy, and it is the foundation from which literacy is built. I think it was James Britton who said reading and writing are built on a sea of talk, so that language is the foundational entry point for children. But becoming literate means really being able to engage with all forms of reading, writing, language to be a part of society. You know, writing is important, reading is important. If we can't read, we can't pick up a prescription from the doctor and see that we've been given the right medication, we can't fill in forms, we can't navigate timetables. It's really important that we have all of those interconnected elements together of reading, writing, and talk to be able to be fully and functionally literate. There's a lot of talk about language and literacy at the minute. A lot of the headlines saying children are coming in with lower and lower levels of language and literacy. So it's a real focal point, particularly in the early years at the minute, and thinking about what we can do to guide children into reading and writing really well is the foundation of the work that Dom and I have done. There's a lot of focus on phonics, for example, but actually having that language, having those communal reading and writing experiences that lay the foundations for phonics, having that knowledge of song, story, and rhyme as children enter is so important.
[Dominic Wyse]
Can I just nip in and add something there? We're going to come to some of the details of our new theory in a while. But I think one of the many things that we've been heartened by is the invitations for both of us, together and separately, to speak in places where we weren't expecting to have influence. So if one week I end up speaking to more than a thousand primary and early years teachers in China and researchers and policymakers, clearly the model that we've developed, the theory we've developed, has interest there. And other places, you know, I was in Spain the other week, I'm off to Iceland soon. Places where, of course, you see, we've built our whole theory around the idea that classrooms all over the world are full of languages. And even, you know, let's take, if you like, a small school in rural Cumbria in England, people may be surprised at the way that languages are present, not to the degree perhaps in the big inner city areas. But if you also think about children's accents, dialects, and the grammar of dialects, and indeed the way that language is so intimately connected to identity, then and these are the kind of ideas that our work is built on. And maybe to some people listening today that is self evident, but we know from looking across the field it is not self evident. There are plenty of narrow models that say just do it like this.
[Mark Quinn]
Yeah, but I'm just going to come into this about language because I I think it's nice we've started with this distinction actually between language and literacy. And as you were speaking there, Dom, it occurred to me that sometimes language or languages are posed as a barrier to literacy. Can you just maybe Charlotte, you first of all, just address that for me because obviously you'll have taught in classrooms where there are many languages being spoken, and obviously you're working with teachers where that is the case. And as you're saying, Dom, this is not just an English-centric phenomenon. This goes around the world. Can you just talk about that, why that bar why people think that barrier might be an issue, or and why you think it mustn't be a barrier?
[Charlotte Hacking]
Yeah, absolutely. And I can talk from very real evidence. I'm actually, as well as working at the Helen Hamlyn Centre, I'm working as a practicing teacher in a year two classroom at the minute. So I've got children who are speaking different languages. It's often seen as a barrier because of this incessant search for progress and progress happening very quickly, and the lack of understanding of the time it takes for children's conversational language and then academic language to actually develop in a second language. I think what we need to go back to is that notion and that proven theory that a lot of multilingual children will actually make better progress than monolingual children once they catch up. And we've got to have that knowledge and that understanding that children's first languages need to be redeveloped alongside their language learning in English so that their English language learning has got something to hang on to. So it's really important, and we'll dive into the model as Dom says later, that we start with the children, who they are, which languages they speak, what experiences they have, and not just what languages they speak, but do they read, do they write in those languages? How are those languages different to English? Do they have different sentence structure? Do they have different directionality on the page? And often we're in such a rush to get that progress in English, and the curriculum is so overcrowded. It's the time and space to get that knowledge of how language learning works as a whole, and then how multiple language learning works in parallel that we need to have that time to focus on and to appreciate and to support in the classrooms. I mean, we talk a lot about real text in our work. Do we have those real texts in other languages that we can read to children that they can listen to on audiobooks so that they're developing that text structure knowledge that they're getting alongside the books we're reading in English as well?
[Mark Quinn]
Yeah, I do know this is an international concern actually. I was I was in Saudi Arabia last week and I was listening to educationalists there talking to me about how Arabic, you know, literacy in Arabic is a concern, particularly for those who are being put through or experiencing an English curriculum, you know, maybe an international school sector. So this is a concern not just for us. I know definitely in the headlines, it's definitely something which is debated here, but it's very interesting, Dom, you were saying that you, you know, that this work, the work on the double helix of reading and writing, and you're finding audiences all around the world. Is the debate similar elsewhere? Is it is are are the concerns similar elsewhere?
[Dominic Wyse]
Well, I think the debate about reading is very common in very many parts of the world because being literate, so and I'm saying reading for now, we perhaps come on to the how writing gets a bit neglected sometimes, but becoming literate, of course, is so fundamental to many things in life. So, you know, down to the instrumental reading of a butter timetable, reading a prescription, through to reading signs, you know, wherever they are, through to just the sheer pleasure that's possible through reading, you know, reading just because you feel like reading, whatever that is, and however that is read. So, as do you know, it's also used typically as a benchmark. So international comparative studies often use whether children, pupils can read as a measure, even of whole education systems. In so many ways, it's important.
[Mark Quinn]
Right. So, this is why it gets the attention, I guess. Why reading in particular gets the attention? Is it because of the international league tables that throw that shed whatever light that they do on this? I think for the non-specialist Charlotte and Dom, they must feel a bit mystified about why there is just so much brouhaha out there about how we teach children how to read. Can you sort of lance that for us? What why why is the media so attentive to how we teach children how to read? Charlotte, you can go first.
[Charlotte Hacking]
You know, I I remember a quote back from Margaret Meek in about 1992, which talks about the constant fact that there's always a crisis in literacy. And it's because governments always invest so much money into it. And again, parents are really wanting to know how well their kids are doing. You know, governments want to know if their money's being spent well. There's been a lot of money spent in the teaching of reading. You know, go back to my time in teaching of reading. I was teaching for a few years just before Tony Blair bathed in with his education, education, education, and with it came the literacy strategy, which was systematic and measurable through SATS with a lot of focus on the skills of reading and writing. Flash forward to the end days of the strategy, and you've got Stephen Anwyll, who was the director of the strategies, he was actually coming forward and saying, if we're raising attainment but we're having a problem with engagement, then we're clearly doing something wrong. And it seems that we swing from pendulum to pendulum with reading. Fads and strategies come in and out of fashion. Everyone's always looking for the silver bullet with reading. And what we want to do with our approach is to actually look at all of the evidence with reading and think, what is the right approach? You know, we don't want reading skills and knowledge and reading for education over here, we don't want reading for enjoyment over here. What we want is what is good quality reading instruction and what are all of the components of that so that we can make sure that children have the knowledge and the skills for reading. They also have the motivation and enjoyment to read, but really importantly, they also have the time to read and the access to the quality text that are gonna support the knowledge, the skills, and the motivation and engagement of reading. You know, we've had the reading wars that I'm gonna put that in inverted commas with my fingers, I know you can't see me doing it, that have been raging that swing us from theory to theory, but it's all about, as we call the book, a balanced approach and maintaining that balance in reading development, but also child development alongside that and what's most important for children and when.
[Mark Quinn]
Okay, so before we get too much into the weeds of the uh double helix, we should spend a bit a bit of time, I think, looking at the other strand. So we've spent a little bit of time thinking about reading and why it's so debated in the media and how they, I guess, miss many of the nuances that you were just talking about there, Charlotte. If we could talk about writing and why, and uh Dom, I'll come to you because you've mentioned it already, that it seems to get less attention when it comes to this debate. Why do you think that might be, and and why do you feel it's so important to bring it back into the centre of focus?
[Dominic Wyse]
Well, one kind of simple way it's neglected currently is if your international comparative studies only assess reading and don't really assess writing, then of course any subsequent media attention has to focus on what the data that's there. Writing it remains a challenging thing to assess, meaningfully assess. So to assess writing holistically requires holistic judgments, which of course are subjective. And so then there's an issue there for teaching, writing, researching writing. The measure is not quite the right word, is it? How do we evaluate what is effective writing? And we've been through and are still going through, you know, a dominant idea, for example, in England's national curriculum is that if you teach grammatical terms, you will improve children's writing. The evidence base simply isn't there for that, you know. And that is, in my view, time wasted largely. This is not me saying that grammar per se isn't important. I'm not saying also that children do need to learn how to construct conventional sentences in whatever language they're learning. So, anyway, that the first sort of neglect of writing is current, is continuing. The historical neglect of writing, actually, ironically, you know, you can trace back through in a in a multidisciplinary way the way that oral language was the thing that first interested researchers in this kind of area. And oral language was incredibly dominant. People didn't really bother looking at written language until I believe Derrida came along and said, you know, wait a minute, we need to look at writing. There's a lot of it. What can we understand through it? How should we understand human communication and challenge the linguists so sure over this? Then the media, of course, they have their tropes, they have their the stories that they know will attract readers. So if they've already got a long, you know, a hundred years of history of, if you like, um trying to wind people up a bit or entice them. Just a little caveat actually on the media. There are brilliant journalists doing extended, thoughtful work around all of these issues, well, most of them, but certainly in terms of reading. I remember Alice Bradbury and I were contacted by the new scientists, which is rather unexpected because they tend to feature obviously natural sciences and uh and so on. But but they'd come across our paper in 2022, and the journalist there, Colin Barras, was brilliant at his the level of understanding he'd acquired around the topic, the way he wrote the piece, the way he marshalled the evidence, having talked to many, many researchers around the world. So, and this was a pretty in-depth piece, although The New Scientist is a magazine aimed at the general populace. Nevertheless, it was one of many examples, I think, of um really, really thoughtful journalism.
[Mark Quinn]
Yeah, so it can be done, right? So it there can be public debate about reading and about literacy more generally, which can embrace the nuance, which doesn't have to appeal only to a kind of lowest common denominator, or doesn't just have to respond to a kind of ill reading of a of an international charter of the best readers in the world. It can be more sophisticated than that. But when you when you Charlotte, I'm gonna come to you for this first, when you and and Dom wrote your book about and you developed your theories around your theory around the double helix of reading and writing, that was, to some large extent, a response to the debate which rages um around literacy and more so around reading, as we've explored. Can you just set out for us in as simple terms as possible to non-specialists like myself what this double helix is about? What is the double helix of reading and writing?
[Charlotte Hacking]
Yeah, so as you said, we did this at a certain time in education, and one of the things I didn't mention in my previous answer was you know, the problem with reading and writing now is when you have dominant ideologies that take over the teaching of reading and writing, and we have had a very dominant ideology about a specific way of teaching phonics that has led to some of this imbalance that we wanted to rectify through the work. And again, for teachers in the classroom, that's really problematic because you've got that dominant ideology then coming into the curriculum, being then assessed in the assessment system that you've got, but also then being inspected from the inspecting system. So teachers are bound to actually teach in that way. And you know, what when we started to develop the model together, it was in response to teachers coming and saying to me things like, I know this is wrong, but I just have to do it. And so we were thinking, right, what is the way that we could push forward and see, get teachers to see this is how you become fully literate. We're not against phonics in any way. I'm a massive advocate of phonics and for the systematic teaching of it because I know what it does, particularly for our youngest readers and writers, but it has to be done in the right way. So the model sets to describe what being literate is all about and how we reach that stage where we've got those motivated and engaged readers and writers at the centre. And I think one of the reasons writing has been largely sidelined is because the phonics focus so much on the reading. When actually, when you look at reception children, the way that they really get into reading and to understanding phonics is when they're using it in their own writing, because the phonics is what empowers them to take their own words, to put it down on paper in a way that someone else can understand that. So phonics has to flow through as much with the writing as it does with the reading. So, as Dom said, we have to start with the child, and the double helix model works from top to bottom and into the middle, and at both ends of the helix, it starts with the child. At the top of the model, the child, their languages, and by languages we also incorporate dialects as well, and all of that understanding that I said before about what languages the children are exposed to, what they can read in, what they can write in, how they might say things, what their grammatical patterns might be in spoken language, and at the bottom of the model, the environment the children are built up in, whether they're sung to, whether they're read to, what text they have around them, what general life experiences and understanding of the world they have that then adds to their knowledge as a reader and as a writer. And then through each section of the model, we go through the different stages, more focused on reading at the top of the model and writing at the bottom, but taking children through that journey to learning early phonological and sound awareness into that knowledge of the alphabetic code and the phonic code, into the wider knowledge about words in terms of morphology and orthography, and then into that idea of fluency and comprehension. At the bottom of the model, we look at children's ability to write. So we start with their idea of how they handle objects, how they make marks. The idea that you know a child sitting in a high chair who spilt their yogurt and starts making marks in it is actually being able to realize that their marks can communicate something. Looking then at words and sentences and texts, and again, fed by the real books. And I think one of the things of why texts are so important is that they give as much of the model for what writing looks like as it does for how reading works. You know, when you read a quality text with a child, you get that, you don't need to talk about fronted adverbials, you get it in practice. You can say, why did the author choose to start that paragraph in that way because it moves the action on, because it creates suspense, and when they understand how words and sentences work together to build text, they then have that intrinsic motivation to write as a writer rather than to write because I'm trying to fit an assessment focus or a wow word into my sentence, and that hopefully leads the children to the knowledge for comprehension and composition that we're looking for that drives them to be engaged and motivated readers and writers.
[Mark Quinn]
So you you said so many things there, Charlotte, that I wanted to pick up on, but just because you finished on it, this notion of meaning and motivation, um, and why that's so important for children as they pick up their finger and make a mark, or as they encounter words on a page. Say a little bit about that for us, about that meaning and that motivation, and perhaps if you could also, again, drawing on your current and previous experience in classrooms, how did how do you make that happen? How how do you get that motivation going?
[Charlotte Hacking]
It's got to start from the very beginning. You know, it's not something that you do the phonics and then that happens afterwards. Phonics has to be built on that, it has to happen from children's very first and earliest experiences, which is why singing to children, reading to children, talking to children, playing with them at the very earliest years is really, really crucial. That back and forth conversation that you have together, that idea that you can have a paintbrush, a mark in your hand to actually draw, to mark, to mark make, to write, to model writing around children. You know, we're going to the shops, let's write a list together. I'm going to leave you a note on the fridge to remind you of something, or oh, we're going to fill in a family calendar so that we know what's happening for dinner, or when mummy's out, or when daddy's out. That whole idea of modelling how to be literate in daily life. You know, you started us off with why is being literate important? Well, it is. So much of our world is driven by print and communication and so much more now in through technology. So we need to see how being literate works in our everyday life so that we can be on that journey to be there as well.
[Dominic Wyse]
And if I could just add that back to the point, it's reminded me of the point about how writing can get neglected. I had a doctoral student whose study looked at two and three-year-olds' experiences in a nursery and in particular how the parents understood the literacy that was going on. And while the parents were reasonably confident in many cases to support reading and could see why you would, for example, sit down with your young child and share a book together, their views about writing were typically well, they're not writing, and so they they they didn't engage over writing. And it also comes back, Mark, to what you were saying about meaning. Children's mark making pretty soon becomes an intentional act of meaning making and so as adults, it doesn't need to be too technical. What but what we need to do is just take an interest, you know. If I'm a parent, I need to take an interest. Why you know what is my child trying to communicate here? Whether it's through pictures, eventually it will be through more conventional forms of writing. So again, it's uh it's really interesting how reading and writing intersect or don't.
[Mark Quinn]
Can I can I ask a question a bit about the sort of age and stage of the child? And because of and I want to bring a few thoughts together here, maybe with this question, because I think certain sort of the phonics initiative or drive to have teachers teach children through phonics is largely a primary school and early years phenomenon, not unheard of in the secondary school, but but certainly less a phenomenon in secondary schools. I would suggest also that was my experience as a secondary school teacher, and I certainly spent an awful lot longer deliberately teaching children how to write things rather than teaching them how to read things. Is there is there a shift? Is there a shift and you and sort of and and Dom, you just talked about the parent who's comfortable, uh who can get across the idea of reading, but is maybe a little bit uh reluctant when it comes to writing. Is this to do with the age of the child? Does does something happen as the child gets older? They move from a reader to become a writer?
[Dominic Wyse]
Well, I think definitely yes. I think you know, writing is a form of language that never you never finish developing. I mean, you could say the same as reading to a large degree, but I think with writing there are particular levels of writing that some people will never achieve. So if you say take the world's greatest writers, then obviously most people don't achieve that level of writing. So, however, although I do accept that there's a kind of developmental aspect to this and a progression aspect, as you said, the problem is the as ever, the deficit mentality, the the kind of the thought that, well, they're not ready to write. Well, this we know from I've known from research that was produced more than 20 years ago that the very, very youngest children are intentionally making marks which we should call writing because it is writing, because they're trying to communicate meaning. And that that's the essence of what writing is. Now, it's certainly true. Let me give another category from our double helix model. For example, we there's a bit about forms of writing. Now, understanding forms of writing, while early understanding will be around perhaps what is a book, how is it constructed to some degree? Later on, of course, we develop the ideas around, you know, if you take a print news media, how is it constructed? How are headlines written, and what's a good headline, or you know, how are pictures, photographs integrated deliberately in certain ways to communicate other meanings? And take poetry, of course. Poetry is a wash with you know with sophisticated forms, simple forms, free forms. So that is, I would say, an example of where you write, where I think there are clearly points at which it's advantageous to be focusing on certain big areas, and it's definitely true that you know, the research is clear that for most children around about age six is when that's the best time to help them understand the alphabetic code in alphabetic languages. For some children, it happens earlier, they naturally are curious about how this all works, and so but having said that, as Charlotte has said so clearly before, if you were to take the view, well, because children naturally seem to need systematic teaching of phonics aged about six, therefore that's all we should do, then you have a problem. And that, by the way, is that is one of the major problems, not only in England, but in other systems. Because, and let me give an example of new work we're doing based on the double helix, we're now focusing properly on children with reading difficulties. And one of the many things we've done is we've searched we've surveyed teachers in England about do they either continue with their phonics teaching even if it's not working, or do they try something else? Very roughly speaking, I think it's you know, I don't know, two-thirds perhaps would say we would try something different, but worryingly, somewhere around a third said, no, we just carry on because that's what the national curriculum tells us to do. And it does, it says for children reading difficulty, just keep going with synthetic phonics, even after they've had two years, possibly up to an hour a day, do another year and then just keep doing it. So it was interesting, Mark, when you were speaking about secondary education, and now it's true that if children they have to crack the alphabetic code or they won't learn to read. But what happens as as pupils get older is very difficult, isn't it? Because you've got their self-esteem, always has to be considered. You know, some great work has been done with finding finding books that are genuinely interesting to say a 13-year-old, but also enable them to develop skills and knowledge. But it's it's a it's difficult, it gets more and more difficult, and that's why early intervention is so important.
[Mark Quinn]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've talked about books there, Dom, and actually I want to bring Charlotte in on this because I know it's something that you're particularly passionate about about the use of real books, picture books as well. Can you just sort of draw the line for us, please, between a teacher using a real book in a classroom and uh teaching the children how to read and not just teach them how to read but actually to enjoy the process of reading?
[Charlotte Hacking]
Yeah, it's really important because the the books that are going to motivate, I think it was Cathy Nutbrown who said is the children in the early years who want to use the books that are gonna light the flame of a love of literature that will burn throughout their lives. Before any programme of phonics teaching, children have to be awash with rich, beautiful stories. You know, old classics are old classics because they're brilliant. Michael Rosen's We're Going on a Bear Hunt, Martin Waddell's Our Babies, those are the songs with the rhythms, with the patterns, with the structure. Gain children a sense of the language they're coming into, but also the structure of narratives, and that's really important in their developing knowledge of becoming not just a reader but as a writer as well. You know, we get that sense of there are characters, there are settings, there is a story that follows a particular pattern, it comes to a resolution at the end. Those books are not the books that children are going to be necessarily taking home in their book bags and reading along with their parents in the levelled and the scheme and the decodable readers. Those readers have a very different purpose and aren't your whole class readers that are going to light that flame of the love of literature. They follow very dull sentence structures often because they have to be contrived in that way to fit the patterns that the scheme entails, whether it's a decodable reader using the phonic patterns or whether it's a levelled reader using the high-frequency word patterns. You want to put at the centre of children's literacy learning the real text that are going to keep the children engaged and motivated alongside that skill learning. And again, when you're using a real reader, what you've got to do as a teacher is actually think about the opportunities that that book affords you because with every book, they are using the language that you want to see in learning how to read. It's very easy to pick up a book and say, you know, oh, actually, there's loads of words in here that have got the E sound in it in different ways. We could actually pull that out with the children and look at that and look at how EE and EA are usually used in the middle of a word to represent that E sound. We could look at how Y is often used at the end to represent that E sound at the end of a word. So it's knowing as a teacher what it is that you have to teach and how you bring it out in every aspect of literacy that you're using. You know, you should be using it as you're modelling writing, as you're modelling reading, and actually having a think about how to build that knowledge of grammar vocabulary into your teaching as well. And the real books offer that rich context in which to do it.
[Mark Quinn]
So thanks for that, that's Charlotte. So you've been sort of talking about how with the double helix approach, it's it's more balanced and it allows for, or in fact, it requires phonics to be part of it. So, Tom, can you can you pick that up for us about how how, with this more balanced approach to the curriculum and to teaching, there can be a proper place for phonics and systematically teaching the alphabet and the and the soundings, and also give space for that rich textual experience and the joy of language and everything else that we've also talked about in the podcast so far?
[Dominic Wyse]
Yeah, so systematic teaching of phonics is important. We know this from decades of research. But the the quick the question is what do we mean by systematic? Do we mean you know, months and months, years and years of a pedestrian linear journey from the phoneme A to the phoneme z? No, we don't. So the key thing is well planned, sequenced, obviously adaptive to children's assessed needs. But the key thing that I want to mention today is what we call contextualized phonics teaching. So, as I'm sure Charlotte will say, we argue that the best of children's books and texts can be used as vehicles to deliver outstanding teaching of the alphabetic code. Now, I'm not just saying this anecdotally, there's clear research evidence that if you teach phonics in a contextualized way, you get better outcomes. This evidence is clear from systematic reviews, which review initially start off with hundreds of hits and whittle it down to answer key research questions. But I just want to share briefly two studies that both directly address this. So, one study about Anne Cunningham in 1990 asked the question: is it more effective if you contextualize your phonics teaching or not? Indeed, she found through an experimental trial that if, for example, you say things to children like when they're struggling with a word, you say, Well, look, think about this story about basketball or whatever it is. What do you think the word is in the context of that sentence? And by the way, that is not saying that they should not use their developing knowledge of the alphabetic code. Yes, they should. And yes, they should be trying to sound words out, but it's crucial that that's linked with this idea that it's all about meaning. The whole thing is about meaning. And one other study which was done, the Anne Cunningham study was done with typically developing readers, the Peter Hatcher and Co. study was done with children with reading difficulties. To cut a long paper short, found exactly the same. In fact, they proposed a phonological linkage hypothesis on the basis of it, which of course we've built on. So there's absolutely robust and clear evidence that you get better outcomes if you contextualize your phonics teaching, rather than unduly narrowing and separating it out. And currently, in too many places in the world, it's separate.
[Mark Quinn]
Yeah, I guess rather than sort of finish on that sort of barren landscape, uh, I'm gonna invite Charlotte to paint a different picture for us. So, so you know, I want you to imagine it could be your very own classroom, you know, where contextualized phonics is a thing where language is rich and it's valued, languages are valued, uh, where there's creativity, where there are real books on real shelves. Is that hard to achieve? Or are we are we close to that? Do we have schools where this is taking place? Is this the sort of thing that any trainee teacher who might be listening to this podcast can really attain for their own classroom?
[Charlotte Hacking]
I absolutely don't think it's hard to achieve, but I do think it's hard to achieve in the current climate because, as I said, the curriculum, the assessment systems, and the inspection systems are all driving towards this narrow approach with phonics. It does happen in our school and in our classroom. I can say that hand on heart. We've got a very structured program and systematic program that leads children from in our pre-reception classes, all of that work on early phonological awareness to teaching the alphabetic code systematically in reception. But it's all done through the rich text. You know, we do have explicit teaching of phonics, we introduce the phonemes, the graphemes, we talk about the links between the letters and sounds, but then it is contextualised through the good quality books that we choose for our curriculum that give that broader approach to literacy. We have children who can read, they're obviously at different levels of literacy, as all children will be, but we intervene with our struggling readers because we know them so well and we look at what is it that they need next. You know, some children might need a little bit more phonics, some children might need something very specific for an underlying SEND difficulty that we have. You know, we might we're investigating some kids that have dyslexia and looking at targeted teaching to teach them. But we then move them into year one and year two, where they then open up to the complex code and we look at the morphology of language, we look at the prefixes and suffixes both in our reading and our writing, and again continue to collect contextualize that through real books. Link back to the the answer I gave before about the quality text. You know, every time we look at a book, we go, what are the opportunities within this text to broaden their word knowledge, their word language? When they're doing pieces of writing, we're going, what are they showing us in practice? What are they using and applying? What are they not doing yet? And what can we build into the next sequence? I think the worry that I have with some of the schemes and programs that are going out is that it's shutting teachers' knowledge of how to do that and when to do that, and the time to do that with children as well, because it's very much go on to the next lesson, go on to the next lesson, go on to the next lesson, rather than what are we assessing, how are we building that in. It's going back to that good early years practice of observe, assess, plan, review, and then keep going through that cycle.
[Mark Quinn]
So it remains gloriously possible to have such classrooms, but it's it but it isn't easy. It's particularly not easy because of the way assessment procedures work, because of the, and dare I say it, because of the curriculum that uh teachers are uh obliged to plow through, if not necessarily enjoy as they're doing it in all cases. And I I use that word deliberately, uh the word curriculum, because of course it is the focus of your center. So I'm curious to know what what's next for the Helen Hamlin, what you're working on, what you've got coming up, what you can tantalize the listeners with.
[Dominic Wyse]
Thank you, yeah. Well, on the broader curriculum, I'm continuing to work with the curriculum authority in the Republic of Ireland. And for any of your listeners who want to see what I regard as one of the best primary curricula in the world, go and have a look at what the Republic of Ireland has been doing. We're moving now into the phase of the, we've been working, a group of us have been working with them since 2020. We're moving into the implementation phase, and so these next few years are going to be really interesting to see exactly, Mark, actually, it's related to your earlier question. How will teachers process this quite big change in Ireland? Ireland doesn't change very often, but once every 25 years, and when they do change, they make serious, ambitious changes that teachers do have to, and schools and school leaders and the whole system has to go through thought-thinking and developing. So there's all sorts of things going on at the whole curriculum level. In terms of the language and literacy part of our uh work, we're developing some new work on multilingualism. But one thing that uh listeners may be able to come along to is our by the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy Biennial Conference, which this year on the 19th of November, 2026, will be in the British Library. And we've got some stellar speakers, including some brilliant award-winning children's authors, some fabulous academics, some brilliant practitioners, we've got workshops, we've got keynotes. So if people want a fabulous day to think about the arts and humanities, to think about breadth and balance, then do sign up. And uh perhaps two final things for me. One is we're really intensifying our work on children with reading and writing difficulties. Uh, we're in the middle of a pilot trial at the moment, and we're looking forward to seeing what the outcomes are. And sneak preview, you heard it first on this podcast. There will be a balancing act book two. But that's a wee while away because we haven't even started writing or even decided how we're going to change it.
[Mark Quinn]
I'm I'm looking, I'm looking forward to the new metaphors, Dom and Charlotte.
[Dominic Wyse]
No, the the double helix is going nowhere. What I should say is the double helix is staying where it is.
[Mark Quinn]
Uh, right in the DNA of teaching, as it's where it belongs. Thanks, Dom, and thanks, Charlotte. It's been fascinating as ever to talk to the two of you. This is my second opportunity to sit down with the two of you and talk about uh about your work, and it's been as fascinating as it was uh the first time. So thanks once again for coming onto the podcast.
[Dominic Wyse]
Thanks very much, Mark. It's great to talk.
[Mark Quinn]
You've just heard from Professor Dominic Wyse and Charlotte Hacking. Some of what we've covered today is also available in the episode notes. If you've enjoyed this episode, why not listen to another? Search IOE Insights to find episodes of Research for the Real World, as well as more podcasts from the IOE. And a quick favor before you go if you're listening on Apple or Spotify, we'd really appreciate it if you gave the IOE Insights podcast a rating. Five stars would be nice if you're enjoying the show. And that will help us to reach more people who are interested in hearing about such important work. Uh, I'm Mark Quinn. Thanks for listening.
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