Early intervention in education is 'key'

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Nardia Foster, national chairman of Voice, speaks to ePolitix.com about her views on educational practices.

Could you tell us a little about your role at Voice and what it entails?

I was the national vice chair for a year and have now become the chair – which means I will be the face of Voice for the year and attend all the national events. I also continue to partake in local events representing Voice members in Enfield, where I live.

What are your views on early intervention in education?

A lot is said on early intervention, but not much is done. I have been involved in education for a long time and have had experience of teaching from nursery to tertiary. Most recently I have been in a primary school, after being head of psychology in a secondary school. I wanted to find out what was going on at primary level, after so long involved in secondary education.

I had heard the reports that some children were leaving primary school unable to read and that worried me, so I went to a primary school and taught a group of Year 1s – 5 and 6 year-olds – for two terms.

I made up my mind that these children are going to learn to read. When I started trying to achieve this, I realised that I was having a number of battles with critics of this idea and not getting the support that I expected to receive. Being a psychologist, I am very aware of the learning difficulties that children can suffer from. I really believe that children can learn to read – practice and repetition are key to this.

In the class I was in, I could see that some of the children were frustrated and bored and they needed to be challenged. The scheme was successful; by the end of two terms some parents said to me ‘I have a new child. Their behaviour has changed and they love to read.'

The intervention of making the children read every day and giving them support encouraged the parents of the children at this school to set up a reading group. The children got excited, but also the parents got excited – all because of the discipline of committing ourselves to education on a daily basis.

It was not always easy to achieve this, because of the pressure of the timetable, and I would sometimes get frustrated. The most important thing, though, is that these children can read, because they can then access the education system and are not so dependent on the teacher. As a teacher you can then find out which children can read and which children cannot, and focus on those who cannot. A teacher can then concentrate on the weakest children in the classroom.

Are young children under too much pressure at schools?

Early intervention is not pressure. I was very fortunate because the school I was in had a wonderful team that understood what I was doing.

Having said that, other teachers who didn't have the experience I have had may have felt intimidated to deliver everything that is in the curriculum at such an early age. I felt that reading opens the door and, if you focus on that, children can catch up on the rest. I feel that the timetables for very young children are too loaded.

We need to be clear about what children need to know at certain ages. If the child can read first, and then take on board everything later, you haven't lost anything – in fact, you've gained. This is better than to have a child go through a system where there is so much on the schedule that they haven't even learnt to read before they go to secondary school. I see this as wrong and frustrating for the children.

The child that can't read at secondary school level may then not want to come into school, and so this causes all sorts of problems. The education system creates all these problems because we load too much on. We should focus on what is needed at a certain age and then develop and build up the timetable as the children get older.

Do parents get enough support to raise their children? Is this a role that the state should play, or is it better left to individual parents?

In the school that I was at, 85 per cent of children had English as a second language. Some of the children that I taught are the first English readers in the family.

Parents may want to help their children in these circumstances but they can't speak or read English. For children, learning is vital. Once I had helped the children to learn how to read, parents would come to me and I would read with the parents so that they, in turn, could read with their children. The parents could then come to me and they understood that I would help. I would do anything I could to help the child, but also help the parents.

Government and education professionals need to recognise that to send a book home, or set homework, where the parents can't speak or write English, is foolish.