Teaching methods and results

“…it looks like every responsible parent’s dream: absorbed faces, intelligent questions, patient teachers, general calm.”
                     Alan Franks, The Times, August 2007

 

Our teachers use a no-frills approach which concentrates on high quality teaching along traditional lines to enable children to master basic skills quickly. We emphasise phonics-based reading and mental arithmetic. We want children to be able to read fluently, spell accurately, know their times-tables and do long division. We also try to teach them a little bit about the history of this country and its institutions.

(Left) Jade learning her times-tables at King’s Cross

We regularly test children’s reading ages using the respected Holborn Reading Scale. Our aim is to have the children reading at a level appropriate to their age as soon as possible, and then move ahead, as a child who reads well will make rapid progress in all other subjects. Children with special educational needs are given one-to-one support.

Resources

Irina Tyk's Butterfly Book, a phonics-based reading course, has proved very effective in our supplementary schools. It teaches children to decipher words by recognising the 44 sounds that make up the English language. It is straightforward and easy to grasp.

Textbooks published by Galore Park are popular, as they present a thoroughly traditional pedagogic approach in a lively and modern format.

We also regularly read Our Island Story with the children.

We encourage the children and parents to read together regularly. Our classes contain book boxes so the children can take home a new book each week. The boxes contain classic stories, poetry and children’s favourites such as books by Michael Morpurgo, Anne Fine, Dick King-Smith and Michael Rosen.

Results

At the 2007 summer school we tested the children on the first and last days, and found that in the two-week period of morning lessons only, the reading age of the children increased by an average of one year and nine months. This being an average, some increases were of course greater.

In September 2006, when seven-year-old Saurav joined one of our Saturday schools he couldn't read past the letters of the alphabet. We set to work using the Butterfly Book and within three months Saurav had a reading age higher than his chronological age. In the 2007 summer school Saurav’s reading age increased to nine years and nine months – nearly two years above his actual age.

(Right) Linda Webb teaching at the 2007 summer school

Even more dramatic was the case of eleven-year-old Rebekka, who was unable to read beyond the most basic level when she joined us in 2006. Jason Stainer, a primary school teacher who has a full-time job in Hillingdon, has been travelling to King’s Cross every Wednesday evening to teach Rebekka, who is now reading confidently and ready to profit from her secondary school education.

Another of our pupils, 13-year-old Prithu, won a scholarship to attend Bancroft's School, a prestigious independent school. This was a welcome alternative to his local school in East London which is notorious for drugs and knives. Prithu has gone on to win the headmaster’s commendation for excellent work. We have other children, equally bright, whose life-chances we can enhance by giving them an education which, for whatever reasons, their full-time schools are unable to provide.

(Left) Marley reading from 'Funtastic Phonics' with Meaghan Delandro

There is nothing magical about how these results are achieved. They entail good, committed teachers who turn up, week after week, often improvising makeshift classrooms in community centres, to teach the children the rudiments of literacy and numeracy.