How well they can learn when they get there
depends on their faith and confidence in their ability to learn.

Today, most* of our children’s futures are in danger. 

 

 

Most children are improficient readers. 

They can’t escape reading. Everything that must be learned by reading is harder for them to learn. Month after month, year after year, they blame themselves for not being able to read well. Chronically feeling ‘not good enough at learning’ erodes their faith and confidence in learning.

______________

 

 For most of these children and for the education system as a whole, the bottleneck to improvement, is reading*.

______________

 


Poor decoding, insufficient vocabulary, and emotional aversions are most the common bottlenecks to reading improvement.

Decoding: the bottleneck to improving decoding is code-confusion: 

 

weird – handkerchief – cemetery – rhythm – embarrass – pharaoh 
(AtoZ  –  Letterscope)



 


* Both the lack of content access and the collateral damage to learners confidence in learning. See: What’s At Stake and Shame. Reading scores have barely changed in the 25 years we’ve been gathering national data: