The National Literacy Trust has been campaigning to boost low literacy levels in children from disadvantaged areas, but it needs to be made a national priority by all. Results from the Fair Education Alliance report shows that the country will end up paying double if we let this go on because we will have to pay for the fact children have failed at education. The government need to get this right as the children of today are the generation of tomorrow.
Living in poverty and having low literacy levels is a vicious cycle that is evidently hard to break. It is time for policymakers to focus on ways to boost children’s literacy levels at home and reinforce learning outside of school. Through inspections of schools, and work with disadvantaged schools across the country, it is clear that teachers are doing their best to teach children. Staff are doing a great job and helping to improve the outcome of children’s lives.
There must be more activities put in place to support these children. One way is to have the remaining amount of pupil premium distributed among those with the highest needs. This time in their life is vital, and they are building skills that they need for the rest of their life. The qualifications of staff have an impact on the setting as those with entry-level teaching qualifications are less likely to say they are “very confident” sharing stories with children. In contrast, practitioners with postgraduate teaching qualifications are not as confident.
Investments Have Been Made To Improve Literacy
The best way to ensure the settings with a larger number of deprived children are supported is to concentrate the pupil premium. Although investments have been made to improve literacy, writing, speaking and listening skills, they still remain a challenge to social policies in the UK. Ways to solve these low literacy levels have been driven strategically through top-down approaches. However, it is believed that a lack of skills is due to cultural and social problems. It is often affected by the learning environment at home and the attitudes towards learning from both the child and the parent.
The National Literacy Trust is seeing improvements in the attitudes towards literacy levels in these areas due to the help of the local authority and community support. There are involvements from the Fair Education Alliance to unite organisations from across education, business and charity. They are also there to promote improvements in the education of a child’s life.
For the poorest families to receive the best support, we must join resources to close the literacy gap, leading to a fairer society.
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