They all cover it. They have to. But the depth of study and the expertise they promote in their trainees is at best variable and at worst cursory and confused. Bearing in mind we send a quarter of 11 year olds to secondary school below the expected reading standard...
...all new teachers should be experts, not only in phonics instruction with deep code instruction knowledge but in all elements of reading instruction: automaticity, prosody, rate and accuracy as well as the promotion of vocabulary and comprehension development.
Any new teacher who has studied for up to 3 years, and who does not have substantial expertise in reading instruction has been failed by their institution and will either have to be trained by their school - at considerable expense - or more likely...
...will fail numbers of children for many years. And there really is no excuse. We know how to teach children how to read. It does require considerable knowledge and expertise but that is why we insist on well educated trainee teachers. Failing them, fails children.
The NQT training we run with trainees from across the country, admittedly only anecdotal evidence, indicates not only the poverty of reading instruction training but also the negligible amount of study time allocated to it.
If primary education training institutions had one job, it would be to ensure their charges could teach reading, with the acknowledgment of the complexity of the English alphabetic code.
‘it is difficult to imagine how teachers can explain the regularities in our writing system to new readers without having a command of it themselves.’ (Rayner,2013).
