Nursery World - Straight talking on language skills

Following a survey of headteachers in Wales, Alan Wells, director of the Basic Skills Agency, was quoted as saying, 'The number of children starting school with poor speaking and listening skills should cause us all to worry, and the numbers are going up' (13 March). I can think of a good few more causes for worry. There is the dangerous suggestion that inviting 'opinions' from a small number of headteachers in Wales counts as reliable research. There is the naive support for a long tradition of believing that things were always better in the past - whether that be in my childhood, the desperate years between the two world wars, the Edwardian imperial decade, and so on, back to ancient Greece.

I can think of a good few more causes for worry. There is the dangerous suggestion that inviting 'opinions' from a small number of headteachers in Wales counts as reliable research. There is the naive support for a long tradition of believing that things were always better in the past - whether that be in my childhood, the desperate years between the two world wars, the Edwardian imperial decade, and so on, back to ancient Greece.

There is also the worrying tradition of professionals, especially teachers, being surprisingly ignorant of the home lives and cultures of the children they teach. The resulting myths about children who are never spoken to at home were brilliantly challenged by Tizard and Hughes in the early 1980s.

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