This will bring back memories for some of you:
The Initial Teaching Alphabet was a radical, little-known educational experiment trialled in British schools (and in other English-speaking countries) during the 1960s and 70s. Billed as a way to help children learn to read faster by making spelling more phonetically intuitive, it radically rewrote the rules of literacy for tens of thousands of children seemingly overnight. And then it vanished without explanation. Barely documented, rarely acknowledged, and quietly abandoned – but never quite forgotten by those it touched.
I just missed experiencing the delights of the Initial Teaching Alphabet. I knew of it; a few of the Ladybird ITA books, including, if I recall correctly, “Peepl at Wurk: The Poleesman” as illustrated in the article, lingered in cupboards and crannies at my primary school. I remember asking what those funny letters were and being given a fairly good explanation. I was quite old before I realised that most people didn’t know about it.
Looking at the Guardian article to which I link above and at the Wikipedia article on the ITA, the choice of letter forms seems to have been amateurish. Some of them resemble the letters of the International Phonetic Alphabet, but many of characters and pairs of characters used to represent vowels and diphthongs in the ITA contradict the way those same characters are used in the IPA. And what in the name of Paul Passy’s sainted aunt was the point of borrowing the “long S”, ʃ, from the IPA but then not using this character on its own to replace the digraph “sh”, as the IPA does? The ITA spelling of “ship” appears to be “ʃhip”, which is the worst of both worlds – the children had to learn the difficult concept that two letters can represent one sound, but still had to unlearn the funny S before they could read the word as it was written outside school.
The Guardian article, and even more so the comments to it, make much of the fact that the creator of the ITA, Sir James Pitman (the grandson of the man who invented Pitman’s shorthand) was a Conservative MP. In fact he was the sort of Progressive Conservative that socialist charities like to have on the Board of Trustees to prove they are not irredeemably partisan. “As a member of parliament, he championed many notable causes, notably nationalisation, education, and world security.” He was one of a long line of would-be reformers of English spelling and comes across as motivated only by a well-meaning desire to help the children of the English-speaking world cope with our famously odd orthography.
Pity the ITA was a flop. Well, probably a flop – though it certainly disappeared from schools quickly enough, and most of those who remembered it speak of the difficulty of having to learn to read twice, no systematic survey of its results was ever made, so we cannot be sure. A few brave voices in the comments say that it did them no harm and one or two even say it helped them.
However the majority view (which I share) is that it was one of many foolish experiments carried out on schoolchildren by bright-eyed educationalists throughout the 1960s and 70s because parents in those days were far too trusting of authority. Some of the Guardian commenters take a harsher view. Someone calling themselves “karapipiris” thunders,
The elephant in the room is this:
It was precisely this inconsistency that Conservative MP Sir James Pitman – grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand
In any society when power and influence is hereditary what one will get is damage done by trying out ideas of incompetents in the real world. I can imagine that dozens of people dedicated to educating children at the time actually had good ideas on how to do better, but they were not aristocrats.
In vain do other commenters point out that Pitman’s knighthood was not hereditary and that the ITA was actually a cross-party initiative originally proposed by a Labour MP, Montefiore Follick; the upvotes still flow in a mighty river to Mr, Ms, or Mx Karapipiris for saying that the reason that this ill-conceived scheme was so casually inflicted on so many children was that its leading spirit had a knighthood.
Karapipiris is wrong about the aristocracy part, but right about it being remarkable how little discussion or testing there was before an experiment which obviously had the potential to harm the children it was meant to help was launched in thousands of schools.
Someone called “BFEMBis” thinks they have seen through the conspiracy:
Apparently it was never introduced at Eton.
Ditto: Harrow
Ditto: St Paul’s
Ditto: Charterhouse, Winchester, Merchant Taylor’s, Gordenstoun, Benenden,…Strange, that.
‘Makes yer fink,’ in’nit ?
Like Karapipiris, BFEMBis got plenty of upvotes for this asinine comment, although in fairness to the Guardian commentariat, the person who pointed out that all the posh schools listed start taking pupils at the age of thirteen got more. Once again, however, I must admit that BFEMBis does have the shadow of a point. I don’t know what the use of pseudo-Cockney eye dialect in “Makes yer fink,’ in’nit” was meant to convey, but the relatively low uptake of the ITA by private schools does indeed make yer fink. Despite being infested with at least as high a proportion of kaftan-wearers as the state sector, the private sector does seem to escape the worst of these fads. It introduces mad schemes just as enthusiastically as the state sector does but is quicker to dump them when they don’t work out.*
Why is that then? Why do private schools on average have stronger immunity to fads than state schools do? If BFEMBis and his/her/their upvoters finked a little more deeply about that question they might realise why so many people remain willing to pay double for their child’s education despite all that the current government throws at them.
A private school – or a “public” school in the British meaning of the term – cannot afford consistently bad results. “Bad” is a relative term: a surprising number of the UK’s fee-paying schools are aimed at children with special educational needs who have been failed by the state system. But whether success is measured in Oxbridge admissions or some kid who had been written off unexpectedly scraping a couple of GCSEs, a fee-paying school must be able to convince parents and prospective parents that the service they offer is worth the cost. If it cannot, those fees will dry up faster than you can say nief.
*Very occasionally, they do work out.
???
Anyone finking for more than 3 seconds will have spotted that BFEMBis is being obtuse.
The top public schools require candidates at the of 13 to have a good – if not excellent – command of the language as she is spoke.
It’s positively absurd to think they would ever require a basic introductory reading scheme.
WTF?
Are Cuisenaire rods still in use?
I was briefly at an ITA school in the late 1960s and my granny thought it was all utter bollox 😀
With learning anything you have to be learning what is actually used out there in the real world. Nothing in the real world is published in ITA, so it’s pointless – beyond that, damaging – to teach it as a method of learning how to use the real world.
And, as ever with a pronounciation-based spelling sheme – who gets to decide the pronounciation? du yer ga haim or du yu goh houm?
Those quotes are reminiscent of my occasional forays into the bbc pidgin section in search of light relief.
Incidentally my old school, Merchant Taylor’s, is in my opinion, fortunate to be included in that august list (maybe the writer was another OMT?).
I finally washed my hands of the place when the craven governors, at around the time of the Floyd protests, bowed to pressure and renamed my old house which had previously honoured the historically significant former pupil Robert Clive in favour of an obscure sportsman.
David Roberts, here is the Cuisenaire company website: https://cuisenaire.co.uk/
It was probably (though not provably) a bad idea from the point of learning to spell, but it was a very interesting attempt at a quasi-phonemic spelling reform that handled various dialects of English while retaining much of the look of traditional spelling. An interesting failure, and not deserving of ridicule. What does deserve ridicule and indeed contempt is the whole system of state education.
Anybody else not having comments show up for this post?
(Edit: Funny, but I post the comment, and then all the others show up.)
Yup. Not working for me at all on Chrome on macOS but fine on my phone
Ted,
I had that problem earlier (Win 11, Firefox) but it seems OK now.
Graham,
Interesting experiments should be kept in the lab until ready. What is worth ridiculing is even if ITA made initial learning to read easier either the entire English speaking World would have to adopt it fully and tranliterate EVERYTHING or you’d have to learn to read twice. That is why it is ridiculous.
The morons are out in the comments there too spraffing nonsense about the “whole word” approach, belligerently unaware that you have to go through phonics to learn to read at all before the whole word thing works.
Grrr!
I imperfectly-remember some sort of appearance of the ITA concept at my primary school.
I’m not clear on the exact details, but I broadly-grasped that the headmaster suddenly found himself meeting with a succession of parents – including my father, who was not a native English speaker, had to learn it from scratch, but spoke like a BBC radio announcer – that there certainly wasn’t going to be any of this going on in his school, and how he squared it with the council was his problem to solve. THC, it disappeared about as quickly as it had arrived. Bunch of crap. English as she is spoke is easy to learn when you have a skilled and committed teacher, and I should know.
llater,
llamas
I remember “ITA” – it is one of the reasons that Mrs Williams (in a village near here) had to teach me to read, I had been able to read (to some extent) – but then I went to school, and that was Hell-on-Earth. Mrs Williams had her work cut out to undo some (some) of the damage.
It is a useful reminder that the state does not just spend money “to no good effect” – it spends money actively-doing-harm.
I too could not see the comments on this one post until I tried a test post of my own. Then they magically appeared.
Sir Humphrey Appleby smiles from beyond the grave.
@Perry de Havilland
I take it that ‘bollox’ is the ITA spelling of ‘bollocks’?
Hi Natalie
for some reason the comments on this article aren’t showing up?!
Could it be an issue with the backward e in the headline?
Now that I’ve posted, comments are appearing?!
Back in the 1980s I used to help run a karate club. Kids back then seemed to be learning some kind of sounding out letters method of learning to read. This seems quite sensible but appeared to exclude learning the actual names of the letters themselves. If a kid came in with an unusual name and was asked to spell it, he would respond with a series of strange grunts, ach buh cuh duh eh fuh gah huh juh, and so on.
Stonyground – what you describe sounds like an example of “look-say”.
The left do not like phonics because people learn to read that way – and they might read the “wrong” writers, rather than just nodding along to the television and pop music videos. However, the left would be placed in a difficult position by saying “we do not want children to learn to read – at least not to be able to read well”, so they push methods which they know will either NOT teach children to read, or will teach them to read badly, to only a low level.
Just enough to understand slogans on signs – but not able to read well enough to be able to understand dissenting “right wing” books and articles.
As for private schools – yes they teach people to read, and so on. But many of them are infected by the “Woke Mind Virus” as Elon Musk calls it.
An exception is King Alfred’s School in unfashionable Dudley (West Midlands) – which is why the left are trying to destroy it.