Bullock (1975)

Notes on the text
Preliminary pages Foreword, Membership, Contents, Introduction

Part 1 Attitudes and standards
Chapter 1 Attitudes to the teaching of English
Chapter 2 Standards of reading
Chapter 3 Monitoring

Part 2 Language in the early years
Chapter 4 Language and learning
Chapter 5 Language in the early years

Part 3 Reading
Chapter 6 The reading process
Chapter 7 Reading in the early years
Chapter 8 Reading: the later stages
Chapter 9 Literature

Part 4 Language in the middle and secondary years
Chapter 10 Oral language
Chapter 11 Written language
Chapter 12 Language across the curriculum

Part 5 Organisation
Chapter 13 The primary and middle years
Chapter 14 Continuity between schools
Chapter 15 The secondary school
Chapter 16 LEA advisory services

Part 6 Reading and language difficulties
Chapter 17 Screening, diagnosis and recording
Chapter 18 Children with reading difficulties
Chapter 19 Adult literacy
Chapter 20 Children from families of overseas origin

Part 7 Resources
Chapter 21 Books
Chapter 22 Technological aids and broadcasting

Part 8 Teacher education and training
Chapter 23 Initial training
Chapter 24 In-service education

Part 9 The survey
Chapter 25: I Introduction
Chapter 25: II Primary commentary
Chapter 25: III Secondary commentary
Chapter 25: IV The questionnaire forms (not online)
Chapter 25: V Technical notes (not online)

Part 10 Sumary of conclusions and recommendations
Chapter 26 Conclusions and recommendations

Appendix A Witnesses and sources of evidence
Appendix B Visits made
Glossary
Index

Report of the Committee of Enquiry appointed by the Secretary of State for Education and Science under the Chairmanship of Sir Alan Bullock FBA

London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1975
© Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland.

Chapter 22 Technological aids and broadcasting
[pages 314 - 327]

22.1 There are two points that deserve to be emphasised at the beginning of a discussion of technological aids. The first is that there is no question of the machine taking over the job of the teacher. The second is that we cannot look to any machine to provide of itself some kind of breakthrough in the teaching of reading. Both fallacies are frequently met, and both are based on a misunderstanding of the role of the teacher. However brilliant a technological innovation, success depends on the skill with which the teacher integrates it into his work. It depends on the way in which the new element in a child's learning is supported by and derives meaning from all the other elements. We might begin, then, with a fundamental principle. The equipment is not in itself significant; what is important is the quality of the materials and the use to which they are put. In themselves these are no more prone to poor use than any other teaching materials; but neither do they have any special qualities which will make them succeed independently of the teacher who is using them. This kind of realism is necessary, for technological aids have suffered equally from distrust and from over-enthusiasm.

22.2 These reservations made, we have no doubt that aids of this kind have a considerable contribution to make to language development and the teaching of reading. They give the teacher extended opportunities at various levels of activity, from individual tuition to full class involvement. Most children quickly acquire confidence in their use. Indeed there is a considerable degree of sophistication in the attitude of quite young children to pieces of equipment of various kinds, many of which they are accustomed to handling at home. A child who has learned to control a machine and can operate it at will often acquires a new motivation, especially when he has failed with pencil and paper. A statement as simple as that brings us back to the organisational demands upon the teacher. In his continuous assessment of each child's progress and needs he should see technical aids as another resource available to him to prescribe for a particular situation. And that means knowing the child, knowing the strengths and limitations of various pieces of equipment, and knowing whether any one of them is appropriate for that child on that occasion. This is no small order, and it is not surprising that many teachers feel unable to cope with it. Some are ready to welcome equipment into their classrooms but do not fit it into their programme of work in any planned way. Others find that the attention they must give to one child or a small group operating an audio-visual aid is more than they feel able to justify.

22.3 Teachers require a good deal of help if they are to recognise what audio-visual aids can and cannot do to further their work. They need help not only to understand and feel confident with particular pieces of equipment, but above all to evaluate the material which they present. This means that they must be able to depend upon prompt maintenance and technical advice, and indeed many authorities provide a service which responds promptly to requests for either. Moreover, some of the practices we describe below would make considerable demands upon teachers' time if they were expected to prepare all the tapes, slides, charts and whatever else they might need. We believe that the teacher's role is to organise the learning situation, and that he should be able to rely upon help with the preparation of the materials. How this is provided will depend upon local circumstances, but the experiments carried out by various authorities have indicated some interesting possibilities. For example, some schools can look to a centre which has the task of preparing packs of materials using a variety of audio-visual media, and of providing certain advisory and information services. In at least one authority most of the secondary schools and some primary schools have a Media Resources Officer whose role is to assist in the organisation and preparations of materials and keep the staff informed on current developments in the field. They work with teachers in devising and producing tapes, slides, films, charts etc, and in this situation they have an important inservice training function. They are also responsible for first-line maintenance of equipment, though not as technicians. A third measure is the grouping of a secondary school and two adjacent primary schools for the sharing of equipment and the joint production and use of resources, each group being provided with ancillary help. Some authorities have concentrated equipment and materials in Teachers' Centres, where teachers can experiment, seek advice, and prepare tapes etc on the spot to take back to their schools. A few authorities produce their own television programmes for relay to the schools by a cable system, and this draws teachers into the planning and presentation of content.

22.4 Television is discussed later in this chapter, where we recommend that in common with the other audio-visual media it should be put to more widespread and constructive use in schools. Many young teachers enter their first appointments with little preparation in the use of educational broadcasting. We believe that the information services of the BBC and IBA [Independent Broadcasting Authority, now defunct] should be exploited more vigorously in teacher training. There is a wide range of demonstration material which the Schools Broadcasting Council makes available to colleges. In particular, it has some 80 study boxes, 17 of them devoted to series related to the teaching of English, and these contain film, radio tapes, slides, documentation, and teacher comment and classroom discussion. Not enough use is made of these and other opportunities. Before going on to consider the characteristics and use of a number of individual items of equipment, we must again emphasise the importance of the teacher's control over the media. They must serve his curriculum planning, not dictate to it. This is why it is so important for the subject to be explored in initial and in-service training. We do not suggest that the young teacher should emerge from college with the technical mastery of a wide range of equipment. But we do believe that he should have learned how the media can be made to serve his purposes, and should have had experience of their use in the teaching he himself received.

22.5 After radio, by far the most popular item of equipment is the mains tape recorder. We have discussed its use in the chapter on Oral Language, where we described it as a virtually indispensable instrument. Great advances have been made in the last few years in the development of magnetic recording, and there is now a very varied selection of equipment to choose from. Our survey showed that 80 per cent of the primary schools and 98 per cent of the secondary schools had mains tape recorders, and 14 per cent of the latter had a recording room. Reel to reel mains recorders were certainly more common than battery operated models, which were found in only 57 per cent of secondary and 42 per cent of primary schools. Many schools will have purchased their spool recorders before cassette recorders were fully developed, and the next generation of equipment will probably reflect a recognition of the particular advantages for language work of the battery operated cassette models. On technical grounds alone these have many virtues: simple controls, protection against accidental erasure, automatic sound levels when recording, private listening with earphones, and a sound quality which is satisfactory for most situations. Above all they are portable, which means that a pupil can carry one round for recording conversations with adults or other pupils. This ready manoeuvrability tends to make children use them more naturally than they sometimes feel able to do when grouped round a static machine. The Primary Extension Programme, promoted by the Council for Educational Technology, produced some interesting initiatives in the use of the simple cassette recorder. Nursery rhymes and stories for four and five year olds were recorded on C30 cassettes, some for simple listening, some inviting the children's oral response or participation with flannelgraph and cut-out figures. Each child was given his own earpiece, and the machines were put in the book corner for free use. The children returned to them again and again, and the stimulus to talk was highly productive. This kind of situation is particularly suitable for young children but can be reproduced throughout the age range with appropriate material, particularly with slow learning children. One useful technique is for the teacher to cover up the text of a book, leaving only the pictures exposed. Two or three children are asked to make up and record their own story based on the pictures. When this is transcribed it becomes their own reading book, and they later hear and read the story written by the author of the original.

22.6 Additional equipment can be related to the recorder, so that the visual and aural reinforce one another. For example, easy-loading cameras can be used to produce stills and filmstrips, which are then linked to tape recorded material. Many teachers, both in their own classrooms and at Teachers' Centres, have developed this kind of work in a variety of ways. All those to whom we talked said they found the cassette recorder an indispensable item. Among the uses they listed for it were: developing children's' ability to listen and to follow instructions in completing a task, helping them to record results of personal investigations, giving practice to slow readers by linking cassette to text, recording sounds for a stimulus to talk and writing, interviewing adults and other children, composing commentaries to accompany slide sequences or film, recording stories and poems to build up a library of tapes, and producing sound effects for improvised drama. The most common use we found was the recording of a story or other reading material which the child followed from the book as he listened. Sometimes this simply reinforced the defects of the text, and this again underlines the importance of the teacher's role in evaluating the material. Merely to add a taped reproduction to poor reading matter is to gain nothing. This can be even more true of phonic practice provided in this way, if sound and symbol are not very carefully related. For example, we came across one commercially produced programme where the letters 'b', 'd' and 'p', often a source of difficulty to children, were dealt with in a manner likely to add to confusion rather than remove it. More often than not, however, the examples we saw of the use of cassette/print were very encouraging. Sometimes well-designed commercial products were being used, where book, cassette, slide and film strip made up a unit, each component bearing on the same topic. Also popular were the BBC Radiovision units, where a filmstrip purchased in advance provides the visual element for the radio programme, which can be recorded by the teacher. A minority of teachers had developed their own materials, sometimes using pictures which the children had taken themselves with simple cameras. Children from one inner-city school had visited a cattle market and recorded their impressions visually and orally by way of cine and still cameras and taped interviews, to be linked later to their own written accounts. There is scope for much more imaginative work of this kind, not to mention teacher preparation of materials at the simpler tape/print level. Where an authority has a high speed tape copier available in its audio-visual services, this can be shared between a number of schools, thus permitting an exchange of recorded stories and reference material. For some of the work we have been describing the cassette playback machine will be adequate. This has the disadvantage that it cannot record, but it is very much cheaper than the cassette recorder itself. Two or three fitted with junction boxes and headsets can provide several children with the opportunity to listen to pre-recorded material. We have singled out the portable machine as a particularly valuable instrument, but do not intend by this to minimise the importance of the mains tape recorder. There are many occasions when the latter is the obvious piece of equipment for a particular purpose, and every teacher should have ready access to one. We see the cassette recorder as supplementary to it, and we should like to see one of these in every classroom where the teacher regards it as essential to his work.

22.7 A number of infant teachers now make much use of various specialised machines which use recorded sound to supplement written and pictorial information. With at least one of these machines the pupil can record his own voice, replay, and match his attempt with a master recording. Some machines are moderately expensive (of the same order of cost as a good reel to reel recorder) but are still within the budget limits of most schools, including small primary schools. We asked about three such machines in our survey in an attempt to discover to what extent this kind of aid is employed. The most widely used of them was to be found in 10 per cent or so of the schools containing six year olds and 17 per cent of the junior and middle schools. 14 per cent of the secondary schools had one or other of such pieces of equipment. The machines differ in detail and in method of operation, but they work on the same principle of letting the child hear what he is reading. We met teachers who found them a very great help, and their commitment to them was proving a valuable element in their teaching of reading. Cost was obviously an important factor with the heads to whom we talked, and not only initial cost but recurrent expenditure on consumable material where this is required to operate the machine. Another wise criterion was whether the teacher could make materials herself to suit her own approach and fulfil the needs of individual pupils as she assessed them. We feel that machines which allow this kind of teacher independence have an important advantage over those which operate only with specially produced materials. These materials may well be of excellent design but they often present schools with the problem of continuous replacement of consumable items. More important, they limit the use of the equipment in the sense that it cannot be linked directly and at will to work the child has been doing in the course of other activities. Machines can be a useful reinforcement in the process of teaching a child to read, but they make their best contribution when they can be integrated with the rest of the work the teacher has devised for the teaching of reading. Another technique which deserves mention in this context is the use of the typewriter, especially for older children with reading and writing difficulties. Several teachers have found it a useful stimulus, and one system which uses an audio-visual method of training typewriting skills claims considerable additional benefits for motivation and progress in reading.

22.8 We have mentioned visual material as one component in the successful linking of sight and sound. The 16mm film projector and the 35mm strip projector are old-established aids, and though more common in secondary than in primary schools they have been increasingly evident at all age levels during the last ten years or so. In our survey sample (see table 37) 65 per cent of the junior and middle schools had a slide/filmstrip/loop projector and 39 per cent a film projector. The corresponding figures for the secondary schools, almost a quarter of which had a projection room, were 86 per cent and 92 per cent respectively. This last is a high figure, but it seems probable that in many schools the 16mm film projector is under-used. It tends to be wheeled out for the showing of a film to a whole class, and the occasion has the flavour of a special event. It is understandable that to make the most of the hiring costs a school should want to let as many children as possible see the film, and this often leads to the large audience. We have, for example, seen situations where as many as three classes have been assembled to watch a film whose atmosphere could not survive such conditions. In terms of the value to be derived by each child it was a false economy. Schools should aim where possible to arrange more small group viewings of the kind which give rise to so much valuable interaction and follow-up. Some authorities organise their own 16mm film library, and when this happens film often plays a more prominent part in the teaching of English. The British Film Institute is an excellent source of complete films and short extracts, and will undertake the booking arrangements for films from other sources.

22.9 We have seen the work of some teachers who make excellent use of film as a focal point for talking and writing, as an aid in thematic work, where it is associated with related literature, and as a medium for study in its own right. In devising a course for fourth and fifth year pupils one English department had tried over a hundred films in the space of a few years, most of them hired from the British Film Institute. These were rarely full-length feature films. As one teacher put it: 'There are many excellent short films which are shown in Film Festivals and then are seen no more. Like short stories, they fit well into double lessons'. One such short film is A Time Out of War, where two Union soldiers and a Confederate strike a temporary personal truce at the height of the American Civil War. The following are extracts from pieces of writing by two boys who had seen and talked about the film:

'The trees around the river were generously covered with leaves, birds sang on their still branches, it was a beautiful day. The river was low and heavy, slowed down by the thick mass of reeds. This was a day in which nature excelled itself, a day for anything except war. This was the reason the men didn't want to fight and even if they did it was stalemate. Neither side could move and it was too hot to fight. After the truce had been agreed by both sides they went down to the river, for an hour of freedom from the pressures of the war.'

'Alden, the other Republican, using a hard grey rock as a soft white pillow, lay next to the crisp rippling stream which swiftly whirled by on to curves and bends, and sped through the bright green energy-filled reeds which were forced into a leaning position. This was what war was destroying. The natural beauty of life, warm and pleasant. Then the one fishing disturbed the quiet for what he thought was a fish biting on the line. His friend hurried across to discover it was a dead fellow soldier. They buried him under a dark lifeless tree and then gave him a soldier's salute. When the truce had begun and they were relaxing, cannon fire was heard bellowing out of the distance. This was appropriate as it kept reminding the soldiers who thought of peace as they rested in peace, that the war was still in motion. The water, reeds and sunlight showed the natural way of life which the soldiers tried to turn to. The dead tree was in respect to the men who were dead, which also was true in nature.'

22.10 The 35mm film strip projector and the slide projector have been developed considerably in the last decade. Lamps run cooler, and projectors have been made safe for children to handle themselves. Teachers and children have found them increasingly helpful as a classroom aid, and a wide range of commercially produced material is available. Some publishers produce packs which contain slides, printed matter, and disc or cassette. In our visits to schools we were impressed by the inventiveness of many teachers in helping the children to produce their own units. We have referred earlier to some of this work, where children used cameras and cassette recorders to devise their own slide/tape sequences. Some have made photoplays to illustrate a story or give a visual interpretation of a piece of music, and these have always given rise to a great deal of oral and writing activity. Work of this kind, where there is a well-defined task, high motivation, and a rewarding end product, is ideal for the kind of language development we discussed in the chapter on Oral Language. Since much of it is dependent upon activity in small groups the equipment should include small screens and viewers for slides and filmstrips. The overhead projector is another machine which can be employed for language work, with the children cutting out silhouettes and adding colour, captions and sound. All manner of material, e.g. woven fabrics, cotton wool, grasses, can be used to create visual effects, and children's ingenuity in this matter is almost limitless. The technique used for making captions can also be employed to produce material for teaching reading. Letters and words can be written on transparent acetates and then cut out. The idea of using letters and words on separate strips that can be moved round at will is a simple one, but it seems comparatively rare for the overhead projector to be put to this service. One obvious advantage of this technique is that whatever the size of group the children can see clearly what is happening; and this cannot always be said for the moving of cut-out card on a table.

22.11 A brief mention has already been made of reprographic facilities, the demand for which has increased considerably in recent years. Printed material remains the most important and prolific of resources, and a large amount of it is hand-made by teachers themselves, from simple worksheets to cards and booklets intended for synchronised use with recorded sound. A means of copying and duplicating is essential, and most schools have some system however simple. In our survey we asked secondary schools whether reprographic facilities were available for the teaching of English, and 76 per cent replied that they were. This figure is, of course, open to a wide interpretation. According to the school's own view of its equipment it can cover a range from one simple spirit duplicator to a high-speed automatic machine backed by an electronic stencil cutter. The same range will be found in primary schools, though few are likely to possess the more elaborate and expensive equipment. This is not to say that their needs for material are any less demanding than those of the secondary school; far from it. It is simply that few but the largest schools can afford such equipment, and this means that the majority of schools - primary and secondary alike - do not possess the most sophisticated facilities. Many authorities do their utmost to ensure that this lack does not handicap the schools, and they have organised central reprographic facilities, either in the Teachers' Centre or in a separate unit. For example, in one Teachers' Centre we visited it was common for a teacher to ask for anything up to 200 copies of diagrams, pictures, or cut-outs, and have them despatched almost by return. It would be unrealistic of us to make a simple recommendation that every school should have an electronic scanner and a high-speed photocopier and a punch-binding machine and an electric laminator. Some schools could put them to full-time service every day of the week and still not exhaust the possibilities, while others would make little use of them. We would naturally like to see every school with the range of facilities to meet its expanding curriculum demands, and we certainly believe that these should never be thwarted for want of access to such facilities. This access might be made available through the Teachers' Centre or other unit, or through a system of sharing between schools, say a secondary school and two or three primary schools. Such an arrangement would impose an important condition: it would need proper staffing and a range of equipment able to produce material in great quantity to the right specifications and at relatively short notice. In our visits to schools we have seen some highly promising curriculum developments hampered by want of good reprographic facilities, and we believe that all schools should be able to count on fast high quality reproduction of the materials they need.

22.12 There remains the question of the extent to which each school should be equipped with audio-visual aids. We have selected certain ones as having a particular contribution to make to the teaching of reading and of English in general, but the selection does not, of course, imply that any not mentioned are discounted. The record player, for example, is well known as a valuable aid in the teaching of English, and many schools have built up extensive collections of recorded poetry and plays. As we have already remarked in the case of reprographic facilities, it would be unrealistic for us to recommend that every school should have a full range of audio-visual equipment. There are obvious reasons why this would be unhelpful, but for us the principal one lies in our central contention that the demand for aids should be created by the teacher's curriculum planning; they should not be imposed upon it. We have visited more than one school where a video recorder has never been unpacked from its box, or where the film projector has been brought out of the storeroom twice a year at the most. Simply to make a piece of machinery standard issue would not guarantee its use. Nor should it, for the use of the equipment should be in response to the needs generated by the work. The teacher must first be persuaded that by adopting it he will create a number of opportunities for learning that did not exist before. This is a matter for in-service training and for guidance from LEA advisers, and we have already remarked on its relevance to the preparation of the intending teacher. It might be argued that to equip a school with a particular facility would lead it to experiment with its use. We have suggested that this by no means follows, and though there will doubtless be many instances of a successful outcome we nevertheless believe that this approach is the wrong way round. There is, of course, an important converse to this argument that automatic issue cannot be recommended. This is that a request from the school should meet with a positive response. In considering the provision of facilities within schools there are clearly too many variables to make it possible to produce a simple formula, but our recommendation is plain. We believe that where the school has a curricular need for a particular audio-visual aid every effort should be made to provide it. Some items of equipment might be shared with other schools, as in the grouping system described earlier. In many situations this will not be possible, and in any case there are certain pieces of equipment, such as cassette recorders, playback machines and cameras, of which a school should have exclusive use on the basis of one per class. And here we must again mention the situation of the small school. 29 per cent of the schools in our primary sample had no more than 150 on the roll. Table 36 shows the extent to which primary schools of various sizes possessed certain items of equipment, and it will be seen that the small schools were poorly off in this respect. The fact that one school has less than a third the number of pupils of another does not mean that it thereby needs a narrower range of equipment.

22.13 Educational broadcasting, both radio and television, is a very important resource for reading and language development, and one which deserves detailed attention. It is interesting to note that in our survey sample more of the secondary schools were equipped with television than with radio, the figures being 91 per cent and 83 per cent respectively. The same was true of the junior and middle schools, where television and radio were represented in the ratio 96 per cent: 92 per cent. In the infant and first schools the position was reversed at 64 per cent: 85 per cent. Many schools are able to tape radio programmes, but in some cases not without considerable difficulty. Radio broadcasts are commonly relayed to classrooms from a central receiver, and if the mains tape recorder is not available a programme is lost. There is a good deal to be said for the combined VHF [FM] radio-cassette recorder, which is immediately to hand, is simple to operate, and needs no careful timing. In addition to the considerable output of national radio there is now a source of valuable material in local radio, where the broadcasters cooperate closely with teachers. Groups of teachers take part voluntarily in a series, and the practice has grown among LEAs of seconding teachers to work with the education producers at the stations in developing programmes for local schools. These programmes can provide the teacher with much useful and stimulating material for language development, geared more closely to local needs than the national networks can sometimes achieve.

22.14 One of the most powerful sources of vivid experience is the general output programmes of television, particularly documentaries and drama. Many teachers are already basing a good deal of classroom work on such programmes. In some primary schools they use after-school programmes as a stimulus for talking and writing, and assemble collections of books to exploit the interest the programmes arouse. In secondary schools the practice is more widespread, and we met teachers who brought the experience of the television screen into the classroom, preparing for evening programmes and following them up the next day. Some classes were reading the texts of television plays with enjoyment and others were writing scenes for themselves. In a few schools we came across serious study of the medium of television itself. We were impressed by such work as we did see but are concerned that a decade after the publication of the Newsom Report there is still little evidence of the kind of study it recommended: 'We should wish to add a strong claim for the study of film and television in their own right' (91). We believe that in relation to English there is a case for the view that a school should use it not as an aid but as a disseminator of experience. In this spirit we recommend an extension of this work. Although there is unquestioned value in developing a critical approach to television, as to listening and reading, we would place the emphasis on extending and deepening the pupils' appreciation. This could be achieved by three complementary approaches:

(a) the group study of television programmes, extracts, and scripts alongside other media dealing with the same theme;

(b) the study of a full-length television work in its own right, with associated discussion and writing;

(c) the study of television as a medium, with some exploration of production methods, comparison with other media, and analysis of the output of programmes.

22.15 The BBC and IBA have continued to expand their education output in recent years, with valuable attention to reading and English in general. The educational output of both is influenced by advisory committees on which teachers and other educationists sit. Their discussion is supplemented by advice and information gained at first hand in the schools by the organisations' own education officers, most of whom are themselves drawn from the teaching profession. Both networks have been at pains to give shape to their professional interest in language and reading, their only hesitations being over time and money in relation to the other demands of the school curriculum. At regular meetings the two bodies exchange plans and timetables, and they jointly carry out statistical surveys of the audiences in schools. These statistics show that in 1972/73 98 per cent of all primary schools in the United Kingdom used school radio broadcasts, and the same percentage used television. The figures for secondary schools were 65 per cent and 62 per cent respectively. A mere 2 per cent of the primary schools with television sets did not use them to receive educational programmes, but the corresponding figure for the secondary schools was 33 per cent. In the case of radio, the figures show an almost identical disparity between primary and secondary schools. BBC programmes with an important language ingredient, such as Watch (television, older infants), Merry-go-round (television, 7-9), and Let's Join In (radio, infants) have been used in 70 per cent, 70 per cent and 47 per cent respectively of the schools for which they were designed and which are equipped to receive them. The television series Look and Read, first devised in 1967 for 7-9 year olds needing extra help in reading, was taken in 35 per cent of the equipped schools. Audience figures in general fall off among secondary schools, notably when the programmes are experimental, but the Listening and Writing series was taken by 21 per cent of schools. The schools service of the IBA has also played an important part in this aspect of the curriculum, and among its English programmes are It's Fun to Read, Picture Box and Writer's Workshop. Both organisations produce supporting material, much of which is an essential part of the provision. It takes the form of attractive publications, worksheets, filmstrips etc, and detailed notes which frequently contain a wealth of ideas on which teachers can draw to relate the broadcast material to their own pattern of working. Thus radio and television programmes provide children and teachers with a common experience which can be adapted to the needs and capabilities of individual pupils. There is a tremendous potential in educational broadcasting, and we believe that teachers should continue to be provided with this valuable source of stimulus for talking, reading and writing. It goes without saying that the use of broadcasting material involves the teacher in careful preparation if it is to be effectively integrated with the rest of the children's activity. When this is done successfully the quality of the resulting work is such as to suggest to us that those teachers who do not attempt it are missing promising opportunities.

22.16 A particularly creditable feature of the whole broadcasting effort is the amount of audience study and consultation that has gone into most of the programmes. Some, such as Look and Read, are influenced by the results of more rigorous research, but generally speaking inquiry of this kind is extremely expensive and beyond the means of the broadcasters themselves. Some programmes, especially if they are breaking new ground either in form or content, are 'piloted'. Sample programmes are produced and recorded, then taken in a small number of trial schools, and the resulting response is used to modify the proposals as necessary before a published series is begun. Research may well be an area which should receive more attention and which could attract funds from external sources, a point to which we return below. In only rare cases, notably in such programmes as Young Scientist of the Year and in educational broadcasts by BBC Local Radio stations, have teachers and children themselves been involved in programmes. We feel this practice could be extended.

22.17 The use of television in schools at the present time is limited by several factors. In a number of schools there is only a single television set and this is frequently ill-tuned, ill-serviced, and ill-sited. Even where the school is better served than this there is still the problem of using a single transmission most effectively, especially when timetabling is a further constraint. The use of a video recorder is a valuable aid, since it enables the teacher to record television programmes on magnetic tape and re-show them at times and in circumstances best suited to the needs of the pupils and the school organisation. Current developments with video-cassette recorders promise to make this technique even easier. There has been a fairly rapid increase in the last few years in the number of schools equipped with recording facilities, and currently some 29 per cent of all schools have videotape recorders. However, many of these are large secondary schools and there are very few primary schools among them. Indeed, it is estimated that 49 per cent of secondary schools with more than 8DO pupils have videotape recorders. In our own survey, only 18 per cent of the sample secondary schools were able to use recordings in the teaching of English. We welcome the efforts of LEAs to provide these items of equipment in all their schools, but in our recommendations we would go further. What is required is a complete system for recording television and sound programmes, involving not only the video recorder itself but a stock of magnetic tape large enough to permit a small library of tapes to be held for up to a year without the need for constant erasing. There should be good aerials designed and sited to give adequate signal strength, and an efficient system of maintenance and repair. In some schools, twin recorders will be necessary to permit recording and playback to go on at the same time. We are particularly concerned that the small schools should not be denied facilities of this kind, and we believe that the needs of nursery and infant schools should be given urgent consideration. Although financial restraints are likely to make it difficult for schools to acquire colour television receivers on a large scale in the immediate future, it appears to us that over the next few years there will be a gradual move in schools to colour reception. The video-cassette recorder already records in colour at no extra cost, and the educational broadcasting output will be entirely in colour by 1976 at the latest.

22.18 The wealth of broadcast material can be fully exploited by schools only if they are able to record programmes and use them in ways and at times that suit their purposes. We acknowledge that writers, artists and performers have rights which are protected by law, and we appreciate the efforts made by broadcasters and by copyright holders themselves to allow schools to copy certain types of transmission. Nevertheless, much more could be done, both by a revision of the law of copyright and by an extension of agreements to make available to teachers a far greater proportion of the material. For example, a system of licensing might be negotiated, broadly based upon the amount of use intended, and applicable to all broadcast material. A working group of the Council for Educational Technology has been considering in detail the problems of copyright within education. We welcome this enterprise and the Council's submission of evidence to the Committee chaired by Mr Justice Whitford which is at present looking into the whole issue of the laws of copyright.

22.19 Educational broadcasters are seldom short of ideas; what they lack is money to carry out research. Although there have been some informative pioneer studies to discover what pupils have learned from specific broadcasts, it remains true that there is still too little research and evaluation, both of which are of the greatest importance to programme planners and producers. Both the IBA Education Advisory Council and the Schools Broadcasting Council are aware of this need and they have initiated their own evaluative studies from time to time, the most recent being a cooperative exercise involving nearly 60 LEAs and 120 schools. Ideally, what is required is the involvement of qualified educational research teams, so that evaluation can be linked closely to production. This evaluation should aim at determining such effects as (a) interest, (b) increase in knowledge or skill, (c) the discrepancies in benefits to individual children and how these can be remedied, (d) the contribution of each component in the programme package, (e) how and in what ways the effectiveness of a programme differs between individual teachers. Such work would give production teams a firmer base on which to test their programme ideas. Any substantial effort along these lines would require special funding, but we believe that this is a time when wide experimentation in programmes, drawing upon rigorous research and evaluation, would pay dividends for literacy.

22.20 It has to be recognised that finance is now a major problem in educational broadcasting, so that it seems very unlikely that either authority can afford to carry out unaided any significant extension on its own. The BBC, over the years, has been able to allot annually some £6m of licence revenues to meeting the broadcasting needs of the education world generally, excluding the Open University. It has itself raised the question of 'whether some alternative sources of funds can be found, at least for that part of the service which is directed towards schools and colleges'. That would be a major break with the tenets of the past. If it is indeed a pointer to the future it would seem that only public funds, possibly with some selective help from charitable foundations (e.g. to finance the research elements), could meet the extra cost needed for an expanded broadcasting effort directed to reading and language development. The BBC's school broadcasting budget in 1972/73 was £2.5m, nearly two thirds of it spent on television. The IBA companies' incomes are subject to fluctuation, but it may be assumed that their combined spending on all school programmes is between £1m and £2m a year. These are not small sums, but the financial constraint plainly limits the opportunity for any major new initiative.

22.21 It would be impractical for us to recommend a massive increase in programmes on the teaching of English at all levels. Quite apart from the cost, we have already pointed out that much remains to be done to encourage and enable schools to make more widespread and constructive use of what is already provided. But there are certain areas where we feel that there is an urgent need for expansion. These are in the pre-school years, in the early stages of schooling, and for older children with learning difficulties. We referred to the first of these in Chapter 5, where we suggested the use of television to help parents understand the language needs of their children. This is most likely if the children's programmes themselves could be structured in such a way as to focus the parents' attention on these language needs in the process of fulfilling them. We believe that programmes should be developed to help the language interaction of parent and child, and that they should be based on thorough research, for the objectives we are pressing will not be achieved simply by providing entertaining sequences. Again we acknowledge the pioneering work of the broadcasters, particularly with such recent series as Rainbow, Mr Tumble, Playtime and You and Me. These are attempting to involve adults and children in a common experience and provide opportunities for talk. If programmes are to reach those parents and children where the need is greatest it will be necessary in some areas for schools and social agencies to promote active participation. The habit of passive viewing needs to be broken and parents made aware of their role in using television constructively, not merely as a means of keeping children out of mischief. We believe, moreover, that the programmes we are advocating, and others directed specifically to parents, should be shown on videotape at antenatal clinics. There is no escaping the fact that this would not be easy to fulfil, but we are convinced that the dividends would be out of all proportion to the cost and effort.

22.22 Ideally, programmes directed to pre-school children, at home and in the nursery class, should have virtually a year-long daily output. This is what Sesame Street aimed to provide in the USA, where it was transmitted for an hour a day, five days a week. It used animations, puppets, film-clips and adult actors, and it exploited the techniques of commercials to produce the maximum impact. In Britain it was initially shown for only an hour a week - on Saturday mornings - for some 13 weeks, and only in two IBA areas. The controversy it aroused is well known and there is no need to detail it here. The LBA's research (2) showed that many parents found it stimulating and valuable for their children, but its critics maintained that its manner was alien to British educational ideas and way of life. One observation was that it might have been better received had it been 'translated' into English, as it was successfully translated into German and Spanish. A more recent American series, The Electric Company, a trial selection from which will be broadcast by the BBC in summer 1975, appears to have proved more acceptable in Britain. This series is designed for school viewing by seven to ten year olds as an aid to the development of basic reading skills. It is highly entertaining and uses songs, humour, short sketches, and numerous other devices, including electronic computer-generated graphics and animation. We must again emphasise that in our view the value of such programmes lies in offering a common experience which the teacher can adapt, and not in providing a series of direct lessons. For pre-school children a programme similar to Sesame Street can provide useful background experience in an entertaining way. Once they are in school, however, both time and learning experiences are organised more deliberately in terms of individual needs. Clearly, if children cannot be expected to work at the same pace through a reading scheme it is not to be expected that their learning needs can be closely matched to the predetermined sequence and pace of a series of television broadcasts. Programmes used for their general interest continue to be useful, but to employ them for skill-building with the whole class can have serious drawbacks. Techniques of the kind used in Sesame Street and in The Electric Company for teaching specific skills would be of more value if available to the teacher in the form of videotapes or short film loops for use with individuals or small groups.

22.23 18 months' research and testing took place before The Electric Company's first experimental run of 130 daily half hour programmes over 26 weeks. Some idea of the total cost, which was met jointly by the US Office of Education and certain industrial charitable foundations, can be deduced from the fact that each individual programme cost not less than £5,000 to make. This kind of outlay, and the £3.3m. spent on Sesame Street, suggests that a British equivalent of either would be likely to swallow up a disproportionate part of the total available resources. With due realism we cannot recommend expenditure on this scale. Nevertheless, we do believe that extra funds concentrated upon programmes for pre-school children would have considerable educational and social value. We also feel that there should be a greater investment in programmes produced for children with reading difficulties, particularly in the age range at which The Electric Company is directed, provided they are able to be used in the way we have suggested above. With the appropriate modifications, both types of programme could draw profitably on some of the techniques used in The Electric Company and Sesame Street. Programmes aimed to help adults with reading difficulties have recently been introduced. This is a commendable enterprise, and it presents another argument for allocating to minority audiences a proportion of the limited resources available.

22.24 The suggestion has been made that national interest in literacy might be encouraged by exploring the issues and problems in a popular entertainment series, rather as one of the aims of The Archers was to ventilate matters of interest to the farming community. Whether this is practicable is a question for broadcasters, but it does raise a related possibility of introducing the right kind of reference into established popular programmes. If the theme were to come up naturally in a highly popular series like Crossroads or Coronation Street, some parents might be given an insight into their children's language needs or reading difficulties. At another level young adults might be encouraged to take the first steps towards help because their difficulty was represented sympathetically. If some aspect of the subject were to be introduced into a major programme or play or into any episode in a popular dramatic series there would need to be deliberate planning. For the maximum effect to be achieved advance information and guidance would be necessary for the various interested agencies. These suggestions would require a closer liaison between broadcasters responsible for general output and those responsible for educational programmes. These links do exist but are perhaps too tenuous, and in our view a closer interaction between these two sides of broadcasting could result in considerable benefit to literacy in its widest sense. We believe that these ideas deserve consideration and that their practicability and implications should be examined.

References

1. Half Our Future HMSO: 1963

2. Reactions to 'Sesame Street' in Britain Independent Broadcasting Authority: 1971