Times Online
by Sian Griffiths

Phil Beadle credits his working-class mother Olive, who taught him to read before he was four years old, for a love of learning that has led to a “lovely” middle-class life mixing teaching, television presenting and writing.


Secondary teacher of the year in 2004 and star of the television programme The Unteachables, Beadle says his mother – “fresh off the boat from Ireland” – exhorted him to “work hard, you little bugger”. It’s a message he is passionate about passing on, not only to his own three children Bas, 9, Len, 5, and Lou, 2, but also to the next generation, especially of white work-ing-class boys – the group now failing most severely at school.

Beadle, 42, found the kind of fame most teachers will never see shortly after he won his teaching award: his unconventional lessons with a group of disaffected children were filmed by Channel 4. In The Unteachables Beadle, rumpled and passionate, enthused his pupils with “Punctuation Kung Fu” – punctuation driven home with karate kicks – and got them declaiming Shakespeare to a field of cows.

Now this former rock musician turned state school teacher – who rarely baulks at the odd swear word – has written Could Do Better! to share some of his methods. It’s dedicated to Olive Bridget, “whose interest in my education is the reason I am able to write a book”. His message is that parents are the key to making sure children shine at school.

“My tips are probably a bit more sophisticated than my mum’s ‘work hard, you little bugger’,” he laughs. After all, when he taught in one supposedly failing school not one of his pupils got less than a B in GCSE English. But the point is the same. “You, the parent, have the power to transform your child’s chance in life just as my mum did mine.”

The long summer vacation is a crucial time for children. Beadle says 11-year-olds who score highly for reading ability when tested in the last year of primary school do much worse just a few months later when they are retested at secondary school. It used to be thought that primary teachers were artificially inflating the first set of scores, but now, says Beadle, the idle summer holidays probably explain the dip in performance.

So, here, in the first of a two-part series on how to keep your child’s brain ticking through the summer are Beadle’s top tips for the under10s.

1 (age 4-5) Phonics: Buy a Jolly Phonics workbook to help your children with reading. It is important they understand what a digraph is: a word with two vowels next to each other, where “the second doesn’t do anything except make the first one say its own name”. Examples include “tree”, where the second e simply lengthens the sound of the first. “The English language is riddled with digraphs,” says Beadle, who is making a television programme with adults who have difficulty reading, some because they never had a digraph explained to them.

2 (age 6-9) Mind maps: Show your children how to make “mind maps”, Tony Buzan’s way of collecting ideas using words and pictures. Start with a mind map of a family: draw a family at the centre of a page and then draw six curvy lines radiating from the picture with an illustration at the end of each line ofindividual family members. Label the lines with information about the pictures they lead to – brother or sister, for example. “If you teach them this technique, note-taking in lessons will never be a chore but a pleasure,” says Beadle.

3 (age 6-9) Sentence kernels: Walk across the room and ask them to write what they can see. They will write “The lady walked across the room”, which is, according to Beadle, “what isknown in the staff room as ‘crap writing’ ”. Get them to write a list of 10 adjectives in a table, then add another list of 10 nouns that could replace the word “lady” and 10 verbs to replace “walked” and 10 nouns to replace “room”. Then get them to create new sentences by reading across the table. The result might be “The arthritic headmistress hobbled across the dining hall” – a better piece of writing.

4 (age 6-9) Adverb charades: Write an adverb on several pieces of paper. Ask a child to select one, then instruct the child to perform an action in the manner of the adverb. For example if the child has chosen the adverb “mess-ily”, say: “Please make me a cup of tea in the manner of this adverb.” “Good for boys because it involves physical movement,” says Beadle.

5 (age 6-9) Odd one out: Give them three objects and ask them to explain which is the odd one out and why: which, for instance, is the misfit out of tractor, zebra and duck. “A good game for making high order connections and justifying them,” says Beadle. There is, of course, more than one possible answer.

6 (age 9-11) Possibly impossible questions: Beadle recommends asking children questions such as those in The Little Book of Thunks by Ian Gilbert. Typical examples might be: “What is heav-ier, hate or love?” or “Is there more future than past?”. The game develops their ability to think philosophically.

7 (age 9-11) Writing to a word count: Ask your child to write 100 words on a subject, then 50 words on the same subject, then 20, then 13. “This gives them editing skills,” says Beadle.

8 (age 9-11) Murder in a bag: Place five objects such as a book, flower, bulb, spoon and photo in a bag and ask children to take them out and tell you a murder story in which all five are crucial clues. “This is great for oracy,” says Beadle as speaking and listening are both part of English GCSE.

9 (age 9-11) Writing to specific word lengths: Give them a set of five numbers, such as 20, 5, 15, 7 and 10. Then ask them to write a five-sentence description in which the first sentence is 20 words long, the second five and so on. “Include small numbers so they can see the effect of having a short sentence in a description,” says Beadle.

10 (age 9-11) Encourage them to write about the moment something happens: You can use the moment a car crashes. “This moves children away from writing in a narrative style,” says Beadle.

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