Jescott Bodkin (edit name/settings)

I am a retired professor of education. My first books on British schools were so controversial that discussions can be found in Hansard, as the Minister of Education ( later Prime Minister) urged all MPs to acquaint themselves with my work.  More recently the ideas are being reconsidered because the failure of the seventies changes in schools are finally being recognised. In the 1970s I ran a "Little School" with the cooperation of Barnet Education authority.  I devised the Elf reading scheme which was tailored for each individual child.   At the turn of the 21st century I contacted the researchers who conducted the Clackmannanshire study on synthetic phonics and informed them of the Elf idea for real stories graded by phonic complexity.  The idea was approved and flagged by the Rose Report.  On meeting up with Grant Jesse  I decided that he and his partner at IOL, Peter Scott were the right illustrators to begin to produce the books digitally so that they could be made more widely available.  Everything about the scheme and the books is explained in detail on the website www.englishliteracyfoundation.org.

I chose the pen name Jescott Bodkin as my own name is not decodable at the first phonic level and I wanted every word on the front cover to be readable by children who only know the first 22 grapheme-phoneme combinations.  Under my own name I am author of several academic books and many articles in professional journals.  I am also a fiction author under a different pen name and a published poet under yet another name.