<
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/jul/06/1960s-schools-experiment-created-new-alphabet-thousands-children-unable-to-spell>
"Throughout my life, my mum has always been a big reader. She was in three or
four book clubs at the same time. She’d devour whatever texts my siblings and I
were studying in school, handwrite notes for our lunchboxes and write in her
diary every night. Our fridge door was a revolving display of word-of-the-day
flashcards. Despite this, she also was and remains, by some margin, the worst
speller I have met.
By the time I was in primary school, she was already asking me to proofread her
work emails, often littered with mistakes that were glaringly obvious to me
even at such a young age. It used to baffle me – how could this person, who
races through multiple books a week and can quote Shakespeare faultlessly,
possibly think “me” is spelt with two Es?
It was on one of these occasions that she first mentioned she had been taught
the wrong alphabet. “Google it,” she said. “It was an experiment, so it doesn’t
exist any more, but it was called ITA.”
At first, I thought she was joking, or maybe misremembering some exaggerated
version of phonics. But later, I looked it up and, sure enough, there it was –
a strange chart of more than 40 characters, many familiar, others alien.
Sphinx-like ligatures, odd slashes, conjoined vowels – it looked like a cross
between English and Greek.
“My memory is so poor, but I can still see those devilish characters,” my mum,
Judith Loffhagen, says as we sit in the garden of my childhood home in London.
“An ‘a’ with an ‘e’ on its back, two ‘c’s with a line across them.” She traces
the shapes on her trouser leg. “What the hell was any of that supposed to
mean?”
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.
Why was it only implemented in certain schools – or even, in some cases, only
certain classes in those schools? How did it appear to disappear without record
or reckoning? Are there others like my mum, still aggrieved by ITA? And what
happens to a generation taught to read and write using a system that no longer
exists?"
Amusingly, I have the opposite story: I’ve always been a voracious reader and a
very strong speller, and in my final year of school I read a
Scientific
American article about a proposed phonetic alphabet with glyphs similar to the
upper case Latin alphabet to make it easier to read, and I was so taken by it
that I insisted on doing all my schoolwork in that form - which luckily my
teachers were very patient with! Unfortunately there have been so many proposed
phonetic alphabets for English that this particular system that was never
widely adopted is now very difficult to find.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
