The Origin of the Fitzroy Readers

In the early '70s, Faye Berryman and Philip O'Carroll started the Fitzroy Community School in North Fitzroy, an inner suburb of Melbourne, Australia.

Faye had been a secondary teacher who had witnessed first-hand the sad results of children emerging from primary schooling with poor literacy skills. Philip had been a philosophy lecturer, specialising in logic and linguistics. They had not been trained in primary schooling, but were confronted with the problem of teaching young children to read.

They believed that fluent and accurate reading was at the core of a good education. They were unaware that schools at the time had dropped the phonic approach – the traditional technique of deciphering words by sounding them out, and were puzzled that they  couldn't find any Readers (i.e. simple books designed for children to read aloud) in the educational bookstores.

At the time they didn't realise that in other schools, stories were being read to children, and that the plan was that after sufficient immersion in these regular stories, children would in time get to know how each word looked and, in this way, gradually become fluent readers and writers. Time has proved that this method (whole language) is inadequate for many children and does not support spelling well. But until the 90s, it dominated the primary school system.

They constructed their own little stories from basic spelling principles – like the easy-to-sound-out early Fitzroy Readers: A Fat Cat, A Big Pig and The Pet Hen and waited until Story 9 to bring in the first digraph ('oo'), and after that only very gradually introduced the rest of the digraphs into the program.

There were of course, some words that didn't fit into the system – words like the, said, and eye and they called these special words, i.e. words that have to be learned by sight. They made sure there were only a few of them with each story and warned the child (and teacher) about them on the back cover of each book. They were not to be sounded out, but only read as whole words, and could be practised before the story was read.

The secret of the Fitzroy Readers’ success was that children actually read the books for themselves.Consequently,their confidence grows, and, as a result, they will want to try the next one.

It soon became obvious that Faye was the better story writer, and the majority of the story ideas are hers.  Philip set out to sequence and edit these stories without ruining their flow, making each one the right length, using the previously learned words - and bringing in the new sound where possible. I added some stories to make a complete, gentle, logical progression.

Every story is constructed so that there are no surprises in vocabulary. This no surprises aspect is what has restored the reading confidence of many children who previously struggled with literacy.

At first, they created these Readers just for their own students, however other teachersstarted asking what reading method the school used and urged Faye and Philip to share the readers. Up until that point the texts had only ever been hand-printed and roughly illustrated by Philip – a non-artist using one black pen.

Nevertheless, they photocopied a few hundred of each, offered them to other schools and, lo and behold, they were snapped up. This made Philip and Faye fully aware of the great need for materials of this kind, so an artist was engaged who drew much better, full-colour pictures. The words were typeset in a plain English font and thousands of copies were printed in a new edition. These, too, were quickly snapped up.

From there a whole new project developed, one that has helped children in thousands of Australian schools and other countries including New Zealand, Singapore, Japan, India, Taiwan, Malaysia and Korea.

Philip and Faye delight in knowing that many other students now are able to experience the frequent little victories over English script that the Fitzroy program provides.

May children everywhere share the advantage of literacy.