The radical 1960s schools experiment that created a whole new alphabet – and left thousands of children unable to spell

The Guardian

9 hours ago

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?
English is one of the most difficult languages to learn to read and write. Unlike Spanish or Welsh, where letters have consistent sound values, English is a patchwork of linguistic inheritances. Its roughly 44 phonemes – the distinct sounds that make up speech – can each be spelt multiple ways. The long 'i' sound alone, as in 'eye', has more than 20 possible spellings. And many letter combinations contradict one another across different words: think of 'through', 'though' and 'thought'.
It was precisely this inconsistency that Conservative MP Sir James Pitman – grandson of Sir Isaac Pitman, the inventor of shorthand – identified as the single greatest obstacle for young readers. In a 1953 parliamentary debate, he argued that it is our 'illogical and ridiculous spelling' which is the 'chief handicap' that leads many children to stumble with reading, with lasting consequences for their education. His proposed solution, launched six years later, was radical: to completely reimagine the alphabet.
The result was ITA: 44 characters, each representing a distinct sound, designed to bypass the chaos of traditional English and teach children to read, and fast. Among the host of strange new letters were a backwards 'z', an 'n' with a 'g' inside, a backwards 't' conjoined with an 'h', a bloated 'w' with an 'o' in the middle. Sentences in ITA were all written in lower case.
By 1966, 140 of the 158 UK education authorities taught ITA in at least one of their schools. The new alphabet was not intended as a permanent replacement for the existing one: the aim was to teach children to read quickly, with the promise they would transition 'seamlessly' into the standard alphabet by the age of seven or eight. But often, that seamless transition never quite happened. Many children – my mum included – found themselves caught between two systems.
My mum grew up in Blackburn in the 1960s, a bright child who skipped a year and started secondary school early. She doesn't remember the details of how ITA was introduced. 'That's just what we were taught,' she tells me. 'I didn't know there was another way, or that I was going to graduate on to something else.
'I'm nearly 60, and poor spelling has dogged me my whole life,' she continues. 'Teachers always used to make jokes about my spelling, and I'd get those dreaded red rings around my work.'
English was always her favourite subject, but it quickly became a source of shame. 'I remember that absolute dread of reading in front of the class, stumbling on words. And then, at A-level, I'll never forget my English teacher said to me, 'You'll never get an A because of your spelling.' That was crushing. English was the one subject I loved – I felt so aggrieved.'
In the 60s, parental involvement in schooling was minimal, especially for working-class or immigrant families (my mum's parents migrated from Nigeria in the early 60s). 'Back then, parents wanted you to succeed in whatever you were being taught, but they didn't really question what you were being taught,' she says. 'There was also a reverence for British education, that whole colonial thing, the idea that the British know best.'
Despite her inability to spell, she became a solicitor, and later started her own business. 'Spellcheckers revolutionised my confidence in writing,' she says. 'I hate making mistakes. If I'm the slightest bit unsure of how to spell something, I'll check it. I'm fanatical about the importance of getting those things right.'
Prof Dominic Wyse, professor of early years education at University College London, says: 'ITA is regarded now as an experiment that just didn't work. The transition to the standard alphabet was the problem. Children were having to almost relearn the real way the English language works. It doesn't surprise me that it failed. Any teaching that is based on anything other than the reality of what has to be learned is a waste of time.'
Prof Rhona Stainthorp, an expert in literacy development at the University of Reading, agrees. 'It was a bizarre thing to do,' she says. 'Pitman wasn't an educationist, and ITA is a perfect example of someone thinking they've got a good idea and trying to simplify something, but having absolutely no idea about teaching.'
Sarah Kitt, now 60, was taught ITA at her state primary school in Plymouth in the late 1960s. For her, the legacy of ITA has lingered long past childhood. 'I can tell when a word is wrong,' she says, 'but I can't always make it right. I get these complete blanks.'
Her memories of those early years are clouded not just by the outre alphabet, but by the emotional toll it took. 'I hated English. I would get to the school gates, burst into tears, and turn around and walk home again,' she says. 'I had a teacher who wasn't very sympathetic. I felt so stupid. I used to wonder whether I was dyslexic.'
When Kitt was nine, she moved to Exeter. She quickly realised that other children at her new school hadn't been taught to read and write the way she had. 'You just learned to mask it,' she says. 'You found ways to avoid spelling altogether.'
Kitt was put off humanities, and went on to study economics and statistics at university before working at the Bank of England for more than a decade. Before the digital era, she relied on her mother to check her essays. 'At university, we didn't have computers and spellcheck. I would get my mum to read through things.'
Now a parent herself, Kitt is wary of any classroom experiment that puts children at risk of long-term disadvantage. She says: 'I'd be hugely concerned if my daughter was taught like that. There would be more parent power now – people would be questioning it in WhatsApp groups. We didn't have that.' Like others who learned ITA, Sarah's frustration isn't just with the method itself, but with the lack of transparency. 'It seemed to just disappear,' she says. 'There was no explanation. No one ever followed up to ask: how did this affect you?'
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Stainthorp says there's not enough evidence to prove ITA had a bad impact on spelling: 'People who learned with ITA might blame their bad spelling on it, but there are many people who are bad spellers who didn't learn with ITA, and vice versa.' Spelling proficiency is shaped by a tangle of factors, from teacher quality and parental involvement to self-esteem and natural aptitude. While many former pupils who used ITA blame their lifelong spelling struggles on it, others have had no such problems.
In fact, early reports of ITA's effects were largely positive. Infant school teachers noted that reading ability among children taught with ITA outpaced those learning with the standard alphabet. But a 1966 study demonstrated that any initial superior reading fluency of ITA learners began to fade at around age eight.
Toni Brocklehurst, who taught ITA for four years in Lancashire in the early 1970s, still believes it gave many of her pupils – especially those from socially deprived homes – a head start. 'These were kids who had no books at home,' she tells me. 'Once they'd learned those characters, they could decode anything in that alphabet. It gave them a huge boost in confidence.'
However, she continues: 'I don't think it would work for all children. It wouldn't work for middle-class children who are being introduced to reading books at home, because it would confuse them.'
The biggest challenge to ITA's success was always going to be the transition back to the standard alphabet. And because pupils did that at different ages, many teachers were left juggling both alphabets simultaneously within the same class.
Even more puzzling is the way the system was rolled out. ITA was never adopted nationally, nor required. As Stainthorp explains: 'At that time, there was no national curriculum – a headteacher could simply decide to implement it in their school, or a teacher in their class. There was no consistency.'
In the early 70s, Mike Alder was a pupil at Devonshire Road infants' school in Blackpool. He was strong at maths and science, placed in top sets, and on track for good O-levels. But English was always different.
'We had little thin cardboard books,' he remembers. 'Stories about Paul and Sally. The letters were odd – some of them were joined together, like an 'e' and an 'a' welded into one shape. At first, I didn't question it. I just thought that's how everyone learned to read.'
For Alder, the abrupt transition from ITA to the standard alphabet felt like a betrayal. 'It was like they said: 'Right, we've told you a pack of lies for the past two years, now this is how you're actually meant to read and write.' My disgust at being lied to, that loss of trust, that stuck with me. I was never interested in English after that.'
He believes that ITA has had a long-term impact on his attainment. 'My spelling is still appalling,' he says. 'In all my subjects, I was getting As and Bs, but in English I really struggled. I got a C at O-level.' He remembers one friend, also taught in ITA, who had to retake English years later at sixth form just to move forward academically. 'It definitely held people back.'
Now 58, Alder works as a technical specialist in electrical ground equipment at BAE Systems in Blackpool. Though he has built a successful career, spelling remains a daily obstacle. 'I rely on spellcheck constantly. I sent an email today and 15-20% of the words had that red underline.'
For decades, Alder assumed ITA was just a strange footnote in his own education. 'When I tell people about it, most say, 'What's that?' No one's ever heard of it. It's like it never happened. I'd love to read a proper lessons-learned document from it. What did they find? What did they conclude? Because, to me, it felt like they tried something, realised it didn't work, and just buried it. If either of my kids had been taught ITA,' he adds, 'I'd have pulled them out of school with immediate effect.'
The issue isn't simply whether or not ITA worked – the problem is that no one really knows. For all its scale and ambition, the experiment was never followed by a national longitudinal study. No one tracked whether the children who learned to read with ITA went on to excel, or struggle, as they moved through the education system. There was no formal inquiry into why the scheme was eventually dropped, and no comprehensive lessons-learned document to account for its legacy.
In some ways, ITA is an extreme manifestation of a debate about early-years education that is still relevant today. The 'reading wars' – the long-running tension between phonics-led approaches, which involve breaking down and sounding out words, and those that emphasise context, comprehension and whole-language exposure – are very much alive. English's chaotic spelling system continues to divide experts and frustrate learners.
In 2022, a landmark study by researchers at UCL's Institute of Education found that the current emphasis on synthetic phonics is 'uninformed and failing children', and 'not underpinned by the latest evidence'.
Some defenders of ITA, like Brocklehurst, think its logic wasn't so far removed from phonics – now a government-mandated method for teaching reading in UK primary schools. But there's a key difference; phonics uses the same structure of the alphabet as every other bit of English language.
What ITA reveals is how tempting it is to try to simplify a problem that is, in truth, irreducibly complex. There was a clarity to its premise: let's make English easier. But the cost of that simplicity may have been borne by a generation of children, many of whom are still unsure of its impacts.
'You've only got one education,' my mum says. 'I do feel really resentful. My parents aren't alive any more, but on their behalf as well – and as a parent now – I'd be absolutely furious to think that my children were put into an experiment without me being asked.' She pauses for a moment. 'We weren't given a choice, we weren't asked and we weren't explained to. I think it's telling that it seems like this experiment slipped in and slipped out quietly. Fifty years later, we're still suffering as a result.'