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

[NOTE: This is a fascinating history lesson about one poorly designed and failed attempt to deal with the fact that English spelling is incredibly complicated and irregular – and makes learning to read an incredibly hard chore for many children.]

By Emma Loffhagen for The Guardian

Decades ago, a generation of UK schoolchildren unwittingly took part in an initiative aimed at boosting reading skills – with lasting consequences

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.

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