I was schooled in this time, at a primary school in central edinburgh which was said to be where Moray House did its experiments (-the Scottish teacher training college, which all state school teachers had to attend, to be qualified to work) and while I have dim memories of seeing the alternate spelling books around the place, luckily didn't get foisted onto them. Judging by the stuff people recall in this piece I dodged a bullet.

The ITA ladybird books were also around in the shops. I had that one about the police but in real alphabet. Confusingly edinburgh had its own idiosyncratic police boxes more like Georgian temples. They all wound up being sold off as coffee stalls and bookshops. Scots coppers rarely wore the custodian helmet(maybe on duty at an old firm game) so the imagery didn't make much sense.

The politics of phonics vs whole word leaked into Queensland (where I now reside) politics and continues. It's stupid, all aspects of language and literacy come to bear, demanding one technique over another or whacked ideas like ITA is politicising early childhood to no good effect.

I'm just thinking of people at age moving to a different country and start a new life in new surroundings. It would be the same situation, like kids learning a new alphabet / transition. Imagine language changes like Arabic <-> Latin or Cyrillic <-> Chinese and vice versa. One needs time & practice, but one can't blame the alphabet learned in the early Years. I feel like the transition came in the age when it was most important and the kids weren't prepared and struggled with further studies. But again, me myself also learned one language and moved to a different country & started to learn another language at 12 and another one at 14 and 16 and at 24 started to learn Chinese and also went there to study abroad. I can spell in each of the languages. Although not perfect, but fluent enough I think :)

May be it's some other cause. Dyslexia, some shape of. Bad learner. I dunno, but learning another language would be impossible for that good woman featured.

I have no trouble reading the fragments shown. I learned English as a second language as someone with a form of dyslexia that makes you struggle with spelling. The spelling of English is not very fonetic and even nowadays I sometimes use Google to look-up the spelling of a word or struggle with the correct pronouciation of certain words. A more fonetics based spelling would greatly have helped to learn the language.

Fonetic based spelling also have there problems brcause languages constantly change and there are often local variations with different pronounciations.