The 1960s schools experiment that created a whole new alphabet

Summary

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.”‘What the hell was any of that supposed to mean?’ Judith Loffhagen. Photograph: Thomas Dufffield/The GuardianAt 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?”A 1966 Ladybird book that used ITA. Photograph: Marc Tielemans/AlamyThe 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 ...