Many young people remain unaware of the inadequacy of their reading and spelling skills or are able to conceal the difficulties whilst they do not experience any academic problems. This situation can change rapidly at the secondary school stage, but sometimes it will not be until they are taking advanced courses that the problems begin to emerge, their high intelligence, excellent vocabularies and good visual memories having acted as a mask up to that point. Once they have to do much more reading; write extensively using more specialised words; deal with the organisation necessary for writing essays, and face a large amount of work under time pressure, they will inevitably find it difficult to cope. 'Researchers in Oxford pointed to the existence of ...a group of pupils whose academic problems only began to show once they have reached their teens. The scientists hypothesised that these were children who had learned to read by looking and guessing without having the ability to sound out unfamiliar words' (italics added. Robertson. p163)

Reading expert, Debbie Hepplewhite, suggests that it is because of mixed method (looking and guessing) teaching that many children who come from 'good' homes fail to develop into fully competent readers and spellers despite having had a broad and rich language experience from birth, though this may not become obvious until later on in their education. She says, ''We know that children with a richer oral vocabulary are at an advantage over children with impoverished vocabularies. Even where children CAN blend, they are more likely to discern the 'word' when it is within their spoken vocabulary. However, this is not always the case. We also know of many children from backgrounds which enrich vocabulary and provide a good knowledge and understanding of the world - and yet still children from such backgrounds may not fare well through a mixed methods approach. They may, for example, become hugely reliant on guessing the words from context and logic - but guessing it is nevertheless - and we know that sooner or later such multi-cueing guessing can fail learners. I have always suspected that it may not be until secondary school when many learners find they are struggling to such an extent that it can become a major problem. I have always suspected that the teaching profession generally has no idea of the true scale of this problem - whereby many secondary students 'blurgh' or skip over large numbers of words they cannot recognise or decode - but they still hang on to getting the gist of the text - just about'' (RRF message board 18/10/09)

Every year a significant percentage of children enter secondary school with tested reading ages in single figures**. Few will receive anything in the way of evidence-based remedial teaching at this stage of their education even though, 'Ensuring that as many children as possible are able to 'read to learn' is not a responsibility that ends when children leave primary school' (Rose 2009 p108). Data released by the DfE in January 2012 revealed that just one in 15 (6.5%) pupils starting secondary school in England "behind" for their age went on to get five good GCSEs including English and maths,

Secondary teachers are not trained to teach reading and most think it's not their job in any case. Journalist Harriet Sergeant says, 'I have spent the past nine months interviewing youngsters who are now on the streets or in and out of prison because no one taught them to read and write between the crucial ages of five and seven. And no one, in seven subsequent years of education (most dropped out of school at around 14) addressed the problem. One young man explained: “For my first two years of secondary school, I was in the top sets for maths and science, but rubbish at everything else because of my lack of literacy. That kills you in every subject. Even in maths you need to read the question. (Sunday Times. 08/02/09) A reading age of 13+ is needed to access a KS4 science text (Newbury.Senco forum)

Secondary English teacher, Phil Beadle, winner of one of the government’s Teacher of the Year awards, 'is a very angry man, because he knows that the teaching profession is letting down countless numbers of children. He knows that he was never trained how to help children who couldn’t read in secondary school. Just give them a word puzzle and sit them in the corner. Send them off to the special needs rooms to fill in more word puzzles. Send them to the restart room or sin bin when they kick off. Oh, and give them a word puzzle. Not my job to teach them how to read, that’s what primaries are for. This used to be the same attitude in primaries where junior teachers were concerned. If they haven’t learned in the infants they must be special needs or it's their parents fault' (Shadwell.Teaching: the fourth factor)

If your child is already at the secondary stage it will be more difficult to undo the damage from faulty reading instruction. 'Older poor readers have the same basic problems as younger poor readers and need to learn the same skills. Their problems, however, are complicated by years of frustration and failure' (Hall/Moats p213) They suffer from 'The Matthew Effect' too, from the biblical verse in St. Matthew 25:29: "For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath", which can be summarized as, "The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer." Early development of reading skills leads to faster rates of skill improvement with the result that the disparity between more skilled and less skilled readers widens over time. www.balancedreading.com/matthew.html

Ignore anyone who suggests that your child will have been 'phonicked up to the eyeballs' by this stage and that they now need 'something completely different', by which they mean a mixed method intervention along with coping strategies. If your son/daughter has received any remedial instruction in school it is extremely unlikely to have been a programme that closely followed the synthetic phonic principles. The DCSF (now DfE) intervention (Wave 2/3) programmes used in primary schools, pre-2008, were an ineffective mixture of whole-language and analytic phonics.

There are, presently, no government-produced, synthetic phonics intervention programmes available, specifically designed for secondary age pupils, or adults.

Don't rely on a school-based or independent 'specialist dyslexia teacher' to get your teenager reading effectively either. The majority of so-called dyslexia specialists are trained, solely, in programmes which use the Orton-Gillingham (OG) approach. For many decades OG was the leading remedial reading intervention with far more phonics content than would have been encountered in the average classroom, and for that it should be given credit. Unfortunately, it remains mired in the theories and beliefs from the time it was first devised, early in the 20th century. The OG programmes have failed to incorporate the best of recent, research-based practice or eliminated content which is now known to be unnecessary, ineffective and possibly detrimental- see 'What not to do'.

Phil Beadle taught a class of illiterate adults for the Channel 4 TV programme series, 'Can't Read Can't Write', using a self-devised phonic programme. He is scathing about the government's adult literacy provision; “At present, the provision for people who can’t read at all is a series of activities for the mentally deficient; they say it’s all about balance. Speaking and listening doesn’t help you decode the building blocks. They don’t need speaking and listening. They need the code. These people have huge barriers to overcome just to get to the class. The Entry 1 materials [*example below] are designed for people who can only read a tiny bit. In the first module, phonics appears on page 14 and teaches the “sh” sound. It appears 16 times before they reach that point. The materials are illogical and incompetent. A proper Adult Literacy programme desperately needs to be written, and made statutory, but the adult literacy ‘professionals’, and I use this in inverted commas, have too much invested in it, to admit that well-taught phonics is the answer; and that they have been swallowing and producing b*llsh*t for their whole adult lives” (RRF newsletter 61)

The almost universal assumption that older teenagers and adults would find phonics-based literacy classes 'babyish' and boring was tested back in 2008. A small project, using synthetic phonics with adults, was set up by the National Research and Development Council for Adult Literacy and Numeracy (NRDC) because, as they acknowledge, the 'research base for knowing how to improve the teaching of adult literacy is markedly deficient' (Burton et al intro.) Despite the fact that the project was done with small groups, rather than one-to-one, and the DfE's programme for the Foundation Stage (4-7yr.olds), Letters and Sounds, was used, due to the lack of a government-produced synthetic phonics programme for adults (see Resources for commercial programmes suitable for adults), synthetic phonics proved to be a huge success with teachers and learners alike. 'The learners (mainly Entry 1-3) made significant progress in reading comprehension and spelling', and 'This progress was achieved in a very short time (on average..between five and six sessions)' (Burton et al p9)

Educational psychologist and secondary SEN teacher, Jim Curran, says, 'As far as using a synthetic phonics approach to teach older weak readers is concerned it’s the best system that I have used in over thirty five years of teaching. It’s not a magic bullet but before I discovered this method I was lost and so were the children I tried to help. The magic of synthetic phonics is not just that it teaches the children to read but equally important it empowers teachers and gives them a sense of hope that maybe, just maybe, things can be different for these children' (RRF message board 10/21/09).

Down to practicalities; if you are the desperate parent of an unhappy teenager struggling with reading and spelling and you want to do something effective about it (assuming that your teenager is willing) then, first, assess your teenager's reading, spelling and alphabet code knowledge -use the free tests in Resources 2. Experience shows that the vast majority of poor readers have big gaps in their knowledge of the alphabet code, especially the advanced code. In addition, many older, struggling readers are prone to guessing whilst reading, using part-word strategies. This 'bad habit' is, unfortunately, the result of past teaching methods (see- mixed methods) and needs to be replaced by a phonic-based, left to right, all-through-the-word reflex. An intensive, remedial programme given one-to-one, which explicitly teaches the English Alphabet Code along with decoding and encoding skills is likely to be necessary. You may decide to take this on yourself: use a programme suitable for older children/teenagers from Resources. If the task seems overwhelming then a specialist reading tutor who uses an advanced synthetic/linguistic phonics intervention programme may be the answer - see Choosing a remedial tutor. Even when students have achieved adequate levels of code knowledge and phonic skills, work on fluency and comprehension may need to continue.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12000886
**Dec. 2010: One in 11 boys in England - one in seven in some areas - starts secondary school with, at best, the reading skills of an average seven-year-old.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/u81/Stanovich__1986_.pdf
Stanovich: Matthew Effects in Reading

www.societyforqualityeducation.org/newsletter/archives/words.pdf
Hempenstall -Older students' reading problems

http://www.skillsworkshop.org/resources/e1-literacy-scheme-work
*Independently produced 'scheme of work' to support the government's Adult Literacy Entry level 1. curriculum :-(

www.rrf.org.uk/messageforum/viewtopic.php?t=3787
Jim Curran's conference talk on using synthetic phonics at secondary level.

“Wasted Lives” - Jim Curran
A view of Education in Northern Ireland

www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/apr/14/literacy-adult-education-phonics
A new study proposes to show how phonics can help adults too.

http://www.rrf.org.uk/archive.php?n_ID=156&n_issueNumber=57
The brightest kids need help too.

www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/education/words-of-praise-for-william-after-learning-to-read-and-write-at-55-14277666.html
55yr.old learns to read with synthetic phonics and wins award.

http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6112096
Sept. 2011. Ten years and £9bn later and still 5 million can't read

http://harrietsergeant.com/articles/fixing-broken-britain/
Fixing broken Britain

http://www.cps.org.uk/files/reports/original/111027122608-20091127SocialPolicyWasted.pdf
WASTED: The betrayal of white working class and black Caribbean boys. READ IT and weep.