*By the end of year 6, virtually all ”pupils’ reading and writing should be sufficiently fluent and effortless for them to manage the general demands of the curriculum in year 7, across all subjects and not just in English.”
(England’s National Curriculum. 2014)
2003. Map of Europe (data from Seymour, Aro & Erskine’s 2003 study) showing the percentage of errors in word decoding at the end of the first year of formal school, by country:
http://www.danielwillingham.com/1/post/2012/05/reading-instruction-across-countries.html
The UK children in the study lived in Scotland. At that time, nearly all children throughout the UK were taught using the ‘balanced approach’ (England: National Literacy Strategy’s ‘Searchlights’ 1998-2006), not systematic synthetic phonics (SSP).
2006. England’s DfE introduced SSP after the 2006 Rose review. It met with fierce resistance from the teaching unions, the majority of union members and many influential academics (Mills T. 2021, Greaney 2013). Worried, rightly, that primary schools would be very reluctant to move to SSP from the deeply embedded NLS balanced approach, England’s DfE produced a series of sticks and carrots1. The major carrot was its own free, non-mandatory SSP programme Letters & Sounds (L&S) in 2007. Under heavy government pressure to begin teaching SSP as quickly as possible (they could use either a commercial SSP programme or the DfE’s free one), the majority of schools took up L&S 2007.
1For an outline of the DfE’s sticks and carrots after the Rose review 2006, see Mike Lloyd-Jones’ book ‘Phonics and the Resistance to Reading’ (2013) Ch 9. Climate Change: the Rose Review and After.
Despite their promise to implement the 2006 Rose review’s recommendations in full (including stopping the use of the Searchlight multi-cueing strategies), inexplicably, alongside the introduction of wave 1 SSP, the DfE continued to fund schools to use Reading Recovery (RR Room 101) as a wave 3 intervention for Y1 children and recommended that schools ‘layer’ RR with a number of wave 2 RR derivatives, all found under the Every Child a Reader (ECaR) mantle. In this way, the DfE continued to endorse the balanced approach and effectively ensured that the Searchlight strategies remained embedded in most schools.
2023-24 update: ”In the 2023-24 academic year, 464 state schools in England” were using Reading Recovery:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/reading-recovery-europe/sites/reading_recovery_europe/files/europe_report_for_reading_recovery_2023-24.pdf
2025: The government-funded Education Endowment Foundation continues to recommend Reading Recovery as an approach for improving literacy in KS1 pupils:
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/literacy-ks-1
2007. Letters & Sounds (L&S): Most schools turned to L&S automatically because it was free, government-produced and approved, but problems with the programme and its implementation were there from the start, the most serious being the lack of high-quality phonics training to accompany it. At the time of its introduction, the vast majority of primary teachers and LEA literacy trainers had little accurate knowledge of SSP teaching.
Another serious problem was the lack of L&S-matched resources. To limit any conflict of interest with the commercial SSP programmes, L&S was rolled out without any essential resources such as programme-linked decodable books. Eventually, a few commercial publishers produced L&S-matched decodable books, but the majority of early primary teachers who took up the programme carried on using their school’s stock of levelled, predictable-text scheme books with their beginning readers, along with a hastily improvised mixture of mismatched ‘phonics’ materials. This meant that, in most schools using L&S, the Searchlight multi-cueing strategies continued to be used in literacy activities involving word reading outside the daily SSP lesson, in most wave 2/3 reading interventions (see ECaR above), and in KS2.
2011. In 2011, the DfE introduced another carrot; a matched funding scheme for primary schools to invest in DfE-approved (a catalogue was provided) phonics materials and training to support their SSP teaching. Some schools spent their entire £6,000 matched funding on phonics games and activities rather than high-quality phonics training or programme-matched decodable books.
The death of match-funding. John Walker:
https://theliteracyblog.com/2014/04/10/the-death-of-match-funding/
”Most of the funding (95%) was used to purchase phonics products rather than training.”
2012. The DfE’s most effective stick was the year 1 Phonics Screening Check (PSC). It was introduced in 2012, in part to ‘’encourage schools to pursue a rigorous phonics programme’’ (DfE. 2012). Despite strong opposition, which continues to this day2, from the same people who fought the implementation of the 2006 Rose review’s recommendations, in its final, independent evaluation (Walker et al. 2015), the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) found that the phonics check’s introduction three years earlier had been followed by improvements in phonics teaching and assessment.
2Nov. 2024 update. The NAHT (National Association of Head Teachers) put out a press statement that said: “The primary statutory assessment system, including SATs, does not support children’s progress…The Multiplication Tables Check, Phonics Screening Check and Key Stage 2 Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling test are unnecessary and should be scrapped.”
England’s largest education union, the National Education Union (NEU), still opposes all primary statutory assessments, including the PSC, and advises teachers incorrectly that ”a narrow focus on synthetic phonics is less effective than a more balanced approach.”
https://neu.org.uk/campaigns/assessment/primary-and-early-years-assessment/phonics-screening-check
2016->2019. It became clear that the steady rise in the percentage of children ‘reaching or exceeding the expected standard’ in the Y1 phonics check had plateaued at around 80%. This was/is a worry for the DfE. 95% to 100% of children in every school (including schools with pupils drawn from areas with high levels of deprivation) should reach the expected standard in the Y1 PSC every year (Ofsted 2019 Blog), in what is a simple check on previously taught foundational phonics knowledge and decoding skills.
”The percentage of children on free school meals who reach the expected standard on the check is 12 percentage points lower than of their more affluent peers. There is no excuse for that in a test based on the mechanics of reading. All, apart from those with the most severe special needs, can learn to read.”
(Chief Inspector. Ofsted Annual Report 2017/18).
2025 update: ”We are setting an ambition for 90% of children to meet the expected standard in the Phonics Screening Check by the end of Year 1 through an improved focus on the children that struggle in the earliest years. Many schools already achieve this, and we will support more schools to do the same.”
(Government response to the Curriculum and Assessment Review. Nov. 2025)
2021. It wasn’t until 2021 that the DfE acknowledged that L&S 2007 was ”not fit for purpose” as it did not provide the ”support, guidance, resources or training needed” and withdrew the programme.
This diagram illustrates the wide-spread poor phonics practice which occurred in the intervening years:
https://phonicsinternational.com/Simple%20View%20of%20Schools.pdf
2024. With L&S 2007 gone, nearly all of England’s primary schools use one of the 45 DfE-validated commercial SSP programmes listed below:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/choosing-a-phonics-teaching-programme/list-of-phonics-teaching-programmes
Around a third of the programmes on the list are, with the DfE’s active encouragement (DfE. Validation of SSP programmes. 2023), close copies of L&S 2007, but now complete with the previously missing support, guidance, resources and training. The majority of schools used L&S 2007 before it was withdrawn, and most of them turned automatically to one of the ‘new’ L&S programmes.
It would be prudent for schools to do some in-depth research before selecting a programme from the list.
In The Reading Ape’s blog ‘Decisions, decisions – can research help identify the best phonics programme?’, he pointed out several problems with using schools’ Y1 PSC results for programme evaluation purposes*. He also suggested that all the DfE-validated phonics programmes were tested for their long term effectiveness through the use of a ”Year Three phonics pseudo-word check that assesses the whole alphabetic code, including polysyllabic level.”
https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2020/05/10/decisions-decisions-can-research-help-identify-the-best-phonics-programme (*See DfE 2017, Mills T. 2024)
When the subject of programme effectiveness came up on Twitter/X, John Walker, co-author of one of the 45 DfE-approved phonics programmes, responded that he’d like to see the DfE introduce a spelling test at the end of Year 3. ”That”, he said ”would really separate the phonics sheep from the goats.” (@SWLiteracy. Twitter/X)