Two steps forward, one step back…
2003. Map of Europe (data from Seymour, Aro & Erskine’s 2003 study) showing 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 ”high profile academics” (see ‘The Fightback’ in 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 carrots*. 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.
*For 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/Tier 1 SSP, the DfE continued to fund schools to use Reading Recovery (see Room 101) as an wave 3 intervention for Y1 children, and recommended that schools ‘layer’ RR with a number of 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.
2007. Letters&Sounds: 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, the vast majority of primary teachers and LEA literacy trainers had little knowledge of SSP teaching and did not understand why it is so crucial to early reading instruction. Nearly all primary teachers had been steeped in whole language philosophy and balanced literacy instruction from the start of their careers, beginning in teacher training.
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-linked decodable books but the majority of early primary teachers who took up the programme carried on using their school’s stock of leveled, whole language 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, discrete SSP lesson, in all wave 2/3 reading interventions (see ECaR above) and in Key Stage 2.
2012. The DfE’s most effective ‘stick’ was the Y1 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 day**, 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 only three years earlier had catalysed an improvement in phonics teaching and assessment.
Unfortunately, a belief has arisen in some schools that SSP teaching is no longer necessary, even pointless***, once the PSC has taken place at the end of Y1, if the majority of pupils have reached the expected standard. The Reading Ape (TRA) looked at the outcome of putting this belief into practice when he checked on the phonics decoding abilities of ”every child in years 3, 4 and 5 across 7 schools” who had been taught phonics from the beginning of Reception to the end of Y1, when phonics teaching stopped. He discovered, through the use of the Bryant Test of Basic Decoding Skills (Bryant. 1975), that although most of the children had reached or exceeded the expected standard in the Y1 phonics check and did not appear outwardly to be struggling readers, ”70%…had not mastered decoding.” (TRA Blog: Phonics in KS2 – The ‘later’ catastrophe).
**Nov. 2024. 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), also opposes all primary statutory assessments, including the PSC, and gives the misleading message 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
Feb. 2025 update: ‘Phillipson to defy unions and keep primary phonics and maths tests’
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/phillipson-to-defy-unions-and-keep-primary-phonics-and-maths-tests-5f65c2hjq
***If pupils ‘fail’ the PSC after 2 years of SSP teaching, some teachers believe that they need ”alternative teaching methods as phonics doesn’t work for some children.”
2016->2019. It became clear that the steady rise in percentage of children ‘reaching or exceeding the expected standard’ in the Y1 phonics check had plateaued at around 80%. This was 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 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).
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 (Hepplewhite. 2015) 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 now 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 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. To avoid handicapping their pupils, schools should ‘do their homework’ before selecting a SSP programme from the list; there is no independent research, presently, which compares the different programmes on their long term effectiveness (that is in KS2, in decoding and spelling) – see TRA’s blog below:
In TRA’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:
https://www.thereadingape.com/single-post/2020/05/10/decisions-decisions-can-research-help-identify-the-best-phonics-programme
He 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.”
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)