The sounds and the fury: the debate surrounding phonics teaching in England
It is a common lament that the world is becoming increasingly divisive, with it becoming harder to find nuance within a debate, or appreciate the value of compromise. This is no different when it comes to the teaching of reading. I have watched the Twitter storm regarding the article ‘Reading wars or reading reconciliation?’ written by Dominic Wyse and Alice Bradbury, Professors at UCL’s Institute of Education, with interest. Their article explores the research evidence related to phonics teaching, presents new empirical findings, and discusses the repercussions for pedagogy and practice. My own PhD research explores the marginalisation of different types of literacy within the context of England’s current policy of teaching early reading using a specific method of phonics. I have used the publication of this article as an opportunity to engage with the current state of the debate in England, and respond to the points raised within it that are so essential for all educators to hear.
The title of the article reflects the adversarial nature of the debate on the teaching of reading. It can get incredibly heated and at times personal. There is a good reason for this; teaching is a vocation, not just a job, and people who work within education are necessarily passionate about ensuring that the children they teach are able to learn to the best of their ability. Reading is perhaps the most important skill that is taught in schools, as it is from this that all other learning can progress. Unfortunately, the unintended repercussions of this passion and emotional investment is that people seem to find it very difficult to engage with any alternative viewpoint and see their merits. The ultimate victims of this kind of inflexibility is inevitably young children themselves, whose minds and earliest learning experiences become a battleground for well-meaning adults. Most significantly, the real state of teaching reading is not being critically explored, as to question phonics is not permitted- it appears to be you are either “for” phonics, or “against” it, rather than allowing for nuance and flexibility.
As the article by Wyse & Bradbury shows, England is an outlier of the English speaking world in its emphasis on the prime use of systematic synthetic phonics (SSP). Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own approaches, which do include the use of phonics (there is no doubt that all teaching of reading needs some elements of phonics), but not exclusively. Most other countries implement either a ‘whole language’ approach, such as Canada and Ireland, or a ‘balanced instruction’ approach, such as Australia. England’s focus on SSP begins in the earliest years of children’s education, known as the Early Years Foundation Stage, which spans ages 0–5. The statutory expectation is that at the end of this stage, which children reach at the end of Reception (age 4–5), children should have met a series of Early Learning Goals (ELGs) one of which is related to reading. Children at the “expected” level of development will be able to recognise a series of sounds, including some with two letters, such as “ee” in feet, and use these skills to read words and sentences.
This emphasis upon phonics continues in the English curriculum, which children begin working within in Year 1 (age 5–6). At the end of this year, they are assessed on their knowledge of phonics using a statutory test, the Phonics Screening Check, or PSC. This test establishes whether or not a child can recognise and/or decode (the term for sounding out words using phonics recognition skills) a series of both real words and ‘pseudowords’, such as ‘vap’ or ‘ect’. Decoding is often referred to as ‘sounding out’ — children look at a word and break it down into sounds, which they then ‘blend’ together to make one word. The idea would be that once they know the sounds well enough, they can do this with any word, familiar or not. This video provided by the DfE shows some examples of children carrying out the test. The results for each school are submitted to the government. In addition to these tests, Ofsted, the Inspectorate of schools in England, announced in 2019 with their updated inspection framework that they will be prioritising reading performance when they inspect schools, with a key focus upon phonics.
In defence of this approach, the government argues that the use of SSP and the PSC has led to direct improvements in outcomes. In response to Wyse and Bradbury’s article, a government spokesperson cites the statistic that “since the introduction of the phonics screening check in 2012, the percentage of Year 1 pupils meeting the expected standard in reading has risen from 58 per cent to 82 per cent, with 92 per cent of children achieving this standard by Year 2.” However, this is not quite the same as saying that children’s reading has actually improved.
The PSC involves words with no context, and does not look at comprehension. The abilities to recognise isolated words and to use phonics skills to sound out an unknown word are aspects of reading, but it is the focus on these above other skills which demands a disproportionate emphasis on the part of teachers in order to ensure enough children pass. Reading comprehension, arguably the whole point of reading, is not assessed until the end of Year 2 in the SATs tests. One significant part of the article features results from a survey carried out with teaching practitioners on the impact of the PSC in Y2 (a result of it being delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic) — one teacher succinctly commented that the results of the test are that there is “more phonics focused teaching. Less reading teaching.”
Of course, it is necessary to be able to recognise words before you can understand them (although this can be done via other methods than just phonics, with words such as ‘the’, which cannot be ‘sounded out’). Ultimately, if the current method worked well, you would hope to see improvements in both word recognition and comprehension skills over time. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case. As shown by the results on the Department of Education webpages, from 2016 to 2019 the percentage of children achieving the expected standard in reading the Year 2 SATs has gone from 74%…to 75%. For children identified as ‘disadvantaged’, the percentage has not changed from 62%, and for children identified as having Special Educational Needs (SEN) the percentage has also not changed from a shocking 30%. The attainment gap between both disadvantaged pupils and those with SEN and other children is actually growing.
It is not just the actual outcomes in schools that do not back up the sole use of SSP. Wyse and Bradbury argue that following their meta-analysis of the existing studies on SSP, there is no research evidence that justifies it. Nevertheless, ‘evidence’ or ‘proof’ are generally the key terms utilised by the government when defending the approach of SSP, as they argue that systematic phonics teaching has been “proven the world-over to be the most effective method of teaching children to read”. And so herein lies a key issue — the emphasis upon evidence, rather than simplifying the debate, in fact increases its complexity. The research that does exist provides different conclusions, and uses different methodological approaches to both asking and answering the question of the ‘best’ approach to teaching reading, leading to confusion and misunderstanding. Rather than exploring the context that teaching and reading policies are working within, both researchers and educators fixate on very minor differences across studies and discredit findings of studies they disagree with.
There is a lack of studies into what is actually happening in classrooms or with a focus on what teachers need to ensure their students are effectively learning to read. In the current education landscape with few options available, teachers lack the ability to critically question why some students can learn with phonics, and some can’t. One mandated approach ignores the fact that children will naturally have many different ways of reading and exploring literacy, and practitioners need confidence, flexibility and a variety of approaches in their teaching toolbox (including SSP) to effectively teach everyone.
The key takeaway from this article is that phonics, SSP included, has its place in teaching reading. There is no doubt it is important. However, so are other approaches. The question is not phonics or not- it is phonics, and what?
Hannah Raine is a PhD student at The School of Education.
