Is phonics the best way to learn to read and spell?

Yes lots of euphemisms rather than acknowledging what it actually is.

Read the thread lots of posts saying phonics phonics phonics. Whole words/look say doesn't work because you can't learn every word.

Suddenly seems much more open to various techniques today. I wish that had been the case when GS was struggling but good if things have changed.

Lathyrus3

Well I suppose it was all the children in English state schools at the end of KS2.

Methodology questionable I give you.

Indeed, the results apply only to children in English schools. Scotland and Wales do different assessments. They are not necessarily the same as English SATs.

To assess the validity of the English SATs results you have to look at the criteria for marking the assessments. The 'scoring' of the results has changed since I retired, I'm only familiar with the criteria for the old English Levels. I cannot tell if the new criteria are similar or more rigorous. All I can say is that I worked with KS3 children from Y7 who had achieved the old Level 3, or below, at the end of KS2. As I recall Level 3 was supposed to show that children had achieved basic functional literacy though not at the level expected for children of their age, which was Level 4. In my opinion none of the L3 children had achieved a level of functional literacy which would enable them to access the KS3 curriculum. Their reading ages on a standardised test was never higher than 9 and they struggled with anything beyond simple one syllable words.

There were never fewer than 30% of Y7s who were L3 or below.

This was before the new English curriculum, which mandated phonics for the initial teaching of reading, was introduced in, IIRC, 2012. Children who entered school in 2012 would be the first cohort which was (supposedly) taught by this curriculum so the expectation was that no effect of the new curriculum on SATs results could be seen until 2018 when these children were in Y6. It is difficult to assess this because in 2018 the reporting system was changed from 'levels' to 'scores' . Comparing results after 2018 with previous 'level based results is problematic for me because I don't know if the assessment criteria changed as well in 2018.

Having said that, not only has the reporting system changed but children will have been affected by the breaks in schooling caused by covid lockdowns. While I know that teachers did their best to adopt to teaching remotely, with the best will in the world this was not conducive to the effective teaching of phonics which, in the early stages calls for daily structured sessions and teacher support over the rest of the day's lessons. Additionally, children who might be identified as slower to learn didn't have the extra support they would have had if they were in school.

All in all, I think that the 2025 SATs results which Lathryus reports are pretty good given the circumstances. The children who sat them were in Y3 at the time of covid (my DGS was one of them) and didn't have the support they would normally have had.

I wouldn't expect the real effect of the 2012 curriculum changes to be shown until 2027/28 when the first cohort to enter school in reception post covid take their SATs.

If you think that effects should have been apparent by 2018 you might not appreciate that there was strong resistance to the mandating of phonics, as teachers found it hard to relinquish the 'mixed methods' in which they had been trained, so the quality of the phonics teaching was very variable. There has been a lot of work done on retraining and assessment of suitable programmes done over the past decade.

I doubt if many of you have heard of the Reading Wars. The disagreement over the teaching of reading which raged in English speaking countries from about the 1950s (believe it or not!) the was truly like a war and very hard fought. Not only teachers but academics wading in from both sides. I hear its echoes in this thread

Elegran

I don't think anyone is advocating using only one method. There was a shortish era when it was phonetic notation that was in vogue - sounds were represented by official phonetic symbols which often bore no resemblance to the normal spelling of English at all. There were far more of these symbols to be learnt by a beginner than the 26 letters of the alphabet, and once they had learnt them and were fluent in reading their (specially printed) books they were then weaned into "real" words and "real" books. Is that still done?
My impression is that all early reading teaching is now done using a mixture of phonics and whole-words, depending on the child and the words. I think it is well-known that some words lend themselves to recognition as a whole - "elephant" is a lot more distinctive in shape than "winnow" or "minimum"

ITA, as it was called, has long disappeared.

By far the best method of teaching reading is parents themselves reading books and newspapers, or, a poor third, screens and also reading to their children.

For many children this will mean that they have already started their reading journey before they start chool, as many here have said. If nothing else it means children come to school reading ready.

Glad you’re reassured tww that some words are still taught as sight words by teachers involved in teaching reading.
It’s the problem with not actually doing the job.

I was interested in the list of 100 HFWs you posted earlier. Do you still teach all of them by flash card? I ask because many of them are easily decodeable.

WRT 'tricky words' Ruth Miskin presented them like that because at the time she wrote her programme the curriculum called for teaching the HFWs. But, IIRC, she didn't teach the decodable ones separately, they were covered at the appropriate stage in her programme (and, TBH, in Jolly phonics with the first letter sound correspondences being s a t p i n words like an, in, at, it, would be covered in the first week or two of learning)

Ruth's instruction to teachers was to present the other HFWs as being 'decodable but with a tricky bit'. 'Tricky Words' is a nice name for them but it has caused a lot of misunderstanding.

Of course the HFW lists were produced to aid reading of the Look and Say books, which were never intended to support phonics teaching, and contained words very early on which no self respecting phonics teacher would introduce for their pupils to practice before they had got to that stage in learning the alphabetic code.

Its not one or the otger. Phonics/Word Recognition/Look and Say all have a place. The schools metgodology is daft frankly

My daughter was a victim of ITA. in spite of an A for A Level English she still phones me to check spellings (she's 51) Her brother was three years younger and by that time they'd given it up. His writing has always been almost illegible, but his spelling is fine.

MaizieD
RWI decodeable words on green cards
RWI Non-decodeable on red cards.

Even some early decodeable reading primers needed the addition of non decodeable words
e.g. As you said, the first letters taught are s, a, t, i, p, n. But that doesn’t make is decodeable because the s has a z sound.

They're on different coloured cards because they're 'tricky', not because they're not decodeable.

And I didn't include 'is' in my short list of decodeable ones after learning satpin.. for the very reason you give.

As far as I recall, 'is' wouldn't be in a decodeable text at that stage.

Children learn that they can sound out the words in green cards. They know how many sounds from the dots and lines .
Some Green words could be called “tricky” until the children have reached that phase.
e.g. blends like ee in three aren’t decodeable until children reach phase 3.

My goodness all these reading schemes sound complicated thank goodness all of us learned to read at home before we started school.