In an open letter to the education secretary Nadhim Zahawi, over 250 signatories call on the Government to amend their policy to ‘centre on a wider range of approaches to teaching phonics and reading, enabling teachers to use their own judgement about which is best for their pupils’.
The letter also says that teachers should be encouraged to focus ‘first and foremost’ on pupils making sense of texts, and that phonics teaching should be ‘carefully linked with reading of whole texts.’
Their call comes after findings from new research, carried out by the UCL Institute of Education, suggests that teaching of reading has been less successful in England since the use of synthetic phonics was adopted.
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