Isolated phonics lessons aren’t working: here’s a better way to teach young children to read and write

wee dezign/Shutterstock

Since 2010, five and six year-old children in England have been taught to read using a particular variant of “systematic phonics”.

“Phonics” describes methods of teaching reading that emphasise teaching how phonemes – the smallest sounds in the words of oral language – are represented by letters. In England the type of phonics teaching is best described as “narrow synthetic phonics”.