England’s synthetic phonics approach is not working for children who struggle to read

By Dominic Wyse, Professor of Early Childhood and Primary Education, UCL

Since 2012, England has taken an increasingly narrow approach to how primary school teachers should teach reading.

The policies on teaching reading have insisted that an approach called “systematic synthetic phonics” is the only way to teach reading. Synthetic phonics involves teaching children the 44 sounds, or “phonemes”, of language and how they are represented by letters in words.

England’s approach to teaching reading was alleged to have…

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