Following poor results for children’s reading in Wales, the Cabinet Secretary for Education, Lynne Neagle, commented that it is a clear expectation for all schools in Wales to use ‘synthetic’ phonics, and a Welsh Government spokesperson said that the importance of phonics needs to be more explicit. See the letter below, written by Rob Randel on behalf of the RRF, and sent to Lynne Neagle on 7th October 2024.
Annwyl Mrs Neagle,
The Reading Reform Foundation (RRF) was encouraged by your comments in the Senedd on Thursday, October 3, stating that there is now a clear expectation that all schools in Wales teach systematic synthetic phonics (SSP), the most effective way to teach reading according to reliable evidence.
We also commend the Welsh Government’s acknowledgement that the importance of phonics needs to be more explicit and that the wording needs to be clarified around the use of picture cues in the curriculum.
In order to achieve this clarity, we advise that the Simple View of Reading model is referred to in Curriculum for Wales guidance. This will provide a clear distinction between word recognition (decoding) and language comprehension, both essential for skilled reading comprehension.
For word recognition, children should be taught the letter(s)-sound correspondences, to say the sounds represented by the letters in a word, and to blend these sounds together, all-through-the-word, to lift it off the page. Pictures and context cues should not play any part in this decoding process. However, pictures or context cues may provide assistance in building language comprehension and understanding the meaning of a word once it has been decoded.
Moreover, if the expectation is that all schools in Wales use a synthetic phonics approach, the curriculum changes needed are not just limited to the use of cueing strategies.
As a registered charity, the RRF trustees are experienced and informed by reliable evidence; therefore, we would very much welcome a meeting with you to discuss the aspects of reading that need addressing, so that early instruction aligns more closely with systematic synthetic phonics within Curriculum for Wales.
Cofion Cynnes, Rob Randel