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...
In November 2023, the Princess of Wales delivered a speech on the results of research on early childhood, organised by her Royal Foundation’s Centre for Early Childhood. She said, “Nurturing skills that enable us to know ourselves, manage our emotions, focus our...
The Snow Report to parents by Pamela Snow is about how children are taught to read. It is directed at Australian parents, but the situation is similar in most English speaking countries, including Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. England is...
In Scotland, a young child attended an accredited Dyslexia Friendly School (DFS) and immediately started struggling to learn how to read. The child was attentive, well behaved, and hardworking but made little progress in learning to read. After 3...
There are hundreds of programmes available for teaching phonics. If you are responsible for choosing one, take time to look carefully at the content, reputation and cost of several programmes before making a decision. First, of course, you should choose a programme...
Decodable reading books are part of our toolkit when supporting our children to become proficient readers.Recently, there has been extensive funding available to enable schools to implement them in schools, as partof their approach to systematic synthetic phonics....
The only phonological skill required for children taught to read with Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) is hearing the word after the letter sounds have been spoken, such as /c-a-t/ cat, /sh-ee-p/ sheep . Skilled readers do this whenever they come...
I did a media interview on ABC Radio National’s Life Matters this week, alongside an education academic who is a balanced literacy advocate, and also Sue Knight, a Victorian school principal whose school has adopted a structured and explicit approach to literacy...
In spite of numerous studies over decades, the controversy about how best to teach children the foundations of literacy continues. In England, nearly all schools teach ‘systematic synthetic phonics’, at least to some extent, but in most of the English speaking world...
Decodables are books designed to facilitate the development of decoding skills in the early stages of learning to read. Many educators are talking about decodables, but there is a lot of misunderstanding and, dare I say, even misinformation out there as to what...