Again, you need BOTH. Phonics is a vital component, and explicit systematic synthetic/linguistic phonics is the most effective approach to ensuring that all children maximise their phonics ability/skills. Reading = 1) decoding (phonics) x 2) language comp. Children from rich HLE have lots of (2) and...

I actually find it is the adults who struggle at first without the crutch of letter names as meta-language (I know I did). The children don't know any different and while most children can cope with a dual approach it really can be confusing and create an unnecessary stumbling block for the more vul...

Just as an aside, I found it interesting that children who know letter names seem to have an advantage in learning words over those who do not. I wonder if this is because they have 2 memory 'joggers' - a succession of named letter units alongside the succession of graphic shapes building the word,...

"the condition is still shrouded in mystery" Really?? I do hope they are not going to lead another load of desperate parents and children down some wacky, 'wonderful' and usually ridiculously expensive road to some solution or other. Yes, some really bright, talented kids do grow up and achieve real...

In reply to Kiki: My experience as a good adult reader is not that I am excellent at decoding fluently. I have a large repertoire of words which I recognise instantly, sometimes from seeing them only partially as my eyes focus at intervals along the line of print. The research supports this persona...

If it's the school I think it may be (probably the closest one geographically to Kiki) the FSM figure is 2.2%, as against well over 50% in the two schools with the highest percentage of children on FSM. I do think that parental input can make a huge difference. Some of this input may be phonics-rel...

Jenny asked: There was a wide variation in the FSM figures for the schools in that Ofsted report - what was the figure for the school you 'phoned, Kiki? I’d also be interested to hear these stats. As Jenny says when children have lots of support at home mixed methods may well produce readers but as...

I'm not sure it is such an interesting observation. Consider that there may be several routes to good reading. The phonics check only checks one. Children who use others are discriminated against. In a school using 'eclectic' methods the whole class is discriminated against. What is important is th...

Funny though, I telephoned one of the schools cited in in this report, one that said they used an eclectic range of materials (bwaap...bwaap...bwaap warning!) and their PST results were "terrible". I assume (before kenm asks ;-) ) that 'PST' here stands for 'Phonics Screening Test'? I'd add it to t...

Ofsted showed in 2010 that both KS1 and KS2 results were good in schools where early phonics teaching was good – see http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/reading-six-how-best-schools-do-it . So there has been some official relating of early teaching methods to outcomes on existing government tests ev...

I too despair at the suggestion that dyslexia is a gift. The notion simply makes children and adults who don't have any special talent feel doubly hard-done by; after all they are no more likely to have a special 'talent' than anyone else. It is a really pernicious myth.

don't worry, conflation free zone here

just looking for something that really spells it out (with data) and makes it clear to anyone seeking to reduce any attainment gap btw middle-class high achievers and lower socio-economic and EAL pupils that systematic synthetic phonics is the way to reduce that

Could someone please point me in the direction of any scholarly research that illustrates the effects of good phonics teaching for lower socio-economic groups and EAL pupils.

Thank you

Hi all

Sorry if this is somewhere already but does anyone know where I can find a table showing the relative performance of different Local Authorities ie which LAs did best which did the worst etc.

Thanks