AIBU to question whether my Year 7 still needs phonics?

Teacher of 34 years here.
Seen it all.

If she's sight reading and motivated she'll do just as well with inference and deciphering.

She definitely doesn't need any more stress with phonics if it hasn't suited her up to now.

My DD (6h learnt to read without phonics. I’m not sure how, she is doing phonics at school still (Y1) and does understand it, but she became a free reader before she had covered 50% of the phonics content.

She makes me smile as she will say things like “we haven’t learnt that sound yet” while at the same time being able to read practically anything without help. She’s currently reading Harry Potter, Goblet of Fire without assistance.

The only thing I find is that sometimes there’s a word she has never come across that she can read but not pronounce correctly because it’s unfamiliar. But most of the time phonics is no help anyway. She virtually never uses the phonics to read - she could just read on sight from about age 3. As did I (and her Dad) who were reading before school long before phonics were a thing.

I’ve nothing against phonics but not all kids need it.

They do, but phonics gives you tools to deal with new words that are complex. It is just “sounding the sounds out”.

I do yr 7 literacy interventions. English is such a difficult language to understand - the rules seem completely arbitrary to children. We have pupils whose test scores are the same but whose abilities are completely different. Due to staffing levels, they are being taught as small groups, rather than individually. There are children who experience difficultly with seeing the letters within words, so we are breaking the words down and teaching them to identify sounds. Others can read quite fluently but cannot spell at all, so we revisit phonics to try to overcome the disconnect between reading and the ability to reproduce what they've seen and recognised, in their written work.

Learning for our children is a mixture of working out sounds in some cases and just recognising words as a whole in others. Or deciphering meaning based on the sentence as a whole.

I would think that if your child can read fluently, then what they need is a focus on the areas where they might be struggling (such as spelling), rather than a specific phonics programme because they seem to have worked out the 'rules' even if they couldn't tell you why pronunciation is one way instead of another.

I agree they are subconsciously using them, but if the OP's DD is already doing this successfully (and is at secondary school), there seems little need to go back and teach the principles. Once you're doing it subconsciously you've cracked it.

This isn't true. There were phonics based methods that pre date look & say.

Most people who were not "taught phonics" unconsciously grasped the code, the repetition of sounds within words embeds it. As fluent readers we develop automaticity, we blend the sounds so fast we are not even aware we are doing it but brain scans can show it happening.

How this impacts later on is our ability to read a completely new word (which is common in higher education, and in science/tech especially). You can't work out "ketone" or "spectrometer" or "quark" from look & say.

It also underpins foreign language learning. Many European languages are underpinned by phonics (often more regularly & predictably than in English), its just a different set of grapheme phoneme correspondences.

So op it depends what you want for her. If you expect her to move on to higher education (a-levels, uni) or work in a profession where you regularly encounter technical or specialist vocabulary, its worth continuing, if not, you may seem it not a valuable use of her time.

100% - my DS is never going to read much for pleasure, but he is confident with reading now and shot ahead at spelling and can decode fine. The programme achieved more than 3 years of in-school interventions. I’m so glad we got it sorted and he is happy about moving to high school academically, as I don’t know where he’d be now otherwise. We need to work on times table recall next- I think there are similar methods to Toe to Toe for that too.

As a teacher of several decades, I can assure you she doesn't need to learn phonics now if she is reading well for her age! I'm working with a child at school in year 6 who is noticeably dyslexic- spelling all over the place - who has recently become a fluent enough reader to pass her SATs tests. She can't use phonics or read aloud fully fluently but she sure is determined to succeed.

My DC learnt by the look and say method, so did I. Phonics is a tool for learning and not a way of reading. If she can read, then phonics are not needed. They might help with spelling but not really necessary .

But again, this is teaching for the exam rather than for the real world so, on that basis, I am not sure that 100 is significantly better than 98.
I had similar issues with times table at school. I still remember the whole year where teachers, mum and even my grandmother made it their personal project to teach me times table. I never learned and I have my own ways of working out the sums using the closest position I can recall. For example, it doesn't take me significantly more time to work out 7x8 by subtracting 14 from 70. A second at best. And any double digit multiplied by 11 is worked out by adding first digit and the second and sticking the result in the middle (i.e. 27x11 is 297). And by the time we are deep into algebra (and I was exceptionally good at it) times table becomes irrelevant.
I was very lucky that after that year-long times table incident, my parents were a lot more concerned with actual acquired knowledge than test results. I used zero maths in my entire research project where calculations were done by statistical software and ability to analyse data was actually a far more useful skill to have than recalling times table.

I don’t believe this. I was never taught phonics, have a STEM degree and read 100+ books a year across a range of complexities. There are millions of competent, educated readers in this country who were never taught to read with phonics and are coping very well.

Death by phonics is real for many kids. I like a hybrid approach to teaching reading, but this emphasis on synthetic phonics or you are failing is ridiculous. It could be cynically argued that had Ruth Miskin not been in her position of associated power, we wouldn't be so 'all or nothing '.
How's dd's auditory memory OP? If she's good at remembering songs/jingles etc then practise singing /chanting times tables. Sometimes seeing it makes you question it more than just hearing it. I encourage my auditory times table learners to get into tests (where relevant!) and write down the tables they may stumble on (usually 6,7,8s) so they have a quick prompt and don't need to overthink it if needed.

This book made a huge difference for my daughter aged about 13… It got her reading teenager books for pleasure. She's still not the best reader but succeeds well in a job that involves reading complex document daily. I sometimes think people forget that reading skills can continue improving as an adult at work.

@PuttingOutFirewithGasoline ”Interestingly it's becoming very well known that actually phonics is a barrier to reading for many kids and there is an almost cult like devotion to it by many teachers.”

Completely agree! As a teacher, so many schools and teachers would rather persist with phonics rather than accept <5 children per class might need a different approach. The phonics screening is part of the problem as it assesses reading by phonics rather than just reading. Why is that the goal? Surely we want all children to read, and sure, phonics is a great tool for that but lots of children like poor OP’s daughter has had her time wasted for years!

@Passmethecheese it won’t become an issue as long as she can read fluently and equally important be able to spell.

If you are still concerned subscribe to ‘Reading Eggs’, it’s a really fun way to learn phonics. There’s lots of fun repetition so it sinks in. Both my DC used this for at least a year each and they excelled with their reading/spelling.

What is her spelling like though?phonics doesn't just help reading!!

I didn't learn to read until year 7. I was 11 or 12. I just didn't get words. They didn't mean anything to me. Then in Year 7 things clicked ish. I struggled through school and life. I wasn't academic. I just found it all hard. Anyway as an adult I went back to college and uni. So.etimes words were still difficult. I would underline anything I didn't know look it up in the dictionary and find out the pronunciation and meaning. I got a 2:1. Anyhow, I now have kids. One was a fluent reader by 5 using phonics which were absolutely alien to me. The other is finding it much more difficult. Now I think that I have ADHD and dyslexia. My eldest is currently being investigated for ADHD and autism. The youngest we think has dyslexia but they won't investigate until next year.

She's y7, so you could ask whether she will qualify for extra time for GCSEs. They need to formally assess in y9 and given her school presumably they will do this no issue, but they may also check now and start giving her the extra time. (Otherwise she may start to rush so she finishes which wouldn't be good if she doesn't need to.)

Well of course if you are told the word ('hearing the word helps too') then you can read it, and having seen it once the DC with good memories will be able to read it again.
Context is all very well but:
He had an electric collection v He had an eccentric collection v He had an eclectic collection all have slightly different meanings.

We eventually gave up for DD wrt instant recall.
For her GCSE we got her to spend the first 5 minutes of the non calculator paper writing out a times table grid that she could refer to for the rest of the exam.

@TeenToTwenties Well yes, an established method but the obsession in schools that it’s The Only Way is recent. It’s part of a toolkit but some dc don’t need vast amounts of it because they quickly recognise the syllables. However pronunciation of a word isn’t always produced by phonics. Having an idea of context and hearing the word helps too.