You would have thought so, wouldn't you R&T.
Unfortunately if you don't do phonics correctly you don't get very good results. There is no getting away from that.
But the key reason is that teachers have been very resistant to change their method of teaching reading. Synthetic Phonics became offficial govt guidance in 2007 but teachers weren't obliged to follow the guidance so, if they didn't like it, they didn't do it.
Training was very poor or non-existent. Very often the people who were given the task of phonics training in the Local Authorities were the very same advisors who, up to 2007 had been trainingin, and pushing very hard, the old Searchlights 'guessing' strategies. Those folks really strongly believed that that was the right way to teach reading; how could they be expected to perfom a complete U-turn and train in phonoics, which they neither believed in or understood? (I can vouch for the awfulness of such training, having attended a local session put on for secondary teachers led by Primary Literacy Advisors)
So, until the inception of the Phonics Check in 2012 there was really nothing putting any sort of pressure on teachers to change theri method of teaching reading. So they basically didn't. You can see from threads on here abut reading that any teachers still haven't changed their methods.
The evaluation of the Pilot check in 2011 found that 73% of the teachers who administered the pilot checks taught 'other strategies' alongside phonics. Extrapolate that to England as a whole and you don't get much good phonics teaching going on.
The NFER interim report on the 2012 Check included a survey of teachers. They found this:
..a large majority of respondents (89 per cent) felt to some extent that the teaching of systematic synthetic phonics has value in the primary classroom, with 64 per cent ‘agreeing’ fully with this statement. However, 89 per cent also ‘agreed’ or ‘agreed somewhat’ that a variety of different methods should be used to teach children to decode words.
p18 on.
www.nfer.ac.uk/nfer/publications/YOPC01/YOPC01.pdf
So, as the report says, there appears to be some confusion in teachers' minds about synthetic phonics teaching.
Given that there has only been a real requirement for phonics teaching in the last 2 years I wouldn't expect to see much change in results until 2017, when the Y1s of 2012 (the first entire cohort to do the Check) take their Y6 NCTs. Even the, I don't expect it to be startling as many teachers still don't know how to teach SP properly. I hear of children being intensivel drilled in sounding out and blending nonsense words, then, once the drilling session is finished, being encouraged to guess their way through books just as though phonics has nothing at all to do with reading
I would also suspect that 2014 will be the last year for the Phonics check as I cannot see the current government staying in office and I think that any Labour (or LibDem) Education Minister will abolish the Check immediately. I may be completely wrong...but Mystic Maizie speaks 