WHY don't some teachers teach pure phonics? And what impact does it have on how teachers are viewed?

[TeenPlusTwenties]

As seen on this board by a current thread (which I decided not to hijack) and another one this week on AIBU, there still seems to be a chunk of current teachers not attempting to teach decoding via phonics but preferring mixed methods (phonics, plus whole words, plus guessing).

Do you think the fact so many teachers are failing to teach phonics properly impacts on how the profession as a whole is viewed?

If the main thing that parents of young children understand is important (reading) is not being taught in the way deemed most effective from research, that is also mandated in the NC, doesn't that undermine trust and respect massively?

I'm trying to think of a good analogy, but in medicine there is NICE which looks at data on effectiveness of medicines and then says what can / can't be used.

Is this because teachers are so overworked they don't read the research? Or are primary teachers not maths-literate enough to understand data, and so prefer their own sample-of-one instead?

Do parents end up 'not trusting' teachers because they can see such a blatant example of not following good practice /not knowing what they are doing

The gov website says there are 34 schools in England that are phonics hubs. Hardly enough to effectively train the whole country.

There was several years of matched funding. I think the training for some schemes comes in at about £400-600 per teacher for a 4 day course, including the teaching resources. At least one of those offers a discount for whole school training and the matched funding would have essentially halved the price.

Understandably, schools did go for the cheaper LA options. I wonder whether it might have been better and cheaper for the government just to update letters & sounds to something more in line with best practice in phonics teaching. Schools would have used it.

Not all schools qualify for that level of help, and it's a start. There are more hugs intended. If the level of negativity shown here already is anything to go by though, there'll be other barriers to contend with. Some schools are their own worst enemy.

Hubs, not hugs! My autocorrect obviously has a very different view on their kind of support

Wow. An interesting set of responses.

So what we have is:

understanding of what phonics is and what it is for:

• not a common understanding of what phonics is (e.g. with some not realising that e.g. ai can be pronounced in different ways)
• disagreement whether 'tricky' words are decodable at all, v. saying 'not decodable YET' to yR children.

research

• clear disagreement as to whether the research is 'sound' enough

anecdotes

• lots of anecdotes 'I learned with mixed methods so it must be fine' / 'my child is an ace reader and doesn't do phonics' v others saying were they really taught phonics or actually mixed & how do you read new words if not using phonics

distrust / resistance

• some (a lot of?) distrust of government changes making teachers reluctant to change a method that they feel works
• generally people don't like change anyway, especially if they've been asked to do changes before which haven't worked out well, so why change if you can put it off long enough until the tide might turn back again

Much less response to the second part of my question (so maybe I shouldn't have included it with the first part). I was accused by someone of setting up a teacher bashing thread (which it wasn't meant to be). But actually I get the impression it is more inter-faction issues between teachers causing issues rather than parents.

Mainly the parents who care about the method are ones for whom the teaching of their child wasn't very successful. The ones whose school said they were using phonics (whether or not they were doing it 'properly') blame phonics, the ones who know the school were using mixed methods blame that.

My conclusion from all this?

I think most teachers are trying to do what they think best. But I still think that the researchers/teaching profession need a big kick (and money if needed) to lay this to rest one way or another.

(And I still don't see how you can read a new word without using phonics )

Coming next … what's the best method for doing long multiplication. To be met with complete uninterest and tumbleweed.

This 'change' has so far taken 14 years. And some schools are still surprised.

You train teachers and they leave the profession within 5 years so then you have to train some more. It’s not as simple as getting the funding and training teachers properly then it’s done! And new books cost a small fortune. Matched funding wasn’t enough. The phonics hubs are not enough (my school doesn’t qualify).
FWIW I’m a senior leader in a primary with a low turnover of staff and all of the infant teachers and TAs plus some of the KS2 ones are trained in a fantastic programme called Sounds Write. Fully synthetic and grounded in research. There’s a free online training course for parents if you google Udemy teach your child to read and write.

www.udemy.com/course/help-your-child-to-read-and-write/

Can the teachers on here explain how some children learn to read much quicker than they are being taught phonics? A number of children in DS's Primary class were deemed free readers very early in Y1 (I was a parent volunteer who listened to children read so had a list of which bands children were on). So they would have been reading and understanding words that they wouldn't have been taught the decoding rules for. Is it that they just pick them up intuitively, especially if they are reading at home and parents tell them what the word is rather than using phonics?

DS was an early reader and very rarely appeared to sound out words (but I assume he must have been doing it quickly in his head). Many of the children I listened to, and I was usually given the children who were on the lower bands, did meticulously sound out the words.

@ineedaholidaynow some children figure out the code for themselves. My own DC did. I could discuss it with them by asking simple questions to see how they were figuring out the words. Some were, of course, sight learned initially through general reading but there’s a limit to how many a child can learn that way so phonics is really important!

Look and guess is quicker and easier initially. It will get most of the children to the point of reading a simple sentence, red/yellow books by the end of Reception.

The data obsession in schools often means it isn't in teachers' interests to care too much about what happens long term, they need to prioritise their own targets. So if 80% of children can memorise and guess their way to an ELG at the end of Reception then job done.

6 pages in and probably covered;
My trio picked up certain words early; open/closed signs on shops, stop signs, McDonald’s. Favourite chocolate bar Smarties, they recognized and knew the words as memorized symbols from there they went on to memorize other words that interested them eventually being able to “read”. Eventually much later on phonics helped with decoding but it’s a bit of a catch 22 if you don’t know a word, it’s meaning or the context pronouncing it right really doesn’t matter. My 10 year old had never heard or seen an orchestra so even with some (although poor phonics) needed to hear the word pronounced by someone else.

Coming next … what's the best method for doing long multiplication

Joking apart the NC and SATS only credit column long multiplication (for about the last 4 years) so this is what all pupils are learning. It's made a big difference to us at secondary as we don't see any grid methods or Chinese multiplication any more. I wouldn't say students are any more or less confident, they just don't have a mix of methods.

Children learn by doing.
Every child I ever taught knew how to spell next, everyone. They had seen the local factory so many times that's how they knew!
The same children could spell their own name, no matter how 'unique', yet struggled with I, you , we and so on. Even after endless sessions on these words.

I don't use phonics because I teach in an SEN school and have pupils arrive with me at 11 that have had 'sounding out' drummed into them so hard that they don't see words.

They will quite often know most of the individual letters (although lots with an extra /uh/ added) but cannot blend and certainly can't spot digraphs.

If phonics is not working at 11 then it's highly unlikely to ever lead to functional reading.

I do wish pupils, especially those with 1:1 funding, would be allowed to explore other methods of learning to read earlier -and not come to secondary still working on s,a,t,p,i,n!

BUT when I taught in mainstream I absolutely used phonics for early reading. Reading books were a huge source of frustration though and unfortunately funding only allowed for books in school so the ones sent home were often the older ones that didn't match the phonic schemes.

That was certainly a problem we had, hello. In part because the books went home and didn’t come back. Switching books over is one thing the cost of having to repeatedly replace them is another.

@Teachermaths
That's interesting re what you are seeing in maths in secondary.

I do what I would call 'proper' long multiplication.
DD1 stopped on the grid method.
DD2 uses Napiers(?) method with the diagonal lines taught to her at the start of y7. She had never managed to successfully master the NC method at primary.
(both have different forms of SpLD).

(I quite like the grid method really as it helps to explain expanding brackets in algebra.)

Anyway that's off topic for this thread.

But I still think that the researchers/teaching profession need a big kick (and money if needed) to lay this to rest one way or another.

Money is probably at the centre of things as usual. If we had money, we could afford sufficient decodable books. We could also afford experienced, permanent, full time teachers and we could afford to send them on quality training courses.

As it is, I am in the process of leaving a school which is staffed predominantly by NQTs who appear to be all on the verge of a nervous breakdown and nobody to support them. Our library ceiling leaks and we can’t afford to replace it-the crappy books we do have are not in a good way. The EYFS lead left ‘unexpectedly’ and her class is being split between a supply and an HLTA who is not a teacher-the parents are not aware- whilst we try to recruit. Goodness knows what the quality of phonics teaching in that class is!

I can’t see this government prioritising money for phonics. Money to keep schools open till 5pm so that more parents can work, perhaps! Sadly, that’s the sort of thing I can see money being ring-fenced for .

Our Early Years' NQT has never seen phonics sessions in action so is spending a few days observing KS1. Unfortunately most of the KS1 staff have only ever observed other staff delivering phonics and so it goes back. Luckily they are not so bad, a few mispronounced sounds but it could be a whole lot worse!

The EYFS lead left ‘unexpectedly’ and her class is being split between a supply and an HLTA who is not a teacher-the parents are not aware- whilst we try to recruit. Goodness knows what the quality of phonics teaching in that class is!

To be fair to the HLTA they may have had the same training as the teacher regards phonics. When we did our phonics training (we did Floppy Phonics and Debbie Hepplewhite did our training) at school through a series of twilights, INSET and staff meetings it involved all class based staff including SLT, teachers, TA, and all TAs.

To be fair to the HLTA they may have had the same training as the teacher regards phonics

No, she hasn’t!

"English isn't a phonetic language."

I think you do not understand the meaning of "phonetic," and I also think you do not understand the difference between "a language" and "a language's writing system."

"Said" is not a nondecodable word.

The /e/ sound is usually spelt e (as in "pen")
In a few words, it is spelt ai (said, again, against)

www.spelfabet.com.au/spelling-lists/sorted-by-sound/e/ai-as-in-said/

Why is this so hard to understand? This is how I teach the kids in the phonics workshop that I teach.

The /e/ sound is usually spelt e (as in "pen")
In a few words, it is spelt ai (said, again, against)

I say again with an ai sound. Ditto against.

Realistically though, do you want a child to have to run through e and ai sounds for every word containing the ai digraph when 99 times out 100 it makes the ai sound? You can make up 'rules' that only work for two or three words out of the thousands but when you do the effort of remembering and trying to apply the 'rule' exceeds the effort of just remembering those 2-3 words.

Why would a child be running through all the possible sounds for ‘ai’? A well taught child is going to pretty much always try ‘ai’ first for exactly the reasons you say.