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

Thank you can't .

What you say makes a lot of sense, and chimes with some partially forgotten stuff I learned about change management 30 years ago.

"not all words are phoetically decodable" if they aren't decodable they're not words.
"It's my understanding that the research on phonics is shockingly poor with a very very small sample size." Three national studies ? I think you've been misled.

"I blame phonics for bad spelling " then your blame is misplaced.

"Schools don't have the money to get rid of all their previous reading books and buy new ones. " perhaps they should have taken advantage of funding when it was available to buy decodable books. Sadly many schools wasted the funding spending it on toys and games instead if texts and train8ng.

"English isn't a phonetic language" yes it is ...perhaps you mean that English has a deep orthography making it more complex because we don't have a straightforward one spelling one sound match.like some languages.

Eurochick Said is easily decoded ...three sounds /s//e/ /d/ with the graphemes being an alternative representation for the sound /e/ I'm afraid some people have been misled by poorteaching.

@pumkinspicetime Thank you! @TeenPlusTwenties' comment about primary teachers is unbelievably patronising. I shared it with my colleagues and they were not impressed to say the least! No wonder people don't want to be teachers when this is how we are perceived. It has really got me down.

red' or 'high-frequency' or 'tricky' words aren't synonyms for not decodable

Sadly many schools wasted the funding spending it on toys and games instead if texts and train8ng.

You know this for certain?

@Feenie

So the training is free but what about the cost of cover.

If we’re using anecdata then let’s talk about how three primaries in my area are £100,000 in deficit.

It is all well and good going on about phonics funding but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

"So, you're saying that if 100 kids are taught using a mix of methods, 20 of them will end up illiterate?" In some English speaking countries where mixed methods are more common it's as high as 40%

I'm sorry if some teachers have felt offended, it was not the intention, I was only trying to ask a question.

"You know this for certain?" Yes the data is freely available and it shows most schools chose to buy puppets and games rather than books.

It's a couple of videos - it's not difficult to find the time. You could run them in a staff meeting in a primary school.

I think this is part of the problem, the endless excuses and the acceptance that having data close to national is good enough. One child leaving my school as a non-reader 25 years ago was all I was willing to accept. I had no phonics training in my degree course but went away and educated myself because there was no way it was going to happen again if I could do anything about it. There have been three more since, but all three went on to SEND settings.

There has to be some responsibility on the part of teachers to read research and develop subject knowledge. It's part of the Teacher Standards. The lack of subject knowledge from some teachers is shocking.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1529100618772271

"The quality and scope of the scientific evidence today means that the reading wars should be over. But strong debate and resistance to using methods based on scientific evidence persists"

"It is uncontroversial among reading scientists that coming to appreciate the relationship between letters and sounds is necessary and nonnegotiable when learning to read in alphabetic writing systems and that this is most successfully achieved through phonics instruction. "

Thank you for the link Mrz interesting article (skim read).

Ha! The cavalry has arrived! Thank you norestformrz

The school I posted about agonised for ages over their 1 phonics check failure - a child with complex multiple SEN - because they saw it as unacceptable for any child to leave Y1 unable to decode, and thus very unlikely to be able to read at an appropriate level at the end of KS1 (a level of reading that took them beyond their parents, in the main). It's that attitude - of no child left behind, of the use of every method possible to get as many children as possible to become fully functioning readers, that i miss in many more complacent schools.

(When I say 'every method possible', I specifically don't mean 'mixed methods'. I mean phonics, more phonics, ditching every non-phonic reader, having a hugely wide and varied diet of 'stories to read TO and WITH children all day, every day' - because lack of vocabulary was an associated issue - but ONLY phonic books for children to read, by teaching phonics to much older than 'the norm', by linking all spelling to explicit phonics instruction and by specifically ensuring that all teachers in all years spoke the full language of phonics.

So, you're saying that if 100 kids are taught using a mix of methods, 20 of them will end up illiterate?

Not completely "illiterate" but reading and writing so poorly that it causes serious problems with this. Anyone who thinks this kind of % is surprising has led a sheltered life. Huge huge numbers of people in English-speaking countries read and write very badly.

With SSP taught properly, the figure is more like 5-7% (because there will always be some children who struggle with reading and writing no matter what you do, because they have a significant learning disability. But even children who have learning disabilities still do better with SSP than with other methods).

"As an adult, I'm the kind of person who remembers written words well, and if I read something once I can remember it for hours or even days." How do you think you learnt to talk?

"Are you suggesting that he should have been made to use phonics ignoring the fact that he wasn’t learning?" I'd suggest he is using phonics and very effectively.

"People get het up because they’ve sort of whipped themselves into a culture of caring about it " people get het up about it because they've seen the consequences of mixed methods and the disaster an unproven theory has had on literacy over decades.

@Feenie

I’m going to stop engaging with you now because you view point is shockingly narrow and reductive.

But you cannot moan about how poor training is and then claim that a couple of videos in a staff meeting is going to fix everything. That is no way to embed new learning for anyone. Even adults.

And, yes, teachers do read around their subjects. But reading about something and putting it into practise are two different things. We are in year 3 of life without levels and 1-9 grades and only now, even after reading the spec a hundred times and watching all the exam board videos and attending exam board training do any of us really feel fairly confident about what we’re doing. And my school is well off enough to send some of us on actual training courses to find out. Otherwise it is like groping around in the dark.

I assume from this post you are a secondary teacher so there is a reason why your knowledge of teaching reading isn't linked to evidence and research but what is the excuse for primary teachers ELEVEN years after the Rose review and FOURTEEN years after Clackmannanshire?