Hi there - I was a Reception and Year 1 teacher and I taught synthetic phonics for 5 years before leaving work to have my girls. I've since tutored children diagnosed as dyslexic and I used Jolly Phonics as a resource but did spend time looking into THRASS.
Someone pointed me in the direction of this thread, so I'll answer some points, if I may.
Firstly, any system of teaching and resources is subject to the interpretation and use of the individual teachers concerned and a lot of knowledge s required of teachers to teach reading and phonics thoroughly. Teachers do need to have attended a THRASS course before purchasing resources and understanding how to implement it, but I guess it would still depend upon how they are doing it in class and how much of this they have communicated to parents. If you don't understand it, because the nature of our alphabetic code is complicated and it's been taught a lot more thoroughly than it ever was in 'our' day, then pop in and ask someone to explain it. Schools often have meetings to outline their teaching in such areas - I used to do one with how I taught reading.
"I feel it is far too advanced and abstract for their age"
- our written language is a phonetic one; that is, our written words are contructed of letters, or combinations of letters, that represent our individual spoken sounds. Because of the history of where all our different words come from, this sound/letter correspondence is quite complicated, in that we have lots of spellings for each sound and some spellings represent different sounds.
HOWEVER, taught systematically and thoroughly and in an age-appropriate way, this makes sense to children and they pick it up very quickly and learn to read very quickly.
So it is kind of advanced, compared with how we were taught, which was generally to learn 26 letters and their 26 sounds and to learn words as wholes in the meantime so it looked like we were reading quicker....
But it's not beyond Reception age children at all - of all the classes I taught, there were never any that couldn't read this way, albeit at different levels.
It isn't abstract when it's related directly tto words and reading them - then, it's utterly relevant. Teaching should be quick - here's a sound, here's its spelling, let's put it in sequence with some others we have learned and sound out all through the word to read it.
If learning is being done some other way - I doon't like the sound of "they learn it by looking at a sheet of letters, and trying to memorise them" - this does sound abstract and irrelevant....
"warned the parents that we should not be doing any simple phonics at all at home as this would confuse them" - it is true that conflicting methods can confuse children - indeed, it is the mixed method of teaching children to read that has consistently failed 25% of children as the years have gone on, which has prompted this overhaul of how to teach reading recently.
The 'traditional' way of teaching phonics, through the alphabet; 26 letters, 26 sounds, usually just in their initial position e.g. a is for ant, b is for ball etc AND usually pronouncing the sounds incorrectly is far too limiting and can confuse children who see the logic but are frustrated by the lack of knowledge they are receiving.
However, taught properly, you should see results fast. Teaching using JP, you teach 6 sounds in one week - s, a, t, i, p and n and you use these to make words that the children can read e.g. tin, sat, pin, pan, snip, snap etc so at least 30 words can be read by the end of the first week. Then add the next 6 into the following week - ck, e, h, r, m and d and you can imagine how many words can be read by the end of the second week! Loads! Children who are struggling to take all these sounds and spellings on board can reinforce some at a slower pace and focus on reading less words whilst children who take this on board readily can be reading simple phrases by the end of week two. THRASS can work like this too, although I understand they have a few more things to learn - key words to indicate pronunciation - to support the resources first.
"basically their are 47 sounds sounds to learn (apparently!)."
There are (well, there is even some debate as to exactly how many there are, but that's about it )
Once upon a time, 26 letters would be taught, with 26 sounds and then you would learn all these other sounds that could be make by putting the ones you had already learned together... This was really just delaying things and ingraining some knowledge into kids' brains and then changing it all about a bit with new rules and confusion which lots of kids couldn't cope with. Nowadays, children are more aware of all the sounds in our spoken language from the start and then just systematically learning all the spellings for them. The difference sounds subtle when i put it like that, but it's quite crucial.
THRASS has a web site here which you might find useful.
But if there are a lot of you unhappy about it, I would pop in and ask about the possibility of an information session for parents.
However, i would just reassure that if they are doing this properly, it is a more thorough and systematic way of teaching reading that is infinitely more successful at getting kids reading independenly, especially in the long term, even though it does look hideously confusing and strange to us mums