The government accepted the recommendations of the Rose Report (2006) - an historic report - and 'Letters and Sounds' was brought out - but was not made statutory.
In effect, schools can still choose to do what they want although the expectation is that they will select phonics programmes according to the criteria as outlined by the government (and in the Rose Report.
Teachers were told they could use 'Letters and Sounds, or commercial programmes or in-house programmes.
My opinion, however, is that 'Letters and Sounds' does not provide enough to qualify as a full programme - rather it is detailed guidance. Many advisors and senior managers, however, or pushing teachers into using 'Letters and Sounds' presumably because it is the government material.
At the same time, an initiative called 'Every Child a Reader' was already being rolled out, funded by KPMG and the government which heavily promotes the Reading Recovery programme. RR consists of the type of reading strategies which Rose rejected in his report. In effect, the weakest and slowest-to-learn learners are in danger of getting intervention teaching based on the rejected multi-cueing reading strategies. Clearly this is a contradiction in terms of the messages it gives the teachers in terms of their practice - but also the messages children are given in terms of how they should 'read' their books. Also, Reading Recovery type books are not based on the cumulative, decodable books which underpin good synthetic phonics practice.
Ed Balls and Gordon Brown persisted with the roll-out of Reading Recovery despite warnings and protests from me and 'others' including a number of groups and think tanks. Eventually (just before Christmas), the Science and Technology select committee conducted an inquiry into this government promotion of Reading Recovery and concluded this was the wrong thing to do with insufficient evidence of good quality and in contradiction to the acceptance of Rose's recommendations.
Meanwhile, there has also been much subversion of the Rose recommendations by academics in some training universities who have spent their careers training in the multi-cueing approach to teaching reading.
We don't even know whether general Ofsted inspectors would always recognised good practice in reading instruction and certainly they don't necessarily take a look at reading and writing standards in their inspections. Surely this should be an area that they ALWAYS look at whatever else they look at?
All in all, as I suggested, it is still a lottery as to what your children receive in terms of basic skills literacy teaching.