ALL five-year-old children must be taught to read using a traditional "phonics" method from next year, Ruth Kelly, UK's Education Secretary, said on December 1.
Schools will be told to drop the "searchlights" system, which encourages teachers to use a range of methods. Instead, they will be expected to use phonics "fast and first", Kelly said. Children will have to learn the sounds of the alphabet and how to put them together to form words.
The Education Secretary abandoned the central element of the British Government's literacy hour in schools after an official review concluded that it was failing children. The interim report by Jim Rose, former director of inspection at UK's OFSTED (The Office for Standards in Education), concluded that children must be taught "the alphabetic principles to read and spell words". "Because our writing system is alphabetic, beginners will not become skilled and fluent readers and writers if they cannot understand and operate the system. The case for systematic phonic work is therefore overwhelming," the report said.
The six-month review concluded that there was "no good reason" to delay the teaching of phonics after the age of five. "The approach which is generally understood as 'synthetic' phonics offers the vast majority of young beginners the best route to becoming skilled readers," Rose said.
Synthetic phonics teaches children to read based on the 44 sounds made by letters or small groups of letters which comprise English. Once the letters denoting these sounds (21 consonants, 5 vowels, and double-letter sounds such as ch, sh, th, oo, ee) can be recognized, the child is taught to blend them into words (e.g. c-a-t, s-t-r-ee-t). Schools will be expected to use phonics in place of existing methods from next September.
The move represents a victory for traditionalists who had argued that the literacy strategy ?the "searchlights" policy introduced in 1998 ?gave insufficient attention to phonics.
Steve Sinnott, General Secretary of UK's National Union of Teachers, said teachers were "weary of the reading wars". "The last thing teachers want is a massive upheaval as a result of the promotion of a single fashionable technique. To teach reading effectively there must be a range of strategies."
