A Parent's Guide to the Phonics Wars: Why the Rules for Reading Keep Changing

Hello everyone,

If you’ve got children in primary school, you’ve probably heard the term "phonics" more times than you can count. It’s the rule now, taught explicitly and systematically, and tested in Year 1. But have you ever wondered why the way schools teach reading keeps changing?

For decades, there’s been a huge, often political, argument—the "Reading Wars"—over the best way to get children reading fluently. Understanding this history isn't just academic; it helps you support your child at home by knowing the why behind what their teacher is doing.

The Great Debate: Phonics vs. the "Whole Book"

Back when many of us were children, the approach was often split, leading to inconsistent results across different schools.

 * The "Whole Language" Approach: Imagine learning to read by being surrounded by great books, focusing on the meaning and guessing words from the pictures or the context of the sentence. Proponents believed children would learn naturally, the way they learn to talk, by being immersed in reading for enjoyment.

 * The Phonics Way: This side argued that reading is a complex skill and must be explicitly taught. They focused on the alphabetic code—the fundamental relationship between letters and sounds (like 'c-a-t' makes "cat").

For years, many schools tried to strike a "Balanced Literacy" compromise, mixing the two ideas. However, when national reading scores stayed too low, the government felt they had to step in with a definitive, top-down strategy.

Why Phonics Became The Only Game in Town

The pivotal change in England was driven by clear, consistent evidence that one method worked better, especially for children who needed the most help.

1. The Research Was Clear: Decode First

In the mid-2000s, reviews of international and national studies consistently showed a strong advantage for the Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) method, particularly when it started early. The "synthetic" part means teaching children to blend sounds together from the start (e.g., teaching 's' and 'a' and 't' and then showing how they combine to make "sat").

2. It's a Powerful Tool for Equity

Perhaps the most crucial finding supporting the mandatory change was its impact on fairness. Research in Scotland showed that when children from disadvantaged homes were taught using SSP, they performed just as well in word reading as children from more advantaged backgrounds. This proved that strong phonics instruction was a powerful mechanism for closing the early achievement gap. As a result, the government made it a mandatory policy that SSP was the primary way to teach decoding.

3. The Phonics Screening Check

To make sure every school was teaching phonics with high quality, the Phonics Screening Check (PSC) was introduced in Year 1. This test assesses your child's knowledge of the letter-sound relationship. The data confirms this worked quickly: attainment rates for decoding shot up from 58% in 2012 to 83% by 2018.

The goal of policy intervention was achieved: most children are now equipped with the essential foundational skill to decode words.

The Challenge Now: From Decoding to Deep Understanding

While your child is likely a much stronger decoder thanks to these policies, the hard work isn't over. There is a growing concern that focusing so intensely on the technical skill of phonics might have a trade-off: Reading for Pleasure.

 * Enjoyment is Down: Between 2011 and 2021, the percentage of children who strongly agreed that they enjoyed reading fell significantly.

 * The "Comprehension Bottleneck": Once a child knows how to sound out a word (decoding), the main challenge shifts to vocabulary, background knowledge, and comprehension strategies. If a child can sound out "encyclopaedia" but doesn't know what one is, they still haven't truly read it.

The current challenge for schools—and for us at home—is to take that solid decoding foundation and make sure we nurture a genuine love of reading while building up their vocabulary and comprehension skills.

Now, I hate to blow my own trumpet, but I have a set of comprehension books for year 6 children that have been rigorously tested by several children to ensure the content is both fun and engaging, as well as educational. There’s a link on the main blog page, or you can head over to www.igniteeducation.co.uk for more information. 

Reading is very close to my heart, especially as I know the trouble my own mother went through trying to convince my brother that the (rather dull) adventures of Roger Redhat were worth his time (they really weren't; they destroyed any potential love for books at a very young age for him), so I'm always interested in the subject. I'm also interested in what you think. What were your own experiences of learning to read? If you have kids, what are their schools currently using? Is it working for them? Could it be improved? Let me know!

Until next time, remember: you can do this; you're awesome!

Carl Headley-Morris