The UCL researchers are among 250 signatories to a letter which has been sent to education secretary Nadhim Zahawi, calling on the government to allow for a wider range of approaches to teaching reading, which would allow teachers to use their own judgment about which is best for their pupils.

It doesn't say phonics doesn't work, it suggests phonics is only effective for a subgroup of pupils. Everyone has their own learning strategy and phonics doesn't appear to work for everyone.

There is pretty strong evidence[0] [1] [2] that phonics is a critical part of learning to read for everyone no matter who they are or what their personality is. It's not the only piece of the puzzle but if you leave it out you will handicap the student intended to or not. Without phonics when you encounter a new word you can't pronounce it. If you can't pronounce it you can't use it in conversation. You can't use it in your mental processing. If you aren't taught it you may pick up the rules of thumb eventually but you'll have done so the long hard way.

You might be justifiably angry that no one showed you or your child the easy way.

1: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-Advantages-of-the-...

2: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Ameliorating-Early-Rea...

3: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-effect-of-phonics-...

You and op are both correct. The problems are teaching only phonics (which a lot of SOR advocates want) and not teaching phonics at all (which happens in a fair number of classrooms).

Exactly. You also need to learn word definitions as well as grammar and sentence structure. Leave out any of the pieces of the puzzle and you are handicapping the student.

I can't find anyone out there that advocates teaching only phonics. It's a step in the process of learning to read that, if left to teachers that were taught under a non-evidence based approach, many try to skip.

They don't say "only teach phonics", they say "always teach phonics no matter what even if it fails a significant number of students". It's an issue of forcing teachers to do things they know won't work or aren't working.

I'm not saying there aren't bad teachers, and I agree that's a problem and that the solution (get good people to be teachers and give them the autonomy to be good) depends on addressing it. But using bad teachers as a reason to strip all teachers of their autonomy is a huge step back.

> It's an issue of forcing teachers to do things they know won't work or aren't working.

So many teachers at this point have been falsely taught that phonics doesn't work, that many skip thinking they are doing the right thing. We need them to try to teach phonics. Yes, there are some students it won't work for, such as those with hearing problems. However, those students should be in specialized programs already. For everyone without hearing problems, we need them to try.

> So many teachers at this point have been falsely taught that phonics doesn't work, that many skip thinking they are doing the right thing.

Maybe. There's a lot of guessing about what teachers are doing in this thread; I'd be interested in a survey of what they're actually doing.

> For everyone without hearing problems, we need them to try.

Maybe. The UK has been going hard on phonics and while scores went way up for the next couple years, the effects on the years afterwards were real bad.

The trouble is that there's a strong tendency in UK journalism these days to treat anything the UK is doing as obviously wrong and any alternative as obviously better and ignore evidence that contradicts this, and the Guardian is one of the worst offenders. (This doesn't just apply to education; for example, the British press like to blame our energy woes on the government focusing on offshore wind and push onshore wind and solar as magical solutions, even though the offshore wind push was a roaring success that other countries want to copy and onshore wind and solar were already struggling even before the shift in focus.)

> it suggests phonics is only effective for a subgroup of pupils

If that subgroup is 90+%, is it worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater? (I don't know the % here, I'm making one up as a thought experiment.)

As the petition calls for, it should be left to the teachers to decide. Even if the succes rate is 90%, are you happy to throw the remaining 10% under the reading bus ?

But so many teachers have been miseducated and they try to leave it out. Wyse and Bradbury at UCL are pushing non-evidence based approaches on the false authority of Margaret Meek Spencer [1] by making up a strawman of teaching only phonics, as if people that advocate teaching phonics claimed that were the only step in learning to read.

[1] https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10152356/1/Wyse_The%20...

I'm not sure why you think this is a one or the other solution.