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.