0 England's shift to a phonics-based approach to literacy; as well as the implementation of a related assessment; appears to be paying off, with nearly three-quarters of students meeting standards recently. That's up from 58% when the assessment was first given in 2012. Supporters say the data is validation that the reading programme, known as systematic synthetic phonics, is working.
Some 99% of pupils who had passed the phonics check in year one went on to meet or exceed the government’s benchmark levels for reading in year two, compared with only a third of pupils who had failed the check – suggesting a possible association between successful phonics teaching and later levels of literacy.
Nick Gibb, the education minister who was an enthusiastic supporter of the reading programme known as systematic synthetic phonics (SSP), said the results showed that the plan was working.
Synthetic phonics; the use of which was recently expanded in the UK's national curriculum; differs from traditional methods by directly teaching children the sounds that make up words, known as phonemes. By recognising parts of words as sounds rather than individual letters, children are able to "decode" words and pronounce them.
