I could go to bed right now,” says Jordan, as he leans back in his chair in the classroom at City of Glasgow College.

Jordan is not disrupting the class. In fact, his declaration is met with enthusiastic nodding - not just from his classmates, but also from his teacher.

The 19-year-old has been asked to use “could” in a sentence - something he and his classmates struggle with. They are students on an adult-literacy course that uses phonics to teach them how to read and write - something that is set to become more commonplace across England following the introduction of phonics into the reformed functional skills qualifications.

The class of eight at City of Glasgow College are five months into their course. Having started with simple sounds and a focus on listening, they are now reading and writing basic sentences that, in many cases, they came up with themselves. They are also getting to grips with what are described in the class as “difficult” or “tricky” words - words that don’t follow the usual patterns, such as “could”, “should” and “always”.

“I should come to class every week” is Mark’s contribution to the exercise, followed by Lorraine’s “I could come to class one time”.

Primary schools have been teaching phonics in one form or another for more than a decade. The phonics screening check was introduced as a statutory assessment in English schools in 2012; in no small part down to vocal supporters - not least school standards minister Nick Gibb - the method has rarely been out of the headlines since then.

Despite phonics being used mostly in primaries, classes for adults have seen a slow but marked increase in interest. Take the above class in Glasgow: more than half of the class members have jobs, and their ages range from 18-61. And phonics’ prominence in the world of FE is set to grow further - it has been included in the new functional skills qualifications that are due to be introduced in September.

“Phonics has been added in order to effectively build reading skills, providing the foundation needed to sound words out in order to read words automatically on sight,” explains the consultation on the content of the reformed version of the qualifications.

For me, this amounts to the re-establishment of a forgotten friendship. When I trained as a teacher in the 1980s, no one focused on phonics teaching. It was considered on a par with unfashionable pedagogical practices such as streaming or copying from the blackboard. I only became fully aware of phonics a decade or so into my teaching career, when I started doing postgraduate research.

It may be a popular method now, but phonics has a chequered history. The teaching of synthetic phonics (see box, page 53) was quite popular at the turn of the 20th century. It was a way of standardising reading, or the utterance of sound indicated by written symbols (decoding).

Collocation, collocation

Teachers focused on the formation of components such as plosives (p, t, k, b, d and g sounds), sibilants (s, sh and z sounds) and fricatives (f, v, and th sounds). After teaching a prescribed set of sounds, they would then assess their learners’ reading skills by getting them to read aloud familiar and made-up words. It was felt that once learners became aware of key phonemes (sounds) and their written equivalents, they would move on to become independent readers.

Synthetic phonics remained relatively prominent, both in England and the US, until the 1930s. Then, educational research claimed that it limited learners’ experience of reading - that reading words and understanding their meaning was dependent on context and usage, or what linguists and discourse analysts call collocation.

Take, for instance, “read” as a present-tense verb and “read” in the past tense. They are confusing in isolation. Critics argued that reading required an understanding of the context of a story, the location of words and their relationship in the syntax, all of which help readers to predict and infer their purpose and meaning by (often implicitly) making various associations with words.

Some critics also argued that the English language was intricate and complex, and that individual word sounds were not always consistent - that there were exceptions to the phonics rules (such as homophones - words that sound the same but have different spellings or meanings). Another argument concerned spelling: just how do you teach the existence of silent letters with the method of synthetic phonics alone? In short, the critics felt that students learned best by developing visual and aural familiarity, and that this could only be gained through exposure to a wide range of texts - not reading for assessment, necessarily, but reading for pleasure.

So, today’s educationalists contrast the synthetic method with what teachers have been using since the 1960s: analytic phonics (see box, page 53). This also involves multi-cueing reading strategies that include the memorisation of words and their sounds, or the “look and say” strategy that was particularly dominant in my own primary school. Back then, teachers used Janet and John-type books for resource material that relied on looking at the whole word.

A 2018 report by University College London (UCL) academics found that, having surveyed 120 respondents, there was felt to be little discernible benefit in using synthetic phonics at primary school, with the need for measurable outcomes making schools more prone to applying phonics rigidly. It also raised fears that improvement in results might come at the expense of pupils’ long-term enjoyment of reading.

This point is counter-argued by the Department for Education and advisory organisations such as the National Literacy Trust, which raise a particular issue about boys falling behind in reading. A report found that 76 per cent of schools were concerned about boys’ reading, with 60,000 boys not reaching the expected level at the age of 11.

Understandably, concerns are growing that the quality of pupils’ instruction in reading is largely dependent on chance and convenience, not informed practice. In addition, questions are being raised about the quality of teacher training, teachers’ professional knowledge of the subject and their commitment to teaching technical rules. To follow the argument through, learners’ experiences are then limited by a teacher’s confidence, ability and knowledge.

Coupled with the lack of standard practice, I fear there is, at present, a laissez-faire approach to teaching reading skills.

Prescriptive directive

Despite some convincing evidence, I am not bowled over by the benefits of the synthetic-phonics method. Neither am I comfortable about its emerging prominence in English as a literacy strategy. I am, however, of the persuasion that there is a place for a synthetic-phonics approach at the elementary stage of schooling, especially for pupils with learning difficulties. Infants need guidance on reading by identifying and recognising basic sounds and their shapes. There is also some evidence to support its usefulness for pupils for whom English is not a first language, who need to understand the rules for sound patterns.

In addition, research by academics at Royal Holloway suggests that pupils using a whole-word reading (analytic) approach have to work harder than those using the synthetic method. The researchers recommend that all teachers adopt synthetic phonics.

However, a study by UCL in 2016 found that, while synthetic phonics aids children from disadvantaged backgrounds, on the whole, it has “no measurable effect on pupils’ reading scores at age 11”. Moreover, in the context of secondary school and post-16 education, it cannot be the case that one size fits all, nor do I believe that government bodies should enforce a compulsory strategy.

As a report by the UCL Institute of Education, published last year, put it: “Taking an existing phonics scheme designed for use in primary schools and importing it into the adult context is unlikely to be effective. Adult learners do not study under the same conditions as children. They also have clear preferences for materials which are aimed at them and make reference to adult life.”

We should resist prescriptive pedagogical directives and insist on teachers maintaining their autonomous role.

Similarly, although Royal Holloway has advocated the synthetic-phonics method of learning for early years, it is cautious when recommending it for adult learners. This is partly because, at present, there is insufficient study in this field. The bulk of the existing research focuses on early years at primary school only and does not provide conclusive evidence of the impact of phonics on post-16 learners.

The majority of teachers are flexible and quick to adapt to government directives or received wisdom. It is, after all, part of their professional training to apply whatever approach best suits a group of learners. But teachers with whom I have spoken are anxious and have expressed concern about the synthetic-phonics method. One or two are against using it on political or ideological grounds; others - though confident to apply rudimentary rules - do not feel that they are sufficiently knowledgeable to use the method in an in-depth, sophisticated way.

That’s not to say that some providers haven’t adopted the phonics approach enthusiastically for use with adult learners. City College Glasgow, for instance, has even devised its own literacy course, City Phonics. The accredited programme reportedly offers a fresh approach to the teaching of reading skills to adults who may be non-native English speakers, reluctant readers or students with severe learning difficulties, such as dyslexia (see box, page 55).

Some teachers of English for speakers of other languages (Esol) have also succumbed to the allure of phonics. They feel their learners have made discernible progress by using basic rules of symbol and sound formation. Of course, in the context of Esol - where you have to teach the rules - anything that helps learners to construct and deconstruct the workings of the English language is an asset. But in the context of functional skills, the application of phonics could be problematic. There is a danger that teachers’ efforts could be perceived as patronising and infantilising for learners. Many 16- to 19-year-olds have ended up on programmes such as functional skills having already struggled with English or maths GCSEs at school; they already feel disenfranchised from the main curriculum without also having to demonstrate basic reading skills by practising sounds as if they were back at primary school. Is this going to endear them to English and/or reading, or is it, as I fear, likely to alienate them?

Teaching reading by practising some basic phoneme rules can be helpful - there is no denying that. What I think is insidious is the way phonics can end up dominating literacy classes as a reading strategy, where schools will be applying it manically purely for the purpose of the exam and outcomes. English - like all subjects - is already dominated by specifications, teaching guidelines, focus directives, assignment briefs, exam questions and mark schemes for assessment; adding phonics to the mixture will add to the existing classroom rigidity, as well as the lack of teacher autonomy and control. The teacher is no longer the independent professional in charge, but one who is chained by external factors.

‘Extreme form of streaming’

I also have other concerns. Leading advocates of the synthetic-phonics programme, such as Ruth Miskin, are advising schools to group pupils on their reading ability - irrespective of their age. This is nothing but an extreme form of streaming that was proven in the 1960s and 70s to be detrimental to learners’ progression and confidence. It was therefore, quite rightly, replaced with the idea that pupils should be exposed to peer learning, with children learning best in mixed-ability groups. So the introduction by examining bodies of phonics as a core component of teaching, learning and assessment is both perplexing and alarming.

With just weeks to go before the reformed functional skills qualifications are due to be taught in our classrooms for the first time, we still await a framework, assessment-weighting guidelines and directives for colleges and training providers. No instructions have been published nor guidelines provided about the administration of assessment or grading.

Added to this, most existing resources are aimed at early years pupils at primary school, not necessarily sixth formers or adults.

For these reasons, I believe that having the synthetic-phonics method as a core, prescriptive component of any post-16 literacy course is - on the whole - going to have an adverse effect on learners’ engagement.

For the sake of students like Jordan, I hope I’m wrong.

Roshan Doug is a functional skills teacher and a reader in education at the University of Birmingham