It is not often that the findings of a research study prompt the authors to directly petition the government to change a core aspect of its education policy. Yet this was exactly the position that researchers Dominic Wyse and his co-author Alice Bradbury found themselves in as they prepared to publish a new study on the teaching of phonics and reading.

Drawing on evidence from their paper Reading wars or reading reconciliation? A critical examination of robust research evidence, curriculum policy and teachers’ practices for teaching phonics and reading, published today, Wyse and Bradbury have added their signatures to an open letter to education secretary Nadhim Zahawi. 

The letter, signed by 251 people, calls on the Department for Education to change its policy on how reading should be taught in schools. 

Here, Wyse, who is professor of early childhood and primary education at the UCL Institute of Education and president of the British Educational Research Association (BERA), speaks to Tes about the new findings - and what the implications might be, both at a policy level and in the classroom.

Fears about the focus on phonics

Tes: This research paper has been described as one of the “most comprehensive” ever published in this area. Can you tell me what it involved?

Dominic Wyse: We’ve drawn on a number of elements: a systematic, qualitative meta-synthesis of 55 randomised controlled trials, and the findings of a new survey of more than 2,000 teachers. 

We also completed analyses of data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) tests and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls), comparing the UK to six other English-dominant nations that perform highly in the Pisa league tables.

What were your headline findings?

We argue that the way in which reading is taught in schools has changed substantially for the first time in 100 years. 

The survey was self-report, and that comes with obvious problems. But the majority of teachers we surveyed told us that they teach synthetic phonics - no other form of phonics - and they teach it separately from comprehension teaching. That is actually a big change. 

Yet I was genuinely shocked to find out that there is very little evidence to support the use of synthetic phonics [in the way it is currently taught]. Our review found that there isn’t strong evidence that it should be synthetic phonics only or that this should be taught separately. 

Government policy encourages teachers to teach reading through synthetic phonics first and foremost, but the evidence to support that just isn’t there.

What approach is supported by the evidence?

What it seems to support is what I call contextualised phonics teaching. That is, in layman’s terms, that the phonics teaching must be properly embedded alongside teaching reading comprehension and other aspects of reading. It should all be taught in the same lesson.  

But that’s not happening, and so, of course, we’re advocating that the policy must change.

How does the UK’s approach stack up against the other countries you looked at?

Our interpretation is that their national curricula equivalents are mainly based either on what we call “whole language” approaches (a focus first and foremost on whole texts) or on balanced instruction (a balance between using whole texts and systematic teaching about the alphabetic code and other linguistic features). 

So, compared to other countries, England is an outlier. Not only is synthetic phonics prominent here, you also have the fact that we rely on other mechanisms, such as getting Ofsted to go into schools, and one of the first things they are likely to say is, “Well, let’s have a look at your phonics screening test results.” 

I’m not against testing, per se, but when you stack all these things together, you get an approach that certainly isn’t in line with what other countries are doing.

Why does the UK do things so differently?

There are a number of reasons, but it really began with Sir Jim Rose’s 2006 report Independent review of the teaching of early reading. There’s a key wording in that report: it says that we must teach phonics “discretely”.

That’s been interpreted pretty much ever since as “separately”, and then successive policy changes have simply ratcheted up. If years ago Jim Rose had said something like, “Well, yeah, phonics is important, but actually what we need is a massive focus on reading comprehension,” then we may be in a better place.

Does the evidence support the same approach for all pupils?

Our paper focuses exclusively on what we call typically developing readers. 

A lot of reading research is done with children with reading difficulties, but you shouldn’t generalise from children with particular difficulties to typically developing children. 

There might be evidence, for example, that children with reading difficulties need a little bit more phonics than typically developing readers. I’m not saying it’s there, but there might be. 

So, at the very least, you’d need to differentiate, and that’s not always happening.

What do you think needs to change at a policy level?

We’ve come up with an idea that we call “reading reconciliation”. In policy terms, what this means is that instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and completely replacing the curriculum for reading every time a new government comes along, we need incremental change. We need to keep things that are good and modify as we go.

We also argue that secretaries of state for education should no longer have the power to compel schools to follow just one approach. 

We would like to see something more like the Royal Society and the British Academy have proposed - an office for education research. This would be an independent body like the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) in medicine, which advises the government on the basis of what the evidence says. 

What can teachers take from all this?

Teachers should feel encouraged as professionals to make more decisions themselves about the pedagogy of reading. 

So, in our view, the evidence is clear that reading teaching should always focus first and foremost on meaning. A really good reading lesson should begin and end with whole texts - real ones, written for children.

Let’s say the lesson is going to look at the sound “t”. You might look at where it is regular and where it is irregular - but you would use a whole text to contextualise the teaching of phonemes, and the way that English represents phonemes with letters, within this same lesson.

Obviously, schools will struggle to do things differently within our existing system of accountability. How much can they really be expected to change? 

Wyse: I know that Ofsted is a problem, so it is difficult to do things differently. But I think headteachers and teachers need more confidence to say, “No, the evidence is not only for synthetic approaches.” 

The evidence shows that phonics teaching is important, but the evidence, in my view, also shows that if you do it the wrong way or too much, if you neglect reading comprehension within the lessons, that’s not advantageous. 

But we do need policy change. We shouldn’t have government panels vetting which reading schemes teachers can use, for example. There’s no justification for it. Why did we train our teachers for four years if we don’t trust them to make decisions on the most fundamental thing they do? 

The problem is that our current approach is based on ideology. I’m not doubting it’s well-meaning, because I think one thing we all agree on is that this topic is massively important. 

It’s at the root of everything in education, isn’t it? If kids don’t learn to read, we’ve got massive problems. But we have to look at the evidence.