Children who enter school not yet reading need some systematic phonics to get them started, but cannot be expected to cope with the whole alphabet or more than a subset of phoneme-grapheme correspondences and grapheme-phoneme correspondences at that stage. So phonics schemes necessarily adopt some sequence for the introduction of graphemes and…

From 2006 the British government strongly favoured synthetic phonics as the principal approach for the teaching of initial literacy in state-funded primary schools in England, and since 2010 has made it mandatory. In 2007-2013 just over 100 commercially published phonics schemes were available, and in that same period the government maintained a…

This article summarises the linguistic base of initial reading and spelling in English for the benefit of teachers and others engaged in education who need explicit understanding of parts of the linguistic base in order to teach initial literacy accurately. The aspects covered are those most relevant to children entering formal schooling: spoken…

Successive UK government policies have strengthened the phonics element of the National Curriculum for English in England. The policies have included inviting publishers to submit completed self-assessments of their systematic phonics programmes. The self-assessment criteria focus on what is deemed to be 'high-quality provision', as defined in the…