Thank you to Mandy Nayton who has developed a summary of the Structured Synthetic Phonics approach to the teaching of reading, which can be downloaded from the Dyslexia - SPELD Foundation (Australia) website. This summary can be photocopied for educational purposes and may be useful for parents. The...

Great post, Dick. We know of parents who are more knowledgeable about phonics and reading instruction than their children's teachers but, as you say, we have achieved a great deal to get successive Governments more or less 'on board' in England with Systematic Synthetic Phonics and that is a huge ac...

I highly recommend a visit to Dianne Murphy's blog - especially if you have an older child who is struggling with some aspect of reading and writing (or other difficulties) - or if you are a teacher of older pupils. I totally agree with what she writes at all times. This post is: SEND the right mess...

I'll add here, too, that this issue is about far more than teaching English-speaking children in English-speaking countries to read and write in English. In every English-speaking country, there are many children for whom English is a new or additional language - and therefore all teachers should be...

And if all the teachers managed to teach virtually all of their children to read - and to spell - and to write (in a similar, realistic time-scale) - well, then it would be 'no worries' about how they taught their pupils. The trouble is that when people refer to the 'no one way' argument in this par...

Great suggestions, Dick - many thanks. We'll have to see what we can do re these suggestions. There's no doubt about it, schools have a very wide range of attitudes and 'understanding' when it comes to phonics provision - and what it means to be 'rigorous' - or not. Forgive me if you have seen this ...

Here's a thought - if all schools in Scotland, Wales and Ireland took the Year One Phonics Screening Check at the same point as children in England, we would have had an extensive control group of sorts! IFERI is urging teachers in other schools in other countries to utilise England's Year One Phoni...

At the time of this posting, the notions of 'learning styles - VAK' and 'Brain Gym', and other fads, are being discredited by quite a number of popular 'Tweeters' and 'Bloggers' in education. I am suggesting to them in response, however, that far more important an issue than 'learning styles' and 'B...

Every post that Alison makes is excellent - and she is one of those generous people that despite having some of her own resources to sell, she also provides free resources for people and promotes other people's work and programmes. Below is yet another great post: Attention During Learning http://ww...

The full text: Why Jaydon can't read: The triumph of ideology over evidence in teaching reading Policy: A Journal of Public Policy and Ideas Volume 29 Issue 3 (Spring 2013) Buckingham, Jennifer1; Wheldall, Kevin2; Beaman-Wheldall, Robyn3 Abstract: The current entrenched rate of illiteracy among Aust...