November 18, 2007 ... Reading by 6.

The use of phonics is simply a component of teaching pupils to read, for without motivating pupils to read beyond their lessons, there will be only be an outcome consistent with the need for schools to show that targets of literacy have been met. The reading ability of a seven-year-old and a ten-year-old is not a particularly big gap to bridge, given a short period of intensive one-to-one tuition.

The expectations of synthetic phonics is illusory. This is because synthetic phonics have to be geared to a particular set of texts which conform to the scope of synthetic phonics.

At its heart, synthetic phonics is designred to develop a phonemic awareness. To that end, the pupil will learn approximately forty-four phonemes (sounds) and their corresponding graphemes (symbols). Unfortunately, a phoneme is not limited to a specific grapheme, For example, 'oa', 'ow', 'ough'. Which is why English is very challenging to learn to read and spell, and why synthetic phonics' usefulness is limited to phonetically regular words.

Synthetic schemes may also include a multi-sensory method: Pupils are shown the grapheme, hear tne phoneme, and perfotm a corresponding action. Such a multi-sensory method can help some pupils to remember many of the phoneme-grapheme relationships.

However, experience has clearly demonstrated that there is no universal method to teach and learn how to read and spell the English language, and which is efficient of teaching resources.

Given that we are now moving towards an information and knowledge based economy in competition with every other advanced and developing country, it is vital that as many pupils as possible gain proper reading and writing skills if they are not to be left unemployable beyond the most unskilled of jobs, which are more easily filled by economic migrants. This goal can only be achieved by increasing one-to-one teaching at a level sufficiently intense to overcome learning challenges, or to make up for a lack of instruction outside of school, where it is quite common for some pupils to benefit from parents' or relatives' instruction, at many levels beyond none at all.

This is not manpower efficient, but the cost can be kept to levels more reasonable than the alternative provisions and consequences of outcomes. To that end, much more use should be made of classroom assistants speedily trained in the essentials of reading and writing for primary school pupils. Fully trained teachers are simply not required for this purpose, except for administrtative and monitoring requirements. It would also be good training experience for assistants who might consider becoming fully trained. To encourage this, classroom assistants would have to be offered more reasonable pay and conditions than those they currently do not enjoy, and which are a false economy we cannot afford at this time.