Manchester is the worst-performing local authority in the country for a key measure of early reading skills, according to Department for Education statistics.
Data released in October revealed only 74% of Manchester’s year 1 pupils passed their phonics check at the end of the academic year 23/24 – the lowest rate in England.
The national average in the last academic year was 80%, which five Greater Manchester boroughs met.
What is phonics?
Phonics is a teaching method that supports reading development by focusing on the relationship between the symbols we see and the sounds we hear.
Through phonics, children learn to recognise sounds, blend sound variations, and decode unfamiliar words.
But is the screening a reliable indicator of reading ability?
Early learning expert Emma Spiers specialises in pre-phonics and early language development. She works alongside schools to deliver effective phonics and pre-phonics teaching.
While Spiers feels there is a benefit to learning to read through phonics, she queries the viability of the assessments currently in place in England.
She said: "Phonics is so important. There are 144 sounds in the English phonetic code. But there are only, maybe, 20 explored in those tests."
A political hot potato
“Phonics is a political hot potato - some people love it and some hate it,” Spiers said.
Louise Mansoor's daughter is in year 1 at a Chorlton primary school. Mansoor is sceptical about the impact of phonics on her child.
She said: “I do not feel phonics works for everyone, particularly those who may have a learning disability like dyslexia or auditory processing disorder.
“The speed at which the children have to learn and remember sounds and then move on is very quick and does not give all children a chance to keep up or follow the phonics programme.”
Mansoor said her daughter is considered behind her peers in her cohort for reading and writing.
She said: “She has some extra phonics sessions being put in place for her, although I’m not sure how useful this is as she finds it all hard to understand anyway.”
The Manchester mum says her daughter is still too young to have received a diagnosis of a cognitive learning barrier, but she is concerned about how accommodating the screening is for pupils who do face such challenges.
She said: “As a dyslexic adult I find phonics hard and it does not work for me at all, so I imagine for a child it’s like a foreign language.”
What if a child fails the assessment in Y1?
Pupils who do not meet the expected standard by the end of Y1 are given another chance to do so at the end of year 2. The national average for pupils meeting the expected standard on their second attempt is 89%.
Manchester’s year 2 pupils met the expected standard at a rate of just 80%.
These figures make Manchester the poorest-performing area in England for both year 1 and year 2 screenings.
What about Greater Manchester as a whole?
Poor phonics attainment is not an issue other Greater Manchester boroughs are contending with.
Trafford came in at 13th place out of England’s 150 local authorities, performing consistently above average with 84% of Y1 pupils meeting the national expected average and 92% of year 2 pupils doing the same.
Bolton, Stockport and Wigan all joined Trafford in surpassing the national average in the academic year 23/24.
While Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford and Tameside sit just below the national average.
Some educators believe the problem lies in how the government directs phonics teaching.
Hannah Boyle is a school governor and a former teacher of year 1.
She said: "In my experience, phonics works well for most children.
"However, when children are younger there are some instances when children can decode the word without understanding what it means in the context they are reading it. So although they can read it, there’s a gap between them regurgitating it and actually comprehending it."
How does the screening work?
The screening measures pupils’ grasp of phonics through an assessment which requires a teacher to sit one-on-one with each pupil and listen to them read a list of 40 words.
Teachers record the accuracy with which the pupils read each word aloud - the goal is to read 32 out of 40 words correctly.
Spiers’ reservations about the system include its homogenous nature which she thinks often proves to be restrictive for pupils with additional needs.
She said: “The phonics screening is so narrow. It gives a number - it doesn’t measure reading. They can get a high score on the test and not be a good reader. It’s just one tiny aspect of reading.
“The minute you start to put a number on something rather than starting from a child-centred approach, you’re setting them up not to be the best they can be.
“It’s not a good indicator of anything.”
Why don't I remember learning phonics?
Many of us have limited knowledge of phonics teaching because the methods used to teach youngsters to read have changed since we were at school.
The UK initially introduced a phonics programme in 2007. Further funding was invested in 2009 which enabled an expansion of the project.
By April 2021, a validation process was established for systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) programmes to ensure all primary state schools in England access pre-approved equipment.
Since the introduction of SSP programmes, the DfE has stipulated that phonics is delivered through a validated SSP and used to teach reading to children aged five to seven.
Phonics expert Spiers feels this system is flawed and fails to utilise the experience of teachers in their classrooms.
She said: “I’ve been working in phonics for years and I think it does work.
“But the government are saying it works for all children and I don’t think it does because there are lots of autistic children that learn by reading words by sight.
“I see lots of children who struggle. And because my background is child development and I know you can’t do one thing before the thing before has been embedded, I know we can’t start with phonics if the fundamentals beneath that aren’t there.”
Former teacher Boyle says she is worried that the teaching of phonics in its current form hampers the love of reading for many children, and forces publishers to make editorial choices which do not encourage reading for pleasure.
She said: "Publishers are so limited in the sounds and words they can use so the stories are sometimes boring, difficult to understand or completely unlike a sentence someone might actually say to a five or six-year-old.
"I understand why the accredited phonics programmes were brought in but exposing children to the same types of books is again, limited.
"I also query the need for phonics programmes for schools that already have good outcomes in phonics."
Why does it matter?
Figures released by the DfE state the national average for success in reading at the year 6 SATS assessment was 74%.
Manchester falls below the average, at just 68%.
Meanwhile, Trafford - the local authority which performed the most strongly and consistently above the national average at the year 1 and year 2 levels in Greater Manchester - was also the highest-performing borough in Greater Manchester at the year 6 level.
Trafford had 83% of its year 6 pupils meet the expected standard for reading in their SATS in 23/24, 9% above the national average.
Stockport, Wigan and Bury also performed above the national average.
While Tameside and Bolton sit just below the national average.
Salford, Rochdale and Oldham performed below the national average.
But Manchester is significantly lower.
This data suggests a correlation between the reading levels of children aged five and six, and children aged 10 and 11. Furthermore, there is a pattern in success as determined by geographical location.
So what is Manchester's problem and how do we solve it?
It's unclear exactly why Manchester consistently performs significantly worse than its neighbours, and Manchester City Council has yet to provide a comment.
The weakness might be attributed to the prolonged impact of the pandemic which affected the early-year development of pupils who are now aged between four and eleven.
Spiers said: “During the pandemic, pupils weren’t having health visitor appointments, or speech and therapy appointments or pediatric appointments, or even going to the GP.
"We weren’t going out and interacting with other people and children weren’t getting the exposure to spoken language.”
Although Spiers believes other factors might determine the pass rates of pupils.
“We need pre-phonics," Spiers said, "like spot the difference, jigsaw puzzles or singing a nursery rhyme.”
She said: "The emphasis on the phonics programmes is whole class teaching. When you watch these phonics lessons from these programmes you find some children who might have even started school being able to read having to sit there and suck it up. That’s not good for those children.
"Then there are children who are struggling to even look in the direction of the board and they have to sit there because we’re saying we have to expose them to age-related content. So they’re miles behind where they’re being taught because they’re not taking it in really. This speaks to SEN children.
"Rather than try to stick a sticking plaster over it when it’s gone wrong, let’s think about how we can set children up for success from the start."
Feature image credit: Kenny Eliason via Unsplash
