In the UK, school children were generally taught with the whole word approach, with a focus on reading books and guesswork in understanding words until the Independent Review of Early Reading, published in 2006. This was shortly followed by the release of Letters and Sounds by the Department of Education in 2007, building on the recommendations for teaching phonics and reading made in the Rose Review. Three years later, the 200 government white paper The Importance of Teaching argued the case for the phonics approach, including the introduction of a simple reading check intended to measure childrens reading progress made by Years and 2. It was also created with the purpose of identifying learning disabilities at a young age. The test is carried out by teachers and includes rather vague guidance for them. Teachers are told that if a child chooses to sound out phonemes before blending the word, they cannot be prompted, and failure to form the whole word by themselves would count as a failure on that question. This puts teachers in a difficult position, if they know a child was capable of forming a word but were not doing it on this occasion, they are obliged to fail the child anyway. It would be difficult for teachers to explain to children the importance of these tests and that they must try their best; some children may listen to this and do as such, whereas others may simply not be in the mood to do so that way, seeing as the test is being carried out on six- and seven-year-old children. Even more challenging for teachers is the expectation placed upon them to make a judgment call regarding children who speak with accents; not only is this difficult for teachers, but presumably there would be variance among teachers in what judgments they decide to make, hindering the efficacy of the test. Teachers are
expected to make further judgments regarding pronunciation difficulties as young children cannot always produce all sounds for numerous reasons for example, if they are in the process of losing their milk teeth carrying the same issue of varying judgment among different teachers and thus inconsistencies in results.
These tests were initially viewed as successful, with year-on-year increases in scores being observed. However, this prompted accusations in the media that teachers were altering the marks to have higher pass rates. To overcome this issue, the government responded to this issue by withholding the passing mark for the tests from teachers so that they would not know the required standard for children to pass the test. A further issue with the phonics approach to reading is that it was argued to be detrimental to children who arrive at school already able to read. The BBC reported that Andrew Davis of Durham University argued that being forced to move back from reading for meaning to a mechanical exercise of blending and decoding is likely to be off-putting. This carries the moral issue of whether it is fair to negatively impact strong readers in the hope of bringing the rest of their cohort up to the same standard. Numerous research studies find that the phonics method is superior to the whole-word approach. Johnston and Watsons report, published in 2005, found that the synthetic phonics method was more effective in developing numerous skills in learning to read. Following research comparing the two, their results showed: At the end of the experimental programs, the synthetic phonics group read 7 months ahead of chronological age, and 7 months ahead of the other two groups. They were also 7 months ahead of chronological age in spelling, and spelled 8 to 9 months ahead of the other two groups.