What Schools Do To Teach Reading

The Rose Review recommendations

In March 2006 a report was published called The Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading, more commonly known as The Rose Review.

This report had very clear recommendations about the teaching of early reading. This was very welcome as prior to this there was a lot of confusion about what schools should be doing.

In a nutshell, schools should:

Teach phonics as the main first method for children to learn to read words.

For most children this should begin at age 5.

Before the age of 5 children should be involved in pre-reading activities to prepare them for phonics work.

Phonics should be taught in a systematic way.

Phonics work should be set within a rich language curriculum that develops speaking and listening, reading and writing skills.

Phonics teaching should be multisensory. This means children will learn using all their senses e.g. by singing, dancing, acting, using magnetic letters, making shapes in the air, looking at pictures, playing games, using computers, making sounds, making choices and as many other ways as possible. This is vital because all children learn differently.

In addition schools need to make sure that:

All teachers have adequate training.

There are assessment systems in place to keep track of how all children are doing in phonics.

All phonics teaching is high quality to prevent children falling behind wherever possible.

Where children do fall behind, they are given interventions, specific support with their phonics to help them catch up.

What this will actually look like

Bear in mind that the Rose Review was only published in 2006. Schools should all be in the process of implementing the recommendations but at the moment all schools will be at different stages of this journey.

All schools following the recommendations will be following a systematic phonics programme. The programme published by the government and available free to all schools is called Letters and Sounds. Other schools may have chosen to buy a commercial programme. There are a number of these available but the school should have taken care to make sure that any programme they use meets the recommendations in the Rose Report. Other schools may have created their own programme or have taken elements from more than one programme and merged them together.

In schools following the Letters and Sounds programme this is what you would see. Schools following other programmes may vary slightly.

Children in Reception, Y1 and Y2 should have a 15-20 minute phonics session every day. This session should be fast, fun and multisensory (see above). Each session will follow a clear sequence as follows:

Introduction - The teacher will explain to the children what they will be learning today

Revisit and review - The children will briefly practise something that they have previously learned - generally as a game

Teach - The children will learn something new - often a new GPC or a new skill - this will be taught in a multisensory way

Practise - The children play games to practise the new thing they have just learned.

Apply - The children will have a quick go at reading or writing using the new thing that they have learned.

Each of these sections lasts a few minutes at most.

Outside of the phonics session children should be given lots of opportunities to apply the new skills that they have learned in all the lessons that they do. The more opportunities they given the sooner they will become confident with these skills.

Is this the only way that children are taught to read?

Absolutely not! Phonics is the first step in helping children to crack the code of reading and writing. However children also need to learn to understand what they read. Reading skills are also developed through regularly Reading Aloud to children, Guided Reading sessions and literacy lessons including Shared Reading sessions.