20 days of government-funded phonics training from Ruth Miskin –but no independent evaluation of its effectiveness

A scheme to train teachers in phonics instruction, provided by one of the government’s best-known education advisers, is one of only two to have been funded by a multi-million-pound Department for Education pot of money which will end up not having been subject to independent evaluation.

Ruth Miskin Training, which trained teachers from 109 schools in how to teach its lessons in synthetic phonics, was not included among eight projects, paid for by the Teaching and Leadership Innovation Fund, which had their work evaluated through a government-funded report published in September.

The evaluation report said that, instead, the DfE-funded Ruth Miskin project was subject to independent investigation by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), with a report expected in “summer/autumn 2022”.

However, in reality this has not been published, with the EEF having abandoned its investigation having cited a failure to recruit sufficient schools to serve as a control group, against which to compare the Ruth Miskin approach.

Last month another EEF study of products provided by Ruth Miskin, including the Read Write Inc phonics programme used in thousands of schools, found no statistically significant gains.