“Little evidence” in favour of systematic synthetic phonics, research review concludes

“There is little evidence” in favour of any one approach to the teaching of phonics over another, a major new research study has concluded, in what looks like a direct challenge to recent government policy.

A team of academics from the universities of Durham and Sheffield carried out a “tertiary” review of studies of the teaching of reading. This was a synthesis of all existing research on the subject, with the team evaluating the findings of 12 “systematic reviews” of existing research, which themselves embraced 452 individual studies in total.

The exercise provided what the researchers, Carole Torgerson, Greg Brooks, Louise Gascoine and Steve Higgins, describe as the “most up-to-date overview of the results and quality of the research on phonics,” across a number of countries.

Yet the researchers found that while analysis of the accumulated research evidence on the teaching of reading does, tentatively, indicate that teaching phonics of one type or another has a “positive effect” on pupils, “the evidence is not clear enough to decide which phonics approach is best”.

This is a significant finding, as not only do ministers advocate the teaching of phonics, but one particular form of it, known as “systematic synthetic phonics”*.