Daily Telegraph:
Letters to the Editor: The wrong way to start a reading revolution
4 October 2017
Evidence from a recent report by Stephen Machin and his colleagues at the London School of Economics, entitled “Teaching to Teach” Literacy, shows that synthetic phonics instruction has little to no effect on reading scores by the time children reach Key Stage 2 (age 11). Their data are consistent with higher-quality, experimental studies that have found that phonics has a modest impact on reading scores initially, but no lasting impact in later grades.
Jeff McQuillan, Los Angeles, California