How do we teach reading?

It's just after break at Trinity Road primary school in Chelmsford, and the eager five-year-olds in Miss Tait's class are sitting on the carpet waiting for their lesson to start. Suddenly it begins at a cracking pace. Miss Tait warms the children up by getting them to build up some simple three-letter words from their constituent sounds. "My turn M-e-n, men. Your turn..." she says. "M-e-n men," they chant in response.

"My turn s-i-t, sit. Your turn," she shouts. "S-i-t sit," they reply. No written words are displayed; teacher and children simply chant the words and sounds.

They continue at breakneck speed until they are building up five-letter words such as "blast" and "plant". Then, after just two minutes of this "synthesis skills" practice, they move on to "segmentation" and repeat the procedure in reverse, breaking down the words they are singing – sob, s-o-b, they singsong happily.

Only then does the class tackle phonics in the conventional way – learning the letter sounds from written letters in front of them. The 15 children sit before a board displaying the letters of the alphabet and some common words, while their teacher slaps at the board with a fairy wand and the pupils shout the sound or word indicated.

They are part of a successful scheme pioneered by Dr Jonathan Solity and Essex County Council with around 10,000 children across more than 170 of the authority's schools. The scheme challenges the Government's National Literacy Strategy on the grounds that it is not succeeding in teaching children to read. Since its introduction in 1995, Dr Solity's project has seen standards rise. The proportion of children who struggle to read and are labelled as having learning difficulties has been cut from around 25 per cent to between two and eight per cent.

Around 20 per cent more seven-year-olds now reach the required standard for their age using Dr Solity's methods. If his scheme were adopted nationally, it would save the Government more than £200m a year and rescue thousands of children from the educational scrap heap, he says.

The debate about how children should be taught to read has been a long and bitter one. And it was reignited last month by the Government's admission that it missed its target for enabling primary-school children to read and write. That target, set in 1997, pledged to have 80 per cent of pupils reaching the required standard in English tests by this summer. However, the initial strong improvements tailed off and the figures failed to show any improvement for the second year running, so that only 75 per cent of 11-year-olds were successful this summer.

Ministers can take no comfort from the performance of younger children because seven-year-olds also failed to improve their reading and writing skills this year. Dr Solity, who works at Warwick University, believes that the Government could do better than its current National Literacy Strategy, now taught in the vast majority of primary schools. Ministers should look at the evidence from academic research and the breakaway projects that have been successful around the country, he says.

In the Sixties and Seventies, the battles over reading were between "progressives", who abandoned phonics in favour of "real books", believing that children should memorise whole words or use pictures to guess, and "traditionalists" who said that phonics were essential. Now, the battle for phonics has largely been won, but the debate still rages about the exact type of phonics that should be adopted – analytic or synthetic phonics.

The differences between the two may appear subtle to the uninitiated, but they are the stuff of intense dispute to the experts. In analytic phonics, children break down words paying particular attention to the start and end of words. Under this method, a child reading the word "cat" would break it down into c –at, so that pupils come to understand how to break words down rather than how to build them up.

In synthetic phonics, children decode words by building them up from their constituent sounds – for example, c-a-t, cat. Recently, synthetic phonics enthusiasts such as Dr Solity appear to have won the upper hand. Several successful schemes have used synthetic phonics to achieve some impressive results.

In the US, a national inquiry into reading concluded that synthetic phonics was the best way of engaging the least able 25 per cent of pupils. And, in Clackmannanshire, Scotland, an intensive "synthetic" method that taught children 42 letter sounds, at six a day over seven days, has put eight-year-old boys two years ahead of the average reading age for boys. Girls are 18 months ahead.

The project was originally piloted by academics from St Andrews University in eight primary schools, and it followed 300 children from the age of four. Its emphasis has been on teaching the whole class rather than dividing it into smaller groups. All the authority's 19 primary schools have now adopted the method.

Dr Solity's programme is different. It teaches 64 core sounds over two years, compared with the National Literacy Strategy, which, he argues, teaches children around 550 sounds over three years. That is because the National Literacy Strategy uses a combination of the synthetic and analytic methods. It includes teaching objectives that demand that pupils master the concepts of analytic phonics. That infuriates the advocates of pure synthetics.

Sue Lloyd, a teacher behind the Jolly Phonics Programme (using synthetic phonics), argues that the mixed approach of the National Literacy Strategy confuses children. "It creates problems for many children," she says. "Evidence-based research clearly shows that the simpler synthetic phonics approach produces higher results and reduces the 'tail of under-achievement'."

It is "unacceptable" that the Government has introduced its programme without testing it scientifically using standardised tests first, she says. "The educationists and advisers must become far more accountable for the ideas that they promote. I suggest that it should even become illegal to promote trends, initiatives and programmes without measuring their effectiveness by means of standardised testing."

Dr Solity, however, argues that his scheme is much more than phonics teaching. It is probably unique in combining phonics with a passion for real books. They are "more fun" and "contain just as many phonically regular words as reading schemes", he says. His methods are based on psychological research about how children learn. That is why, he says, the scheme has produced such astonishing results for 10,000 children since 1995. The Government is mistaken in its faith in a literacy hour when research evidence suggests that children learn best a little at a time, he says.

Under his methods, children must do three 12-minute carefully structured word and sound sessions every day. Most include one of the three sessions as part of their literacy hour, but some have abandoned the hour in favour of their own strategies. "What we are doing is much bigger than just contributing to the debate about synthetic and analytic phonics," he says. "The way we teach reading not only looks at the content of what we teach but is underpinned by key psychological principles of teaching and learning."

Dr Solity advocates "interleaved learning" whereby new letters or words are practised alongside old information every day to reinforce concepts in children's minds. Other academics also have been critical of the thinking underpinning the National Literacy Strategy. They object to the fact that the National Literacy Strategy was piloted but that the Government decided to go national before the results were in. Research into the effectiveness of its methods was not commissioned until after it had already been introduced across the country.

Dr Bonnie Macmillan, of Hull University, concludes that an early intervention programme designed as an update to the Strategy to help struggling five-year-olds, devoted too little time to methods that work, such as phonics. Her analysis of materials sent to primary schools calculated that only three per cent of the programme was spent on developing letter-sound skills while the rest was wasted on useless activities.

However, the architects of the strategy show no signs of changing tack. Last month, David Miliband, the schools minister, effectively reinforced the Government's position. He announced more support for boys, who were blamed for dragging down the results, and extra help for the poorest performing local authorities. Advocates of synthetic phonics have given up hope that their methods will ever be taught in the nation's schools.

"The National Literacy Strategy is not compulsory," says Dr Solity. "Yet the Government has done an amazing job of getting everyone to do it. If teachers follow my model closely, they will get the best results. I admit some teachers were sceptical at first, but as soon as they get halfway through the year and start to see the results, they stop worrying about it."

DR SOLITY'S 12-MINUTE SESSION

Synthesis skills (2 minutes): Building up words from their constituent letter sounds (used in reading); Moving from vowel-consonant words (VC) (am, an, if, on) to CVC to CVCC to CCVC to CCVCC

Segmentation skills (2 minutes): Breaking down words into their constituent letter sounds (used in spelling)

Phonic skills (2 minutes): Moving from learning the letter sounds to reading phonically regular words to reading words with letter combinations

Sight vocabulary (2 minutes): Learning the 100 most common words

Reading together from a 'real book' (4 minutes): The children's input increases as they become more proficient readers

s.cassidy@independent.co.uk