The Guardian 9 October 2021 by Michael Rosen
You’ll know by now that children score much higher on the year 1 tests than the year 6 tests. These are of course very different ways of measuring what children can do, testing different things, so why should they match up? No reason why they should – except that all who trumpeted the introduction of first, fast and only systematic, synthetic phonics claimed it would eradicate illiteracy. In other words, every child would be able to “read” and not simply “decode”. There would be no illiteracy.
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