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When Rhode Island’s was passed in the US in 2019, Kari Kurto was hired to help implement the law, which was supposed to begin training teachers in structured literacy and the science of reading. Kurto, who is the national science-of-reading project director at , an advocacy non-profit, felt like things were finally beginning to change.

For more than a decade, the small East Coast state had been using a “balanced literacy” approach in reading classrooms, which viewed phonics and decoding words as just one of many ways children learned to read, including the now-discredited “three-cueing” approach that critics said amounted to . But it wasn’t working well for a lot of pupils; less than a quarter of Rhode Island (aged 9 and 10) could read proficiently.

Yet after the law passed, the real work began. An amendment pushed by state teachers’ unions attempted to weaken the law, saying that teachers who were already reading specialists, had 25 years’ teaching experience or had their master’s in reading didn’t have to follow the law’s requirements. And state funding for the whole enterprise - about $250,000 (£185,000) - wasn’t anywhere close to what was needed to train all teachers.

As a consequence, the state’s effort to make sure that strong phonics instruction is happening in every school has been uneven.

“It’s very frustrating,” Kurto says. “We are definitely seeing pockets of excellence and improvement. People want an easy solution, and it’s not easy. It takes strong leadership; it takes funding.”

Phonics and the new reading wars

Rhode Island’s complicated journey to teaching phonics well is one playing out not just across the US but across much of the Anglosphere.

Over the past few years, much of the English-speaking world has been hit by a reading research earthquake.

Decades of reading theory grounded in approaches like “whole language” and “balanced literacy” hoped pupils might pick up reading with exposure, context clues and enthusiasm. There’s a long history of these methods being pitted against phonics, with researchers, politicians and educators arguing the case for which method works best in what has been dubbed the “reading wars”.

But over the past decade, a mix of parent activism, expert authority and has helped to swing the pendulum back to teaching pupils phonics, or the letters and associated sounds that are a first step in learning to read.

This time around, the so-called “reading wars” look distinctly different. The phonics approach is now backed by a significant and growing body of - research that countries like England and Ireland have used to unify national guidance and teacher training, as well as to create new curricula and a phonics screener for every pupil. In the process, they’ve successfully transformed reading instruction for .

“If you go to any primary school today in England, you will see phonics all over it. There isn’t a primary school that isn’t doing phonics,” says former schools minister Nick Gibb, who led the charge for universal school phonics more than a decade ago. “There are some better than others, but they are all doing it. So it’s had its impact.”

‘If you go to any primary school today in England, you will see phonics all over it’

Few other Anglosphere countries are at the same point. New Zealand, Australia, Scotland, Canada and the US have all made some progress towards the science of reading with a range of new laws, policies and curricula - but phonics instruction isn’t universal, for a variety of reasons.

Some areas are still engaged in reading wars arguments, while others struggle with the rollout of teacher training and curriculum. And even when laws, policies and guidance point to phonics as the winning, evidence-based approach, there’s still foot dragging, fights over details and confusion.

“I can see that balanced literacy is leaving and the science of reading is sweeping in, and it’s definitely a lot of systematic phonics programmes of varying quality,” says Marnie Ginsberg, a US-based literacy expert who helps train teachers and schools in phonics. “And sometimes with that, old habits are hard to die.”

So why is it proving so hard for phonics to win over teachers’ hearts and minds? And what can the ongoing science-of-reading campaigns playing out around the world teach us about how to shift pedagogical thinking?

System overhaul

For decades, whole language and balanced literacy approaches have dominated nearly every country in the Anglosphere. Adopting an entirely new approach with the science of reading, which is distinctly different in both form and content, means big changes to several systems, including retraining an entire cohort of educators, school leaders and initial teacher training providers.

In Australia, the federal government has recently invested in several key reforms, including revamping teacher training and a free , along with phonics-based structured literacy resources for schools - even though the use of all of it is voluntary.

States like Victoria and New South Wales are beginning to institute phonics teaching in the early years, but experts say it is a big challenge to get every school on board because the states, schools and jurisdictions are so varied.

“There is a general move in this direction [of structured literacy], but we have three education jurisdictions - government, Catholic and private - across eight states and territories,” says Pamela Snow, professor of cognitive psychology at La Trobe University, in Melbourne, Victoria.

“So there are multiple systems, and the level of mandating and resourcing varies widely across them.”

In 2024, for example, Victoria mandated at least 25 minutes of systematic, synthetic phonics instruction for all pupils from Reception to Year 2, after many years of advocacy from various stakeholders. Yet other states, Snow says, have decided they’re not making any decisions to mandate one approach, opting instead for what she calls “choose-your-own-adventure”.

However, even within states that have made the switch, there’s still the long and often arduous process of getting everyone involved on board.

The reading wars have been “vociferous” in Australia, says author and LaTrobe senior lecturer Nathaniel Swain. University professors who train teachers have been especially resistant to reforms. “They saw phonics as being really backward, and just one part of a range of ways of teaching students to decode or to teach them to make meaning,” Swain says.

Training - or often retraining - an entire nation of current classroom teachers on how to teach the new phonics material is also a big ask. Schools will most likely need to hire private providers and coaches.

“It’s somewhat unclear how the next years will go in terms of helping schools along the way,” Swain says. “It’s one thing to announce it, and one thing to sort of say, ‘Listen, here’s what the expectation is.’ But whether schools can actually get there without significant support from external providers or coaches is probably where we’re at at the moment. It’s unclear how easy it will be for people to do it.”

The rocky road of implementation

New Zealand, meanwhile, is grappling with a different issue (one that might feel familiar to teachers in the UK): what some see as an overcommitment to phonics.

A new government, elected in 2023, mandated the teaching of structured literacy, as well as a national curriculum “refresh” that embedded explicit teaching of other aspects of English. “That includes phonics, but it’s also explicitly teaching syntax, morphology, vocabulary, writing, oral communication and comprehension,” says Alison Arrow, associate dean of the Academic Faculty of Education at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch.

More phonics in classrooms is a huge win after decades of approaches that weren’t helping pupils to learn to read, Arrow says. But, she adds, the zeal with which schools are now adopting phonics presents its own problems.

“The pendulum has swung all the way to the other end and didn’t stop in the middle,” she says. “There’s lots of great things going on, lots of great phonics, but sometimes [practitioners are] coming from an approach where you must teach every child everything you know.

“That sounds great, but actually, not all children need everything. What we’re finding is that some children are being pushed backwards in their reading instruction instead of continuing to be supported.”

‘Explicit instruction is incorrectly viewed as teacher-centred, boring, passive, authoritative and lecture-like’

Overteaching phonics has been a concern in the US, too, for educators, as well as cognitive scientists like Mark Seidenberg.

“You know 20,000-40,000 words. How many were you explicitly taught? A tiny fraction. Teaching some of them is important for beginning readers. How did you learn the other ones? Basically, the way AI programs do. Learning about patterns from a lot of examples,” in a talk at the Thompson Center Summit on Early Literacy in 2023.

Schools are still a long way off overteaching in Canada, on the other hand, where there’s no national guidance or roadmap for implementing explicit instruction for foundational word-reading and skills, including phonics.

Following a wake-up call from the Ontario Human Rights Commission, a report called the has inspired some local provinces and jurisdictions to implement phonics programmes.

“Canada is making progress, but we are somewhere between ‘halfway there’ and ‘a long way to go’,” says researcher Nidhi Sachdeva, an educator at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

Manitoba’s Evergreen School Division, for example, has for all elementary pupils after adopting a phonics-based, structured literacy approach.

Yet other areas are hanging on to balanced literacy, Sachdeva says. Some teachers are eager to teach phonics but don’t have the resources or the training support to get it right.

“There is also a significant lack of understanding among teachers as to what it means to teach explicitly,” Sachdeva says. “Explicit instruction is incorrectly viewed as teacher-centred, boring, passive, authoritative and lecture-like. Teachers don’t want to belong in a group where they might be labelled as passive or teacher-centred. This misrepresentation has slowed down the adoption of explicit instruction.”

Draining debates

Ideological battles are driving much of the inconsistency in how phonics has been adopted from country to country. While some parts of the world have mostly moved on from the reading wars, others are still caught up in arguing over whether phonics is the appropriate way to teach young readers, even as the evidence for phonics instruction continues to grow. The result often manifests in doing nothing definitive.

In Scotland, where 40 per cent of pupils have an additional support need, and one in every five requires special support with exams (having questions read aloud to them, for example), schools have been reluctant to adopt phonics as the singular approach to word-reading.

According to a spokesperson for Education Scotland, phonics has been a part of literacy teaching since the introduction of Scotland’s 2010 . The cabinet secretary for education and skills is currently leading a curriculum refresh in literacy and English, and “co-design groups are engaging with the most up-to-date evidence in order to ensure that Scotland’s curriculum continues to support educators”, the spokesperson says.

‘Some children are being pushed backwards in their reading instruction’

But some teachers tell a different story. in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) reveal a long-term decline in Scotland’s overall literacy. And Education Scotland’s new package of literacy resources, writes educator Darren Leslie, “leaves too much room for teacher preference and does not fully mandate a phonics-first approach”. Scotland currently has no plan to train teachers in the science of reading, despite calls from advocates.

Similar to Scotland, the state of California is a notable holdout in the US. Legislators have faced significant pushback to phonics mandates. While most US states have adopted some kind of science-of-reading-based reforms, teachers’ union the California Teachers Association and advocates for English learners have strongly opposed legislation for training all teachers in phonics, killing a that would have mandated teacher training and a phonics curriculum.

The union told US education publication that legislation was “flawed because it assumes all students learn in the same way” - an argument that’s been refuted by research into how the brain learns.

Pupil improvement

Yet phonics advocates in areas that are still struggling to get teachers and policymakers on board point to the fact that in places where phonics has been successfully implemented, they are seeing steady pupil improvement.

The US state of Mississippi, for instance, widely considered to be the poorest state, instituted universal phonics among a slate of other reading reforms more than a decade ago. Its pupils have seen great improvement, moving from dead last in state 4th-grade reading scores to second place. In growth over time, .

But the work of getting phonics instruction into every school has been slow and steady over many years, backed up by significant financial investment, strict state direction in teacher training and curriculum choices, and ongoing coaching and support for classroom teachers. And pupils who can’t pass the 3rd-grade reading test, about , are retained.

It’s a different story in Ireland, which recently earned the among 37 countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and all of Europe in the latest round of Pisa tests. There, phonics has never really gone away, says Patrick Burke, assistant professor in the School of Language, Literacy and Early Childhood Education at Dublin City University.

“We don’t go through the same level of curriculum swings here,” Burke says. “There’s 20-year or 30-year or, in some cases, 50-year blocks where there isn’t a huge amount of national upheaval around how things are taught.

“There’s a relatively high level of consistency from one generation to the next, and I think that means that teachers, in a lot of cases, just use common sense and their own sense of what children need to learn, rather than it being mandated to them.”

Too much focus on phonics?

In the Dublin City teacher training programme, one of the country’s largest, future primary teachers spend about 30 per cent, or sometimes more, of their university contact time learning about how the brain learns to read and the importance of phonological awareness and phonics.

This is considerably more time spent on the “science of reading” and how to apply it than in places like the US, where offers little to no instruction in phonics or phonemic awareness.

Irish trainee teachers then put their knowledge to use in several terms of school placements, where they watch more experienced teachers teach phonics, among other things.

Despite its consistency of approach, Ireland hasn’t been immune to the international reading wars and debates over the use of phonics, Burke says. And some argue that phonics training for new teachers could still be stronger. Overall, though, teaching is considered a high-status job in Ireland, and teachers are relatively well-trained.

If anything, teacher trainers want to be sure that student teachers don’t only learn phonics, but see it as a part of being a motivated, fluent reader. “You also need to make sure you’re developing language, vocabulary, having discussions about books, that the motivation and the engagement piece isn’t lost,” Burke says. “Maybe in some cases there’s too much focus on phonics and not enough on the other aspects of literacy.”

But experts agree that all those important aspects of literacy can’t happen without a good phonics foundation. The next few years will determine whether this crucial battle in the reading wars can be won.

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