We were lucky enough that Dan was in Reception back in the days before National Curriculum. He had a wonderful teacher, who explained to me that every child learns to read in a different way. She used phonics, and whole words, and context clues, and whatever worked, with reinforcements and games and so on. Every child in the class was on a different book – some reading scheme, some own choice within a certain level, some completely free choice. She worked out paths for each child based on their abilities and interests, and recognised when they were on a learning leap and when they were at a plateau.

Ironically, that’s the kind of individual education that the NC was supposed to initiate with all the learning targets and checklists and such. Unfortunately, it had the reverse effect and I doubt if that teacher would be able to teach in such a free-and-easy relaxed fashion any more.

As for Tim, he taught himself to read when he was three, using entirely whole-word recognition, learning phonics by some kind of osmosis as he went along. All I did was run my fingers under words as I read to him, at his request, answer some questions, and play with magnetic letters on the fridge with him. When he started school, he was tested with a reading age of ‘beyond 14′ when he was six. And yet, he could not ‘hear’ individual sounds of words at all until he was at least seven. If he’d been taught by pure phonics, he would probably have been considered an extremely slow learner….