In an article in the Telegraph newspaper in May 2023 the Minister of State for Schools, Nick Gibb MP, claimed “Our ‘obsession’ with phonics has worked”. The claim was based on his interpretation of the Progress in International Reading and Literacy (PIRLS) 2021 study published earlier this year. The minister’s main point was that “England was fourth out of 43 comparable countries” because apparently teachers had “embraced phonics”. England’s average scale score in PIRLS 2021 was 558, compared to a score of 559 in the previous round, in 2016.
The Covid pandemic created a series of extreme challenges for collecting the data for PIRLS 2021. This means it is even more questionable than usual to attempt to make a crude causal link between England’s phonics policy and the PIRLS ranking. One of the many Covid-related challenges faced by the researchers who collected the PIRLS pupil test data was the timing of when the assessments for each country’s pupils’ reading were carried out. England’s sample of pupils was tested between May and July 2022, a full calendar year later than originally scheduled. By May 2022 this cohort had therefore had more time post-lockdown to settle back into teaching and learning than in most other countries, who stuck to the original schedule or closer to it than did England, an advantage that could have affected the test scores.
There are other factors that must also be taken account of. For example, the PIRLS report makes clear that there are overlaps in the range of pupils’ scores for each country (shown statistically as ‘confidence intervals’). So, although it is good news that England is towards the top of one of the PIRLS ranking tables, so are many other countries. And crucially, none of those countries has the rigid, narrow approach of synthetic phonics that England does (see the second post in this series for more on this). In this regard, and close to home, the continuing success of Ireland is something worthy of more attention by policy makers.
