Reception classes are part of the Foundation Stage and should be providing a diverse, experiential and playful approach to communication, language and literacy. Key Stages 1 and 2 should build on this approach and the phonological awareness children have already developed by playing with language (nonsense, poetry and rhyme), experimenting with meaningful writing and sharing lots of story-reading and storytelling. They should learn to use some phonic strategies, but only as one part of a battery of strategies for tackling new words and texts.
All this requires highly trained and educated teachers who understand language and literacy. It is so much easier to give untrained helpers and inexperienced teachers lists of phonic rules and phonic worksheets to hand out and mark.
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