A review of the teaching of early reading in England commissioned by the UK Government recommended that synthetic phonics should be the preferred approach for young English learners. In response, all English schools have been told to put in place a discrete synthetic phonics programme as the key means for teaching high-quality phonic work. In this paper we analyse the evidence presented by the review to support the change to synthetic phonics. We show that the review provided no reliable empirical evidence that synthetic phonics offers the vast majority of beginners the best route to becoming skilled readers. We analyse the available empirical evidence in English, and show instead that the data support approaches based on systematic tuition in phonics. There is also evidence that contextualised systematic phonics instruction is effective. However, more research is needed, particularly with typically developing readers, in order to determine whether contextualised systematic phonics is more effective than discrete systematic phonics.

To date there have been no systematic studies examining the ways in which teachers in England focus and adapt their teaching of writing. The current study addresses this gap by investigating the nature and frequency of teachers’ approaches to the teaching of writing in a sample of English primary schools, using the ‘simple view of writing’ as a framework to examine the extent to which different aspects of the writing process are addressed. One hundred and eighty-eight staff from ten different schools responded to an online questionnaire. Only the data from class teachers (n = 88) who responded to all items on the questionnaire were included in the final analyses. Respondents enjoyed teaching writing and felt prepared to teach it. However, despite feeling that they were effective in identifying approaches to support students’ writing, nearly half reported that supporting struggling writers was problematic for them. Overall teachers reported more work at word level, occurring several times a week, than with transcription, sentence or text levels, which were reported to occur weekly. Planning, reviewing and revising occurred least often, only monthly. For these variables no differences were found between teachers of younger (age 4–7) and older students (age 8–11). By contrast, an examination of specific aspects of each component revealed differences between the teachers of the two age groups. Teachers of younger students focused more frequently on phonic activities related to spelling, whereas teachers of older students focussed more on word roots, punctuation, word classes and the grammatical function of words, sentence-level work, and paragraph construction.

The Rose Report, commissioned by the Secretary of State for Education for England, recommended in March 2006 that early reading instruction must include synthetic phonics. This paper evaluates the extent to which research evidence supports this recommendation. In particular, a review of international research into the teaching of early reading shows that the Rose Report's main recommendation on synthetic phonics contradicts the powerful body of evidence accumulated over the last 30 years. In this paper it is argued that action already taken by the UK government to change the National Curriculum in line with the Rose Report's recommendations represents a change in pedagogy not justified by research.

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In the past 20 years the importance of creativity as part of young people's education has increasingly been recognised. The stimulus for the growing emphasis on creativity has come from diverse sources including drives for greater national economic prosperity and enlightenment visions of young people's education. One facet of creativity in education has been its place in the national curriculum texts of nation states. The research reported in this paper aimed to investigate the place of creativity in the national curricula of the 27 member states of the EU (EU 27) and in the UK. A content analysis of all statutory national curriculum texts for the EU27 was undertaken and implications compared to the answers of 7659 teachers to a survey. The findings showed that creativity was a recurring element of curricula but its incidence varied widely. It was also found that creativity was represented in arts subjects more than other subjects and that it was relatively neglected in reading and writing as part of the language group of subjects. The countries of the UK in general had maintained their historic attention to creativity but there was evidence of a shift from emphasis in primary settings to secondary settings. It is concluded that there is a need for much greater coherence between general aims for education and the representation of creativity in curriculum texts.