Phonics teaching- whole class or ability groups?

There is currently a great deal of debate about how to teach the discrete phonics session. Should you teach whole class or ability groups? The short answer is that either is ok, but my experience is that whole class works better for all children. This conclusion is based on two things– the research and also the experiences of schools who have successfully navigated the phonics maze, both in terms of the Y1 decoding check and OFSTED.
First of all what does OFSTED say about the matter? Actually they shouldn’t mind which way you teach, so long as the lesson is challenging for all children and the quality of teaching and learning is good. They have to abide by their own rules which are stated in their handbook. ‘Inspectors will not look for a preferred methodology but must identify ways in which teaching and learning can be improved.’ Also when judging quality of teaching, ‘Inspectors must not expect teaching staff to teach in any specific way or follow a prescribed methodology.’ So in theory they would not mind if you taught the lesson standing on your head, so long as the children were learning!

The research is particularly compelling and, I find, rather shocking. It comes from the seven year Clackmannan-shire study into the teaching of synthetic phonics, which kick-started the phonics revolution in schools. ‘Slowing down the programme for some slower learning children may be setting them up for reading failure; they may never catch up with their classmates, no matter how much extra practice in reading they get.’ (Teaching Syn-thetic Phonics by R. Johnston & J. Watson 2007) The idea that, with the best intentions, we are creating auto-matic failure for some children, is a rather scary one.


The experiences that schools have had would back this research. For example schools that taught the lower abilities separately and at a slower pace, found that there was no way those children could succeed when it came to the Y1 decoding check. It did not matter how much progress they had made, they simply had not cov-ered all the phonemes required to do the test and so could not hope to pass it. Schools that had taught all chil-dren in a whole class situation, all the phonemes, found that all children could at least attempt the test and some schools got as high at 87-90% passing the check due to this.

I also know schools who ‘undid’ the grouping by ability. It was very difficult to start off with, particularly ensuring that all the children in the lower groups had some sort of catch up to make up for the missed phonemes. What the schools found however, was that the lower ability then made accelerated progress– perhaps it was just a rise in expectations for them or perhaps it was the challenge of being with the more able children. The other thing these schools noticed was the amount of time they had suddenly freed up– in one case it was as much as 3/4 hour each week. In a large school, moving children around for different groups takes up a great deal of time.

The teachers also felt far more confident in their own knowledge of where children were as they were teaching them all the time. This is another big issue around ability grouping. Frequently the Support Staff are used as the teachers for a group and they quite often have not had the same level of training in order to teach the phonics. Grouping has a difficulty around staffing which can really only be solved if Support Staff are involved and teach-ing groups. There are obviously some really outstanding Support Staff, but equally without experience and train-ing it can be a disaster for that group.

Obviously whole class lessons need to be effectively differentiated, which is very easy to do. For example if you are teaching /ee/ in Phase 3 and you have some more able pupils you add in some Phase 4 words such as sleep, creep etc and very able pupils words like cheese. When teaching Phase 5 you always refer to the Phase 3 words covered and your least able group can revise Phase 3 and even Phase 2 as necessary, so long as they are also learning the grapheme for that day. Practice is easy to differentiate by the words given– though always make sure everyone is covering the grapheme for that day and apply you just need to have easier or more complex sentences to read or write, again making sure that all children are applying the grapheme for the day, even if all the rest of the words are only at Phase 2.

Finally, something to think about... On the whole schools do not put children into ability groups and teach them separately rather than whole class, for any other subject, particularly in EY and KS1. So why is it different when it comes to phonics? I don’t think it is different and I would hope schools have high expectations of all their  pupils, giving them equal access to one of the key skills for learning to read.