I have seen so many children fail at reading because they don’t have the skills to decode any word. They come to me at Year 7 and 8 desperate because they can’t read, so school becomes a horror for them. They are in fact functionally illiterate - they can get by through what they hear and what they guess, but they always feel that they are clinging on. I teach these children to read using systematic phonics and then I have to build their confidence back up, which isn’t easy. None of these children couldn’t learn to read - they just weren’t taught. So for them, every word that they couldn’t read was a nonsense word. We need to stop all this nonsense and just teach all children to read.

rabbitpatch, Via www.tes.co.uk.