Phonics and SEND - Article for Professionals

Molly Hall’s article in March/April “Educate” Magazine draws attention to research that shows problems with the phonics centred approach advocated by the Department of Education. While phonics is a valuable tool, their advice puts too much emphasis on this aspect of reading. This is probably even more true when it comes to teaching students with SEND.

In the wake of the publication by Department for Education Reading Framework – Teaching the Foundations of Literacy (Jan 22) it is important to address the question of how to adapt reading programmes to suit learners with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASCs)s?

Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASCs) are characterised by differences in social communication, social interaction and imagination along with differences in processing sensory information (including sound). Many of those diagnosed with ASCs have delayed language acquisition.

These differences can impact on the way the person learns – especially concepts or language-based skills.

The Reading Framework asserts that all students acquire reading skills in the same way and that all students should be taught primarily through a structured phonics programme.

The Department of Education offers an approved list of Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) programmes. Schools can choose their own programme but the Department of Education requires all schools to adopt a rigorous and systematic approach to teaching reading and for schools to adopt a “whole school” approach to teaching phonics for all pupils, with resources matched to the teaching programme.

The emphasis on using SSPs appears to run counter to the experience of those teaching learners with Autism Spectrum Conditions. After all, teachers spend hours creating visual supports to explain concepts because visual input is often what our learners respond to best.

“Autistic people are visual thinkers and they learn best when visual methods of learning are used. All my thinking is visual; I have almost no verbal thought….

Temple Grandin (University Professor and best-selling author with ASC)

This statement chimes with our teachers experience and makes sense to practitioners working with students with ASCs, teachers see many students who seem to acquire knowledge of words by sight, rather than phonetic decoding. However, this understanding is not reflected in the advice about teaching reading from D f E, which focuses on phonics to the exclusion of all other approaches.

Phonics first approach

D f E has championed the systematic teaching of phonics since the introduction of National Literacy Strategy (1998) and especially since the Rose Report (2006). Recommendations of the Rose Report (2006) include:

• “It is important for schools to offer a coherent reading programme in which ‘quality first teaching’ as defined by the Primary National Strategy and intervention work are closely linked.”

• “Best practice in teaching Early Reading uses a Systematic Synthetic phonics programme embedded in a language rich environment and alongside the development of Speaking and Listening skills”

However, the caveats and broader advice from the Rose Report are sometimes lost or oversimplified.

The report states that “when to introduce phonic work systematically is, and should be, a matter of principles, professional judgement based on careful observation and robust assessment.”

Concerns about work that is 'too formal too soon' are long-standing in early years education, it is therefore no surprise that the teaching of phonics has raised questions about the balance between teacher-directed and child-initiated learning.

The evidence from successful programmes suggests that teaching the whole group or class together, for short amounts of time, is advantageous for children, save for those with serious learning difficulties that cannot be met within mainstream provision. Teachers must exercise professional judgements about organising teaching groups to provide optimum conditions for learning.

In observing educational settings researchers for the Rose Report found that:

• “effective” pedagogy in the early years involves both the kind of interaction traditionally associated with the term ‘teaching’, and also the provision of instructive learning play environments and routines.”

• “‘excellent’ settings provided both teacher-initiated group work and freely chosen, yet potentially instructive play activities.”

The Rose Report practice in special education settings and for Pupils with SEND (Anecdotal Evidence) found that teaching reading to pupils with SEND often depends on individual teacher knowledge and preferences, and there was little advice about what worked best. There was also little advice about how to overcome specific learning difficulties.

In mainstream schools’ pupils with SEND were often marched through phonics programmes along with the WHOLE CLASS, with poor results, or simply handed over to LSAs.

Meanwhile in special schools’ teachers often adopted different programmes for different children sometimes relying on whole word programmes or onset and rime, and often combining different approaches.

The Reading Framework (Jan 2022)

The reading framework places the teaching of phonics within the wider literacy teaching framework. It gives a rationale for why reading is of paramount importance, not just to learning but for wellbeing. It builds on the work of the Rose Report (2006)

Advice on SEND from the Reading Framework:

• Schools are expected to enable access to appropriate phonics instruction for children with complex needs. Under the Equality Act 2010, they are required to make reasonable adjustments to enable pupils with disabilities to have full access to the curriculum and to be able to participate in it.

• Consensus is growing among academics and teachers that the best reading instruction for children with SEND is SSP, taught by direct instruction. They can learn to read and write and can make progress towards or attain functional literacy.

• “…comprehensive instruction that incorporates [phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, reading fluency and reading comprehension] …is not only appropriate for children with autism but also effective”

The Reading Framework points out that teaching must be adapted to meet the needs of pupils with SEN but insists that Phonics teaching is the best way to teach all pupils to read. The guidance advises adaptations but does not suggest how and when these should be applied nor what best practice might look like in making these adaptations.

There are problems with the research cited to back up these assertions.

The evidence cited only looks at small groups of verbal students who were able to attend to the tuition. Sermier (2021) states that students with special educational needs benefit from phonics-based programs integrating research-based approaches and techniques. However, the evidence cited does not look at whole school approaches to teaching via SSP with support from LSAs but at small group interventions by specially trained teachers. (Arcuili and Bailey 2021). Furthermore, the focus in these studies is early reading instruction for children with autism who use oral language, none of them investigate how to teach to pupils who are pre verbal or minimally verbal and they acknowledge that there is a major gap in the literature concerning reading instruction for those who do not use oral language.

This is a significant oversight, considering that 30% of children (with ASDs) go on to develop only minimal verbal communication skills. (Anderson et al., 2007; Kasari et al., 2013). Kate Nation – “Clearly however, one needs to be cautious when generalising from single case studies, especially given the wide variation in cognitive and linguistic skills seen in individuals with an ASD”

With an estimated 1% of children worldwide diagnosed with ASD and the potential for growing numbers due to underdiagnosis there is a pressing need to identify effective methods for improving educational outcomes for this population (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2018; Baxter et al., 2015; Christensen et al., 2016; Elsabbagh et al., 2012; Kirkovski et al., 2013)

Approved SSPs and support for SEND

Schools are expected to enable access to appropriate phonics instruction for children with complex needs. Under the Equality Act 2010, they are required to make reasonable adjustments to enable pupils with disabilities to have full access to the curriculum and to be able to participate in it.

The Guidance advocates approved SSPs (which are evidence based) however these SSPs do not have strong data about application for pupils with SEND. Guidance suggests adapting SSP programmes and teaching from mainstream to meet the needs of students with SEND but no practical advice on how this will be done has been offered. Special Schools face particular problems in implementing the approved phonics programmes

Firstly, they often need to cover phase 1 for longer – lots of different activities are needed and these need to be age appropriate – SSPs may not support this sufficiently. In addition, not all students can access the whiteboard presentations or resources provided by the SSP, many students have auditory processing problems, many students have delayed communication skills, and often some older students 12+ need phonics teaching but the fact that the phonics resources are targeted at much younger students can impact self-esteem.

Teachers in special schools are saying that these programmes must be adapted in a variety of ways:

• Pace of the programme – slower, faster, smaller chunks of information, shorter sessions

• Wide variation in progress and barriers to learning make it difficult to implement whole group teaching in special schools – many small group sessions are required

• Ensuring comprehension of teaching instructions – many programmes assume knowledge e.g., “can you put this in a sentence?” assumes knowledge of what a sentence is, a word is and that meaning is conveyed by words

• Multi-sensory techniques to improve motivation and understanding – these involve planning and work in producing suitable resources

• Focus on concrete and meaningful skills – can you read labels in the supermarket or follow instructions in a recipe or find the fire exit

• Pace of the lessons must allow for auditory processing differences and attention difficulties

• Language deficits must be addressed – many students with ASCs have delayed language acquisition

• Assessment of progress must be adapted to enable pupils to show what they know – e.g., reading aloud or answering orally will not suit those who are pre verbal

• Opportunities to practice skills need to be expanded in order for skills to be generalised

• Reading skills may need to be taught to older students as it takes them longer to acquire the language and comprehension skills to learn phonics – age-appropriate resources are difficult to find

• Students who have poor phonological awareness will not have the skills to develop phonemic awareness – the SSP programmes do not address Phase 1 phonics where these skills are taught

• Students who have difficulties with fine motor control may progress more slowly in writing skills than reading skills

Clear information is needed about what the benefit is for students in terms of time compared to other interventions such as using PECs , Speech and language interventions, OT interventions, Colourful semantics to support understanding of what is read. Clarification is also needed as to when other methods should be used e.g., Whole word reading.

The primary advantages of the SSPs used in mainstream are to reduce teacher workload – but this advantage is lost when SEND teachers or mainstream teachers with students with SEND have to adapt with forensic accuracy to the learning barriers, processing needs, and sensory barriers of students.

Molly Hall’s article also mentions the cost to schools of implementing SSPs and how this may lead to an overemphasis on the importance of phonics in teaching students to read. Extensive whole school training is needed to implement the SSPs– teachers and support staff as phonics skills are taught:

The argument for teaching phonics via SSPs rather than using a mixed approach with whole word reading and symbol support requires further research.

Given frequent difficulties with auditory processing it seems strange to prioritise aural routes for learning over others – as this seems to charge headlong at the “barrier to learning” rather than finding ways around it. In addition to this many students with ASCs have poor phonological awareness, making it difficult for them to distinguish or to sequence sounds that they hear.

Phonological awareness skills are prerequisite skills for phonics!

• Phonics involves the eyes AND ears.

• Phonological awareness involves just the ears.

• You can have phonological awareness without phonics but you cannot have phonics without phonological awareness.

The Pan London Autism Schools Research Forum was established by the Centre for Research into Autism Education at the Institute of Education (PLASN-R). They have established a literacy forum where literacy leaders from special schools can meet to exchange ideas about what constitutes “good practice” and has been investigating the efficacy of using the Government approved SSPs in special schools.

PLASN – R Literacy leaders have been comparing how they implement recommended phonics schemes and what adaptations have been made to meet students’ needs.

In order to do so they are comparing relative merits of different SSPs, book schemes, training, and ideas about adapting the programmes.

It is early days to decide if SSP implementation has had a major impact on reading progress in Special Schools or for students with ASCs who are being educated in mainstream schools. Observations by PLASN-R literacy leaders, since adopting SSPs, are showing improvement in reading and spelling in initial case studies. Indeed, some students ARE motivated by SSP based lessons but require many more and varied activities to embed each letter/sound. The teachers are beginning to feel confident that there is a positive impact for many students however there is uncertainty that the benefits outweigh time spent on this for older pre verbal students. Recently some SSPs have added support for SEND to their programmes but only allow for the teacher to make decisions around timings of teachings – there is no support for the particular barriers to learning phonics – for example poor phonological awareness.

SEND Schools need Research into a number of issues. These include how to overcome problems of phonological awareness, how to get maximum functional reading skills for pre verbal students, whether findings can be applied to those with greater language deficit. There is a need to increase the numbers in studies and ensure that the full range of the disability is covered.

Research is also needed into pacing lessons and activities for our students, and looking at the advice about barriers to learning reading and whether it is simply the case that children with ASDs need a slower programme of study with more opportunities for overlearning?

What Next?

The next step is to investigate the types of adaptions being used by teachers to break down barriers to reading, to quantity and qualify the successes of our teaching of reading, and to look at how to make them accessible to teachers in all schools. It is also important to emphasise here that Molly Halls’ conclusion, about rebalancing teaching of reading to include comprehension and encouragement of reading for pleasure, applies to pupils with SEND too.

Works Cited:

• Hall, M. (2023). “Phonics isn’t the only answer” – in Educate. (March/April 2023)

• Rose, J. (2006). The Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading. Department for Education and Skills

• DfES (1998). The National Literacy Strategy. Department for Education and Skills

• DfES (Jan 2022) The Reading Framework: Teaching the foundations of literacy, Department for Education and Skills

• Grandin, T. (2006) Thinking in Pictures, Bloomsbury Publishing

• Sermier D and others (2021). ‘Effects of a phonics-based intervention on the reading skills of students with intellectual disability’ Research in Developmental Disabilities: volume 111

• Arcuili J and Bailey B (2021). ‘The promise of comprehensive early reading instruction for children with autism and recommendations for future directions’ Language, Speech and Hearing Services in Schools: volume 52, issue 1, pages 225-238 78

• Dehaene S (2009). ‘Reading in the Brain’ London: Penguin Random House 79

• Trembath D and others (2015). ‘Accurate or Assumed: Visual Learning in Children with ASD’ Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders: volume 45, pages 3276-3287

• The National Literacy Trust (0/02/2023 20:10) What is Phonics https://literacytrust.org.uk/information/what-is-literacy/what-phonics/

• White, M.A. (2022). Adopting Appreciative Inquiry as a Positive Change Process in a Disadvantaged School. In: Transforming Teaching: Wellbeing and Professional Practice. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-4945-6_6

• Essential Letters and Sounds https://essentiallettersandsounds.org/

• Crae Centre for Research in Autism and Education https://crae.ioe.ac.uk/