Recent studies in Scotland and the US found that a synthetic phonics program, as a part of the reading curriculum, has a major and long lasting effect on children’s reading and spelling attainment. The skills taught were found to be increasing many years after the end of the program, as synthetic phonics provides students a self-teaching technique.

At the end of a 16 week training period, the students taught synthetic phonics were reading words around 7 months ahead of chronological age and their spelling was also 7 months ahead of chronological age. They also showed a significant advantage in ability to identifying phonemes in spoken words to students taught a method other than synthetic phonics.

As the students progressed through school, it was found that word reading and spelling that the gain in skill compared with chronological age had increased significantly over the years, even though the students had been in the synthetic phonics program for only one year. The likely reason for this is that in learning to recognise and blend sounds early on, children are given a procedure that they can apply for themselves whenever they meet an unfamiliar word.

In terms of detecting children needing learning support, most teachers commented that they were able to do this much earlier, and one said that for some children only a low level of support time was needed for them to catch up.

Resources:

"The Effects of Synthetic Phonics Teaching on Reading and Spelling Attainment"
National Literacy Trust