Table of Contents
Type: Full Masters Dissertation | Subject: Education | Level: Masters | Word Count: ~14,000 words
This model Full Masters Dissertation was produced by an Essays UK specialist as reference material for learning purposes only. For support in this field, see our Education dissertation writers.
Overview: This model MA Education dissertation investigates how primary school teachers in England perceive the mandated use of systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) for early reading instruction. Using an interpretivist design built on twelve semi-structured interviews and reflexive thematic analysis, it offers a complete, chapter-by-chapter structural reference for qualitative educational research, from abstract and literature review through methodology, findings, discussion and conclusion. All interview data are illustrative and were created for this example; the scholarly literature cited is real and referenced in Harvard (Cite Them Right) style.
Since the Rose Review of 2006, systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) has occupied a privileged and increasingly prescriptive position in the teaching of early reading in English primary schools. Although a substantial body of experimental and policy literature addresses the efficacy of phonics instruction, comparatively little qualitative research explores how the teachers charged with delivering SSP understand, interpret and respond to its mandated status. This dissertation addresses that gap by examining the perceptions of primary school teachers regarding SSP, with particular attention to how they reconcile statutory prescription with their own professional judgement.
The study adopts an interpretivist paradigm and a qualitative design. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve teachers of Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 classes across three local-authority-maintained primary schools in a single metropolitan area in the North of England. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006, 2022) reflexive thematic analysis. Four themes were generated: phonics as a secure foundation for early reading; the phonics screening check as a double-edged instrument of accountability; the negotiation of programme fidelity and professional judgement; and the recurring conviction that “phonics is not reading.”
The findings suggest that teachers hold a markedly ambivalent position. They broadly endorse the principle of structured, systematic decoding instruction and credit SSP with improving the decoding confidence of lower-attaining children, yet they express sustained unease about the narrowing effect of high-stakes accountability, the constraints of scripted programmes and the perceived marginalisation of comprehension, vocabulary and reading for pleasure. The dissertation argues that policy framings which treat SSP as a settled technical solution underestimate the interpretive and ethical work teachers undertake daily. It concludes that a more dialogic relationship between policy and practitioner expertise, together with a reconsideration of the phonics screening check, would better serve both the fidelity and the breadth that effective early reading demands. The study is modest in scale and context-bound, but it offers transferable insight for teacher educators, school leaders and policymakers, and a model structure for qualitative dissertations in education.
The teaching of early reading in England has, over the past two decades, become one of the most tightly regulated areas of the primary curriculum. Following the publication of Sir Jim Rose’s Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading (Rose, 2006), systematic synthetic phonics was adopted as the recommended method for teaching children to read words, and the “simple view of reading” (Gough and Tunmer, 1986) was embedded as the conceptual foundation of national policy. Successive revisions to the National Curriculum, the introduction of the phonics screening check in 2012, the publication and repeated updating of government guidance, and the requirement that schools adopt a validated SSP programme have together produced a policy environment in which phonics is not merely encouraged but, in effect, mandated (Department for Education, 2023).
This degree of prescription is unusual within an English education system that otherwise affords schools considerable latitude over pedagogy. It reflects a particular reading of the research evidence, in which synthetic phonics is held to be the most effective route to accurate and fluent word reading, especially for children who do not acquire print knowledge incidentally at home. The policy settlement has been reinforced by international evidence syntheses and by the influential argument that the so-called “reading wars” can be resolved in favour of structured, explicit decoding instruction (Castles, Rastle and Nation, 2018). Yet the same period has seen persistent and articulate dissent from academics who question both the strength of the evidence for synthetic phonics specifically and the wisdom of mandating a single method with such rigour (Wyse and Goswami, 2008; Davis, 2013; Clark, 2018; Wyse and Bradbury, 2022).
What is striking about this debate is how little of it attends to the perspectives of the teachers who deliver phonics instruction day after day. The literature is dominated by randomised and quasi-experimental studies of reading outcomes, by systematic reviews of those studies, and by policy analysis. Teachers appear in this literature largely as implementers whose “fidelity” to a validated programme is a variable to be measured, rather than as professionals whose interpretations, values and judgements shape what phonics teaching actually becomes in the classroom. This dissertation takes the opposite starting point. It treats teachers’ perceptions as worthy of study in their own right, on the assumption that how teachers understand a mandated practice materially affects how, and how well, they enact it.
This prescriptive settlement did not emerge in a vacuum, and a brief historical perspective helps to explain why it provokes such strong feeling. For much of the late twentieth century, early reading in England was taught through an eclectic mixture of approaches, in which phonics coexisted with whole-word recognition, the use of context and picture cues, and immersion in high-quality texts. The National Literacy Strategy, introduced in 1998, formalised a “searchlights” model in which phonic knowledge was one of four cueing systems that readers were taught to draw upon alongside grammatical knowledge, word recognition and contextual understanding. Rose’s (2006) review marked a decisive break with this pluralism: it rejected the searchlights model as giving insufficient priority to decoding, replaced it with the simple view of reading, and recommended that synthetic phonics be taught “first and fast” as the primary route into word reading. The current policy, with its validated-programme list and statutory screening check, is the institutional culmination of that break. Understanding teachers’ perceptions therefore means understanding how a profession, many of whose members trained under an earlier and more pluralistic orthodoxy, has accommodated a settlement that reversed much of what it once took for granted.
The timing of the present study also matters. Successive updates to the government’s reading guidance, the introduction and periodic revision of the list of validated SSP programmes, and the embedding of phonics within the inspection framework have, if anything, tightened prescription in recent years rather than loosening it (Department for Education, 2023). At the same time, concerns about a post-pandemic “reading gap” and about stagnating reading-for-pleasure have renewed public debate about what effective early reading instruction should encompass. The question of how teachers perceive and reconcile these pressures is thus not merely of academic interest but of immediate practical consequence for the children currently learning to read.
The problem this study addresses is twofold. First, there is an empirical gap: the lived, interpretive dimension of SSP policy enactment in English primary schools is under-researched relative to its political and pedagogical prominence. Second, there is a practical concern: if teachers experience tension between statutory prescription and their own professional judgement, that tension is likely to have consequences for the quality, consistency and sustainability of early reading instruction. A policy that assumes teachers are neutral conduits for a validated method may misjudge both the risks of superficial compliance and the opportunities afforded by genuine professional commitment. Understanding how teachers perceive SSP is therefore not a peripheral matter but central to the effectiveness of the policy itself.
The overarching aim of the study is to explore and interpret the perceptions of primary school teachers in England regarding the mandated use of systematic synthetic phonics in the teaching of early reading. In pursuit of this aim, the study pursues four objectives:
These objectives are operationalised through a single central question and three subsidiary questions:
Central question: How do primary school teachers in England perceive the mandated use of systematic synthetic phonics in the teaching of early reading?
The rationale for the study rests on the premise that educational policy is not simply implemented but enacted, translated and mediated by the professionals who carry it out (Wyse and Bradbury, 2022). A qualitative, interpretive study of teachers’ perceptions can illuminate the interpretive labour that the implementation-fidelity framing renders invisible. The significance of the study is accordingly threefold. For policymakers, it offers insight into how a flagship policy is experienced at the point of delivery, which bears directly on its effectiveness. For school leaders and teacher educators, it surfaces the dilemmas teachers face and suggests where support might most usefully be directed. For the wider research community, it contributes qualitative evidence to a field dominated by quantitative outcome studies, and it models a transparent approach to small-scale interpretive inquiry.
There is, in addition, a conceptual rationale. A persistent feature of the public discourse around phonics is its tendency towards polarisation, in which commentators are cast as either partisans of phonics or its opponents, and in which teachers’ views are frequently invoked but rarely examined. This framing obscures the possibility that teachers might hold positions that are neither straightforwardly for nor against, but that combine endorsement, critique and adaptation in ways that do not map onto the opposing camps of the “reading wars.” By attending closely to how teachers actually talk about SSP, the study is positioned to test whether the binary of the public debate survives contact with the nuanced reasoning of practitioners. If it does not, that in itself is a finding of consequence, for it suggests that the terms of the policy debate are poorly matched to the realities of practice.
In interpretive research the investigator is the primary instrument of data generation and analysis, and reflexivity about one’s position is therefore essential (Braun and Clarke, 2022). I approached this study as a qualified teacher with experience of Key Stage 1 and a prior commitment to the principle of structured, explicit teaching, tempered by scepticism about high-stakes testing in the early years. This dual stance carried both risks and resources. It risked predisposing me to hear criticism of the screening check sympathetically and to discount enthusiasm for SSP; it also gave me the insider knowledge to pose informed questions and to recognise the significance of participants’ accounts. Throughout the study I kept a reflexive journal to document my assumptions and reactions, and I return to questions of positionality in the methodology and conclusion.
The study is deliberately bounded. It concerns the perceptions of teachers, not the measurement of reading outcomes, and it makes no claim about the comparative efficacy of SSP relative to other methods. It is situated in English primary schools and is shaped by the specific English policy context; its findings are not presented as generalisable to other jurisdictions or to secondary settings. The sample is small and purposive, and the schools share a regional context. These delimitations are appropriate to the interpretive aims of the study but are revisited candidly in the discussion of limitations.
The dissertation proceeds as follows. Chapter Two reviews the literature on the simple view of reading, the evidence base for synthetic phonics, the English policy trajectory and the critical scholarship, culminating in a statement of the research gap. Chapter Three sets out the methodology, including the interpretivist paradigm, the interview method, the analytic approach and the ethical and quality considerations. Chapter Four presents the four themes generated through analysis, illustrated with participants’ accounts. Chapter Five discusses these findings in dialogue with the literature. Chapter Six concludes, drawing out implications, acknowledging limitations and suggesting directions for future research.
This chapter situates the study within the scholarly and policy literature on early reading. It is organised thematically rather than chronologically, although the English policy story has a strong temporal logic that is difficult to ignore. The review begins with the theoretical model that underpins current policy, the simple view of reading, before distinguishing synthetic from analytic phonics and surveying the evidence base. It then traces the English policy trajectory from the Rose Review to the current reading framework, before turning to the critical literature. The chapter closes by identifying the gap that this study addresses, namely the relative neglect of teachers’ own perceptions within a field preoccupied with outcomes and fidelity.
The dominant theoretical framework in contemporary English reading policy is the simple view of reading proposed by Gough and Tunmer (1986). In this model, reading comprehension is the product of two separable components: word recognition (decoding) and language comprehension. Expressed informally, a reader must be able both to translate print into speech and to understand the resulting language; a serious weakness in either component depresses overall comprehension. The model is “simple” not because reading is simple but because it reduces the determinants of reading to two broad factors, each of which can be developed and, in principle, assessed.
The appeal of the simple view for policy is considerable. It provides a clear rationale for teaching decoding explicitly and early, on the grounds that fluent word recognition is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for comprehension. It also offers a diagnostic logic: a child who comprehends poorly may have a decoding problem, a language problem, or both, and instruction can be targeted accordingly. Rose (2006) adopted the simple view explicitly, and subsequent guidance has retained it, with the two components often represented as the axes of a four-quadrant diagram used in teacher training.
Critics argue that the model’s simplicity is also its limitation. Reading development is not neatly decomposable into two independent streams; decoding and comprehension interact dynamically, vocabulary and background knowledge shape both, and the model says little about motivation, engagement or the social practices through which reading becomes meaningful (Wyse and Goswami, 2008). Ehri’s (2005) phase theory of word reading offers a more developmental account, describing how children move from pre-alphabetic through partial and full alphabetic to consolidated alphabetic phases as they internalise grapheme–phoneme correspondences and build an orthographic lexicon. Ehri’s work is frequently cited in support of systematic phonics, but it also complicates the simple view by foregrounding the gradual, cumulative nature of word learning. For the present study, the simple view matters less as a settled truth than as the conceptual scaffolding through which policy frames phonics, and therefore as part of the discourse teachers must navigate.
A more elaborated development of the language-comprehension strand is offered by Scarborough’s (2001) metaphor of the “reading rope,” which has become increasingly influential in teacher education. Scarborough represents skilled reading as the intertwining of two sets of strands. The word-recognition strands comprise phonological awareness, decoding and sight-word recognition, which become increasingly automatic with practice. The language-comprehension strands comprise background knowledge, vocabulary, language structures, verbal reasoning and literacy knowledge, which become increasingly strategic. In this image, phonics develops only a subset of the word-recognition strands; the many strands of language comprehension, which the simple view collapses into a single factor, demand sustained and separate cultivation. The reading rope is significant for the present study because it furnishes teachers with a vocabulary for articulating precisely the concern that recurs throughout the findings, namely that an intense focus on one set of strands risks neglecting the others. It also illustrates a broader point about the policy discourse: the models that frame phonics policy are themselves contested and evolving, and teachers encounter them as part of a professional culture that is more pluralistic than statutory guidance implies.
Phonics instruction teaches the relationships between graphemes (letters and letter combinations) and phonemes (sounds). It is useful to distinguish synthetic from analytic approaches. Synthetic phonics teaches children to convert graphemes into phonemes and then to blend, or synthesise, those phonemes into whole spoken words; it typically proceeds from the smallest units, introduced in a defined sequence, and is taught before children encounter extended text. Analytic phonics, by contrast, teaches children to analyse whole words into their constituent parts, often by analogy, and tends to introduce letter sounds in the context of reading. English policy has adopted the synthetic variant specifically, and the adjective “systematic” signals that the correspondences are taught in a planned, cumulative sequence rather than incidentally (Rose, 2006).
The distinction is consequential because much of the evidence cited in support of “phonics” concerns phonics in general, whereas policy mandates synthetic phonics in particular. Torgerson, Brooks and Hall’s (2006) systematic review, commissioned to inform the Rose Review, concluded that systematic phonics instruction, within the context of a broad literacy curriculum, benefits children’s reading accuracy; however, the review found insufficient evidence to establish the superiority of synthetic over analytic phonics, or to determine the effect of phonics on comprehension. This nuance, that the evidence supports systematic phonics but not uniquely the synthetic form, recurs throughout the critical literature and is central to understanding the contested nature of the policy.
The empirical case for synthetic phonics in England draws heavily on a small number of studies. The Clackmannanshire study (Johnston and Watson, 2005) is among the most frequently cited; it reported that children taught by synthetic phonics outperformed those taught by analytic methods on word reading and spelling, with effects apparently sustained over several years. The study was influential in shaping the Rose Review’s recommendations. It has, however, attracted sustained methodological criticism, including concerns about the comparability of the groups, the confounding of method with intensity and pace of instruction, and the lack of significant gains in reading comprehension (Wyse and Goswami, 2008). Wyse and Goswami’s (2008) analysis is notable for arguing that, at the time the synthetic phonics policy was adopted, the research evidence did not support the specific recommendation of synthetic over other systematic approaches, and that policy had outrun the evidence.
More recent syntheses complicate the picture further. Castles, Rastle and Nation (2018), writing from a cognitive-science perspective, argue that the weight of evidence supports systematic phonics instruction in the early stages of learning to read, while also emphasising that phonics is a beginning and not an end: fluent word recognition must give way to the development of comprehension, vocabulary and knowledge. Their influential framing of the “reading wars” as resolvable is often read as an endorsement of current policy, but their argument is more careful than such readings suggest, insisting that decoding instruction and the cultivation of meaning are complementary rather than competing priorities. The tension between these two emphases, structured decoding and the broader development of comprehension, animates much of the teacher experience this study examines.
Beyond individual studies, several large evidence syntheses are routinely invoked in the English debate, and it is worth noting both their findings and their qualifications. The United States National Reading Panel (2000) concluded that systematic phonics instruction produced significant benefits for word reading and spelling, with effects strongest for younger and at-risk readers; like Torgerson, Brooks and Hall (2006), however, it found more modest and less consistent effects on reading comprehension, and it did not establish the superiority of any single phonics variant. In England, the Education Endowment Foundation’s teaching-and-learning toolkit has consistently rated phonics as a well-evidenced and comparatively low-cost approach, typically associated with a few additional months’ progress, while cautioning that phonics is most effective as part of a balanced literacy programme and that its measured benefits concentrate on word-reading accuracy rather than on comprehension (Education Endowment Foundation, 2021). The convergence of these syntheses on the value of systematic phonics for decoding, alongside their shared reticence about comprehension and about the specific synthetic variant, is important: it indicates that the strongest evidential claims are also the narrowest, and that the broad, exclusive and comprehension-encompassing claims sometimes made on phonics’ behalf exceed what the syntheses support.
A sharper methodological challenge is mounted by Bowers (2020), who re-examines the meta-analytic evidence and argues that the case for systematic phonics over alternative approaches is weaker than commonly asserted, pointing to the scarcity of studies that directly compare systematic phonics with well-implemented meaning-based or mixed approaches, and to inconsistencies in how outcomes are measured. Bowers’ critique is itself contested, but its significance for the present study is less in its verdict than in what it reveals about the state of the field: that even the quantitative evidence base, often presented in policy discourse as settled, remains the subject of live scholarly disagreement. This matters because it bears on the legitimacy of mandating a single method so prescriptively. If the evidence genuinely underdetermines the choice between systematic phonics and other systematic approaches, then the degree of prescription in English policy rests on grounds that are partly political and institutional rather than purely evidential, a possibility that sharpens the significance of teachers’ own judgements.
The English policy story can be told as a progressive tightening of prescription. The Rose Review (2006) recommended synthetic phonics as the preferred method and endorsed the simple view of reading. The 2010 White Paper and subsequent reforms embedded phonics within the accountability architecture. In 2012 the phonics screening check was introduced for all Year 1 pupils, requiring children to decode a list of real words and pseudowords (non-words such as “voo” or “spron” designed to test decoding independent of word recognition) against a threshold mark. The 2014 National Curriculum specified phonics-centred expectations for early reading. More recently, government has required schools to adopt a validated SSP programme from an approved list, and the reading framework provides detailed non-statutory guidance on implementation (Department for Education, 2023).
The move towards validated programmes deserves particular note, because it represents the most recent and arguably the most far-reaching tightening of prescription. Where earlier policy recommended a method, current arrangements effectively require schools to select from an approved list of complete commercial or government-endorsed SSP programmes, each specifying not only the sequence of grapheme–phoneme correspondences but frequently the daily lesson structure, the resources, the terminology and, in some cases, the words the teacher is to say. The rationale is one of quality assurance and consistency: a validated programme, faithfully delivered, is held to guarantee a coherent, cumulative progression. The corollary, however, is a marked reduction in the scope for teachers to design, sequence or substantially adapt their own phonics teaching. This shift, from recommending a method to mandating a packaged programme, is central to the fidelity–judgement tension this study examines, because it changes the nature of the teacher’s task from pedagogical design to programme delivery.
Two features of this trajectory are salient for the present study. First, the accountability mechanisms, particularly the screening check and its reporting through performance data and inspection, create strong incentives that shape practice, a phenomenon familiar from the wider literature on high-stakes assessment. Second, the move towards validated, often scripted, programmes narrows the space for local pedagogical decision-making. Both features bear directly on the questions of accountability and professional judgement that frame this dissertation.
Because the phonics screening check is not merely a diagnostic instrument but a point of accountability, the study is also informed by the wider literature on high-stakes assessment and its effects on practice. A recurrent finding in that literature is that when an assessment carries significant consequences for schools or teachers, it tends to reshape the curriculum around what it measures, a phenomenon variously described as “teaching to the test,” curriculum narrowing, or, in its more general form, the principle that measures which become targets cease to be good measures. Where attainment in a narrow, tested domain is taken as a proxy for a broader educational good, the proxy is liable to displace the good it was meant to represent.
Ball’s (2003) influential analysis of “performativity” offers a theoretical account of how this occurs at the level of professional experience. Performativity, in Ball’s terms, is a mode of regulation that governs through measurement, comparison and display, inducing teachers to orient their work towards what is visible and auditable. Its effect is not only to redirect activity but to reshape professional identity and to generate what Ball calls “values schizophrenia,” a disjunction between what teachers believe to be educationally worthwhile and what the accountability regime rewards. This framework is directly pertinent to the phonics screening check: if teachers experience a tension between their professional commitment to broad, meaning-rich reading and the pressure to maximise measurable decoding scores, performativity theory predicts both the tension and the characteristic responses to it, from compliance and gaming to quiet subversion. The present study does not set out to test performativity theory, but it provides a conceptual lens through which teachers’ accounts of accountability can be interpreted.
It is important, however, not to read the accountability literature too deterministically. The same body of work recognises that assessment can also serve legitimate purposes, including the surfacing of under-served children and the maintenance of professional attention to areas that might otherwise be neglected. The analytical task is therefore not to condemn accountability as such but to understand how its benefits and costs are experienced and weighed by those subject to it, which is precisely what a study of teachers’ perceptions is positioned to illuminate.
A vigorous critical literature contests the policy settlement on several grounds. Davis (2013) mounts a philosophical and empirical critique, arguing that the mandating of synthetic phonics for all children, including those who are already reading, is unjustified; that the pseudoword element of the screening check may confuse able readers who seek meaning; and that the policy represents an overreach of central prescription into professional territory. Clark (2018) raises unresolved concerns about the validity and consequences of the screening check, including the risk that it narrows the early curriculum and mislabels children. Wyse and Bradbury (2022), in a comprehensive review, argue for “reading reconciliation” in place of reading wars, contending that robust evidence supports phonics as one component of a broad approach but does not justify the exclusivity and prescription of English policy; they emphasise the importance of teachers’ professional knowledge and of balanced, meaning-rich instruction.
These critical voices do not reject phonics. Rather, they question the specific form, exclusivity and accountability regime of English policy, and they foreground the professional and curricular costs of prescription. Collectively, they suggest that the apparent consensus around phonics conceals substantive disagreement about where phonics ends and the rest of reading begins, and about how much should be mandated centrally. This is precisely the terrain that teachers must negotiate, and it motivates the attention this study pays to their perceptions.
It is worth noting that the critical literature is itself heterogeneous and that the debate is frequently conducted with unusual rancour. Some critics, such as Davis (2013), object chiefly on philosophical and ethical grounds to the universal prescription of a single method; others, such as Clark (2018), concentrate on the technical validity and the unintended consequences of the screening check; still others, writing from within classroom practice, dispute specific claims about implementation and about the status of non-decodable “common exception” words. Proponents of synthetic phonics, for their part, often characterise criticism as a residue of discredited whole-language ideology, a framing that critics regard as a rhetorical device for foreclosing debate. The effect of this polarisation is that teachers are addressed from several directions at once, and are frequently invoked as evidence by both sides without being consulted. This rhetorical context is part of what the present study seeks to look beyond, by attending to how teachers themselves reason about matters that the public debate tends to reduce to slogans.
A further strand of literature, often marginal to the phonics debate but central to teachers’ professional concerns, addresses reading for pleasure and the affective and motivational dimensions of becoming a reader. International assessments of reading have repeatedly identified a gap between English pupils’ reading attainment, which is comparatively strong, and their reading enjoyment and engagement, which are comparatively weak; this “attainment–enjoyment gap” has been a recurring theme in commentary on successive survey cycles. The concern is that an early-reading regime optimised for measurable decoding may do little, or may even be counterproductive, for the disposition to read that underpins lifelong literacy.
Cremin and colleagues’ (2014) research on building communities of engaged readers is influential here. It argues that developing readers who choose to read, not merely readers who can, requires teachers who are themselves knowledgeable and enthusiastic about children’s literature, who create social reading environments, and who make space for choice, recommendation and response. This body of work does not oppose phonics, but it insists that decoding competence is a necessary rather than a sufficient condition for reading, and that the cultivation of reading for pleasure demands deliberate curricular attention that a decoding-focused, assessment-driven regime may crowd out. For the present study, this literature matters because it names an aspect of reading that teachers care about deeply and that the dominant policy instruments do not measure, and it therefore helps to explain the recurrent concern, documented in the findings, that “phonics is not reading.”
A smaller strand of literature theorises teachers not as implementers but as enactors of policy. In this view, developed in detail by Ball, Maguire and Braun (2012), policy is interpreted and translated within the specific material and cultural conditions of each school; teachers and leaders act as “policy actors” occupying various positions, and the same text is enacted differently across contexts according to resources, histories and professional cultures. Enactment theory draws attention to the interpretive and improvisational work teachers do to reconcile a mandated programme with the needs of particular children, the ethos of the school and their own professional commitments. This framing helps to explain why the same policy produces heterogeneous practice, and it supplies a conceptual rationale for studying perceptions. If teachers’ understandings mediate enactment, then those understandings are a legitimate and important object of inquiry.
Complementary to enactment theory is the ecological conception of teacher agency advanced by Priestley, Biesta and Robinson (2015), which understands agency not as a capacity residing within individuals but as something achieved in the interplay between personal resources, cultural and structural conditions, and orientations towards the future. On this view, whether teachers are able to exercise professional judgement within a prescriptive regime depends not only on their beliefs but on the structural latitude available to them, the professional discourses they can draw upon, and the aspirations they hold for their pupils. The ecological model is useful for the present study because it reframes the fidelity–judgement tension not as a matter of individual compliance or resistance but as a relation between teachers and the conditions in which they work. It thereby directs analytic attention to how those conditions, including the accountability regime and the design of validated programmes, enable or constrain the agency that effective enactment requires.
Several observations emerge from the review. First, the evidence base for synthetic phonics specifically is more contested than policy discourse acknowledges, with systematic phonics in general better supported than the synthetic variant in particular, and with the strongest claims concentrated on decoding rather than comprehension (Torgerson, Brooks and Hall, 2006; Wyse and Goswami, 2008; Bowers, 2020). Second, the accountability regime and the move to validated programmes have narrowed the space for professional judgement, generating potential tension between prescription and practice that performativity and agency theory help to conceptualise (Ball, 2003; Priestley, Biesta and Robinson, 2015). Third, a substantial professional literature on reading for pleasure identifies dimensions of reading that the dominant policy instruments neither measure nor reward (Cremin et al., 2014). Fourth, and most importantly for this study, the field is dominated by quantitative outcome research and policy analysis, with comparatively little qualitative work exploring how teachers themselves perceive and experience SSP. The present study addresses this gap by foregrounding teachers’ perceptions, thereby contributing an interpretive dimension that complements the existing evidence and informs both policy and practice.
This chapter sets out and justifies the methodological decisions that shaped the study. It begins with the philosophical assumptions that underpin the research, before explaining the qualitative design, the sampling strategy, the data generation method and the analytic approach. It then addresses the trustworthiness of the study and the ethical considerations that governed it, concluding with a reflexive account of the researcher’s role. The guiding principle throughout was coherence: that the research questions, which concern meaning and interpretation, should be matched by a paradigm, design and method capable of generating and analysing meaning.
The study is located within an interpretivist paradigm. Ontologically, it adopts a relativist position: it assumes that there is no single, teacher-independent reality of “what SSP is” waiting to be measured, but rather multiple, socially constructed understandings that are real in their consequences. Epistemologically, it is constructionist: knowledge of teachers’ perceptions is co-constructed in the interaction between participant and researcher, rather than extracted intact from informants. These assumptions follow directly from the research aim, which is to explore and interpret meaning rather than to measure variables or test hypotheses. A positivist design, however rigorous, could not answer questions about how teachers understand and experience a policy, because those understandings are not observable facts but interpretive constructions.
This paradigmatic choice has implications that run through the entire study. It licenses a flexible, iterative design; it positions the researcher as an active instrument rather than a neutral observer; and it requires that quality be judged by criteria appropriate to interpretive work, such as credibility and transferability, rather than by validity and reliability as conventionally understood (Lincoln and Guba, 1985).
A qualitative design was adopted, employing semi-structured interviews as the sole method of data generation. Qualitative interviewing is well suited to the study’s aims because it allows participants to articulate their perceptions in their own terms, affords the flexibility to pursue unanticipated lines of thought, and generates the rich, contextualised accounts that interpretive analysis requires. Alternative designs were considered and rejected. A survey could have reached more teachers but would have constrained responses to predetermined categories and sacrificed depth. Classroom observation could have documented practice but would not have accessed the perceptions and reasoning that are the study’s focus. A full ethnography would have offered greater depth but was beyond the scope and timescale of a master’s dissertation. The interview-based design represents a defensible balance of depth, feasibility and fit with the research questions.
Participants were recruited through purposive sampling, supplemented by an element of convenience arising from the researcher’s professional networks. The sampling criteria required that participants be qualified teachers currently responsible for teaching reading to pupils in Reception, Year 1 or Year 2, since these are the year groups in which SSP is most intensively delivered and in which the screening check falls. The aim was to secure a range of experience, year groups and school contexts rather than a statistically representative sample, consistent with the interpretive logic of seeking information-rich cases.
Twelve teachers across three local-authority-maintained primary schools in a single metropolitan area in the North of England agreed to participate. The schools varied in size and in the socio-economic profile of their intakes, which enriched the range of perspectives. Participants ranged from early-career teachers in their second year to experienced practitioners with more than twenty years’ service, and several held additional responsibilities such as English subject leadership or phonics coordination. All names used in this dissertation are pseudonyms, and identifying details have been altered or omitted. The sample size of twelve was judged appropriate for a master’s-level study seeking depth of interpretation rather than breadth of coverage, and the richness of the resulting data supported meaningful analysis. The table below summarises the participants.
| Pseudonym | Year Group Taught | Years of Experience | Additional Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amara | Reception | 4 | — |
| Ben | Year 1 | 2 | — |
| Claire | Year 1 | 11 | Phonics coordinator |
| Dev | Year 2 | 7 | — |
| Eleni | Reception | 15 | Early years lead |
| Farah | Year 2 | 3 | — |
| Grace | Year 1 | 22 | English subject leader |
| Harry | Reception | 6 | — |
| Isla | Year 2 | 9 | — |
| Joseph | Year 1 | 5 | — |
| Kirsten | Reception | 13 | Deputy head |
| Liam | Year 2 | 18 | — |
The adequacy of the sample size was judged not by the logic of statistical saturation but by the concept of “information power,” which holds that the number of participants required depends on the specificity of the aim, the quality of dialogue, and the richness of the data generated. Because the study’s aim was focused, the sample was composed of knowledgeable and articulate informants, and the interviews yielded detailed, reflective accounts, twelve participants provided ample material for a rich interpretive analysis at master’s level. Rather than claiming that no new information could possibly emerge from further interviews, the study claims more modestly that the data generated were sufficiently rich and patterned to support credible and well-evidenced themes. The deliberate inclusion of teachers across the early-years and Key Stage 1 range, across different schools, and across a wide span of experience further strengthened the dataset by ensuring that the analysis could attend to variation as well as commonality.
Data were generated through individual semi-structured interviews, each lasting between forty-five and sixty minutes. An interview guide was developed from the research questions and the literature, organised around four broad areas: participants’ understanding of the purpose and value of SSP; their experience of the phonics screening check and accountability; their negotiation of programme fidelity and professional judgement; and their views on how phonics relates to the wider goals of reading. The guide functioned as a flexible prompt rather than a script; questions were open-ended, and the sequence and wording were adapted to the flow of each conversation. Probes were used to invite elaboration and to pursue unanticipated but pertinent lines of thought.
Interviews were conducted in a quiet room at each participant’s school, at a time of their choosing, to minimise inconvenience and to situate the conversation in the professional context. With consent, each interview was audio-recorded and subsequently transcribed verbatim, including hesitations and non-lexical features where these seemed significant. Transcription was undertaken by the researcher, which, although time-consuming, deepened familiarity with the data and formed an early stage of analysis. Brief field notes recorded contextual observations and initial analytic impressions immediately after each interview.
Before the main phase of data generation, a pilot interview was conducted with a teacher who met the sampling criteria but who was not included in the final sample. The pilot served several purposes consistent with good interview practice: it tested the clarity and openness of the guide’s questions, checked the timing of the interview, and allowed the researcher to rehearse the use of probes and the management of silence. Two adjustments followed. First, an early question that had been framed evaluatively (“Do you think phonics works?”) was reworded more neutrally (“How would you describe the part phonics plays in your teaching of reading?”), because the original wording appeared to invite a defensive, position-taking response rather than a reflective account. Second, the guide was reordered so that questions about the screening check came after, rather than before, questions about the purpose and value of phonics, so that participants were not primed to frame the whole of phonics through the lens of assessment. The pilot thus functioned as a formative stage in the design rather than as a discarded trial, and it materially improved the quality of the subsequent interviews.
The interview guide itself was organised around four domains, each introduced by a broad opening question followed by optional probes. The domains concerned: the role and perceived value of phonics in the teaching of early reading; experiences of the phonics screening check and of accountability more broadly; the relationship between the adopted programme and the teacher’s own judgement; and the place of phonics within the wider purposes of reading, including comprehension and reading for pleasure. A closing question invited participants to add anything they felt the interview had not covered, which on several occasions elicited some of the most revealing material.
Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis as articulated by Braun and Clarke (2006, 2022). This approach was selected for its theoretical flexibility, its suitability for identifying patterns of meaning across a dataset, and its explicit acknowledgement of the researcher’s active role in generating, rather than merely discovering, themes. The analysis followed the six recursive phases described by Braun and Clarke, summarised below, though in practice the process moved back and forth between phases rather than proceeding in a strict linear sequence.
Analysis was conducted manually, using printed transcripts, coloured annotation and a coding table, in preference to software, given the manageable size of the dataset and the value of close engagement with the text. Consistent with the reflexive variant of thematic analysis, themes are understood as analytic constructions generated through the researcher’s active interpretation, not as categories lying dormant in the data awaiting discovery.
To make the analytic process transparent, the table below offers an illustrative extract from the coding table, showing how a selection of data-derived codes was clustered into the four themes reported in Chapter Four. The table is indicative rather than exhaustive; the full analysis generated a larger number of codes, some of which were discarded or merged during the reviewing phase.
| Illustrative Codes | Candidate Grouping | Final Theme |
|---|---|---|
| “phonics gives a map”; “step by step”; “not leaving it to chance”; “same solid start”; “lightbulb moment” | Structure and equity of systematic teaching | Theme One: Phonics as a Secure Foundation |
| “the check show”; “data goes to the head”; “teaching to the test”; “children’s anxiety”; “alien words” | Accountability pressure and the check | Theme Two: The Screening Check as a Double-Edged Sword |
| “same hymn sheet”; “what am I for?”; “colouring inside the lines”; “reassuring as a novice” | Consistency versus professional discretion | Theme Three: Negotiating Fidelity and Judgement |
| “phonics is not reading”; “decode but not understand”; “the books get squeezed”; “fluent but no comprehension” | Decoding versus meaning and pleasure | Theme Four: “Phonics Is Not Reading” |
Rather than appropriating positivist criteria, the study was evaluated against the quality criteria appropriate to interpretive research, drawing on Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) framework of credibility, transferability, dependability and confirmability. Credibility was supported through prolonged engagement with the data, the use of verbatim extracts to ground interpretations, and the keeping of an audit trail documenting analytic decisions. A form of member reflection was undertaken, in which summaries of emerging interpretations were shared with a subset of participants to check resonance, though this was treated as a further site of interpretation rather than as validation of a single truth. Transferability was addressed by providing sufficiently rich description of the context and participants to allow readers to judge the applicability of the findings to other settings. Dependability and confirmability were pursued through transparent documentation of the research process and reflexive attention to the researcher’s influence. These measures do not eliminate subjectivity, which interpretive research treats as a resource rather than a contaminant, but they render the researcher’s reasoning open to scrutiny.
The study was conducted in accordance with the British Educational Research Association’s Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research (BERA, 2018) and received ethical approval from the researcher’s university prior to data generation. Informed consent was secured through an information sheet and a consent form that explained the study’s purpose, the voluntary nature of participation, the right to withdraw without penalty, and the measures taken to protect confidentiality. No participant withdrew. Confidentiality was protected through pseudonymisation, the alteration or omission of identifying details, and the secure storage of recordings and transcripts in encrypted files accessible only to the researcher. Particular care was taken because participants discussed their professional practice in relation to a politically sensitive policy; they were assured that their individual schools and leaders would not be identifiable and that their candour would carry no professional risk. The potential for the researcher’s insider status to create subtle pressure to participate was mitigated by making clear that declining would have no consequences for any professional relationship.
Because the researcher is the primary instrument in interpretive research, reflexivity was treated as an ongoing discipline rather than a one-off declaration. A reflexive journal was maintained throughout, recording assumptions, emotional responses and decisions, and it was consulted during analysis to interrogate the influence of the researcher’s prior commitments, particularly a sympathy for structured teaching combined with scepticism about high-stakes early testing. At several points the journal flagged a temptation to foreground criticism of the screening check, prompting deliberate attention to accounts that complicated or contradicted that reading. Reflexivity in this study is therefore understood not as the removal of the researcher’s influence, which is neither possible nor desirable in this paradigm, but as the thoughtful and transparent acknowledgement of that influence.
Several methodological limitations should be acknowledged at the outset, and they are revisited in the conclusion. The sample is small and geographically concentrated, and participation was shaped partly by the researcher’s professional networks, which may have skewed the sample towards teachers willing to speak candidly or already disposed to reflect critically on policy. The study relies on self-report: it accesses what teachers say about their perceptions and practice, not their practice as observed, and the well-documented gap between espoused and enacted beliefs means the two may diverge. Interviews are, moreover, co-constructed social encounters in which participants may present themselves in particular ways, for example by emphasising their professional autonomy or their commitment to reading for pleasure in response to perceived social desirability. The researcher’s insider status may have amplified such effects, both positively, by building rapport and shared understanding, and negatively, by inclining participants to anticipate the interviewer’s sympathies. None of these limitations is fatal to an interpretive study whose aim is to understand meaning rather than to measure behaviour, but each is relevant to how the findings should be read, and each informed the cautious, transferability-oriented claims made in later chapters.
This chapter presents the four themes generated through reflexive thematic analysis of the interview data. The themes are: phonics as a secure foundation for early reading; the phonics screening check as a double-edged instrument of accountability; negotiating fidelity and professional judgement; and the conviction that “phonics is not reading.” The themes are presented separately for clarity, but they are interconnected, and the tensions within and between them constitute the chapter’s central finding: that teachers hold a genuinely ambivalent position, endorsing the principle of systematic decoding instruction while contesting the accountability regime and the prescriptive apparatus that accompany it. Illustrative extracts are presented throughout; all quotations are drawn from the illustrative dataset created for this model dissertation, and all names are pseudonyms.
The first and most consistent finding was that participants endorsed the underlying principle of systematic phonics. Across all twelve interviews, teachers described phonics as providing a secure, shared and teachable foundation for early reading, and several contrasted it favourably with the less structured approaches they recalled from earlier in their careers or their own schooling. For many, the chief virtue of SSP was that it made the teaching of reading explicit and systematic rather than dependent on incidental exposure.
Claire, a phonics coordinator with eleven years’ experience, articulated this clearly:
“Before, it felt like some children just caught reading and some didn’t, and we didn’t really know why or what to do about it. Phonics gives you a map. Every child gets taught the code, step by step, and you can see exactly where a child is and what comes next. That’s powerful, especially for the ones who’d otherwise slip through.”
The language of equity recurred. Several participants argued that systematic phonics was particularly valuable for children from homes with fewer print resources, on the grounds that it does not assume prior exposure and instead teaches the alphabetic code to all. Harry, a Reception teacher, framed this as a matter of fairness:
“The children who come in already knowing their letters, they’ll probably be fine whatever you do. It’s the others I think about. Phonics means I’m not leaving it to chance for them. Everyone gets the same solid start.”
Teachers also valued the confidence that early decoding success appeared to give children. Ben, an early-career teacher, described the “lightbulb moment” when a child first blended a word independently, and several participants linked early decoding fluency to broader self-belief. There was, in short, a strong and widely shared endorsement of the principle that the alphabetic code should be taught explicitly, systematically and to all children. This endorsement is important context for the more critical themes that follow: participants’ reservations were not, in the main, objections to phonics as such, but to the way it had been institutionalised.
A related strand within this theme concerned the value of a shared professional language and a common sequence across the school. Several participants, particularly those who had worked in settings before the current programme was adopted, contrasted the present consistency favourably with earlier fragmentation. Dev reflected on the difference it made to children who move between classes or who are taught by more than one adult:
“When I started, every teacher did their own thing with sounds. A child might learn one set of actions in one class and something completely different the next year. Now there’s one way, one order, one set of terms, and the children aren’t constantly relearning. For the children who find it hard, that consistency is everything.”
Analytically, it is notable that participants justified phonics predominantly in terms of equity and inclusion rather than in terms of test performance. The recurring figures in their accounts were the child from a home with few books, the child who would once have “slipped through,” and the child who needed the code made explicit because it would not be absorbed incidentally. This framing is significant because it suggests that the policy rationale most salient to teachers is not the one most visible in the accountability regime. Teachers valued phonics for reaching the disadvantaged child, yet, as the next theme shows, they experienced the accountability apparatus as pulling their attention towards a measurable threshold rather than towards the children the method was meant to serve.
Even within this positive theme, however, qualifications surfaced. Eleni, an experienced early years lead, welcomed systematic teaching but questioned the pace and uniformity expected:
“I believe in teaching the code properly, I really do. But the youngest children in Reception are barely four. The programme marches on at the same pace for all of them, and some just aren’t ready. Systematic shouldn’t have to mean one speed for everyone.”
This tension between endorsing systematic teaching and resisting its standardising tendencies foreshadows the third theme, and it illustrates the ambivalence that characterises the dataset as a whole.
If participants broadly endorsed phonics as a method, their accounts of the phonics screening check were markedly more conflicted. The check emerged as a powerful driver of practice, and teachers were divided, often within a single interview, about whether its influence was benign. Three sub-patterns can be distinguished: the check as a legitimate accountability tool, the check as a distorting pressure, and the specific problem of pseudowords.
A minority of participants defended the check as a useful discipline. Dev, a Year 2 teacher, acknowledged its diagnostic value:
“I don’t love tests for six-year-olds, but the check does tell you something. It catches children who’ve been coasting, and it means the school can’t just quietly let phonics slide. There’s accountability, and honestly some schools need that.”
More commonly, however, teachers described the check as exerting a distorting pressure on the curriculum and on their practice. Several used the language of “teaching to the test,” and some reported that preparation for the check displaced other valuable activity in the spring term. Grace, an English subject leader with long experience, was particularly critical:
“From about Easter it becomes the phonics check show. The data goes to the head, the head reports it, so of course there’s pressure. I’ve watched colleagues drilling the children on word lists when those children should be enjoying stories. We’re measuring one narrow thing and then letting that one thing drive everything.”
The emotional dimension of this pressure was notable. Teachers spoke of their own anxiety and, more troublingly to them, of children’s anxiety. Farah described a capable but cautious reader who “went to pieces” in a practice check, and worried that the experience taught the child that reading was a test to be passed rather than a pleasure to be had.
The pseudoword element attracted specific criticism. Several participants reported that their more able readers, who naturally read for meaning, were confused by being asked to decode non-words, and that some “corrected” pseudowords into real words, scoring as errors precisely because they were reading for sense. Isla captured the paradox:
“The irony is that the children who read best sometimes do worst on the alien words, because they’re looking for meaning, which is what we want them to do. So we end up teaching them to switch off their reading-for-meaning for the test, which feels completely backwards.”
A further sub-pattern concerned the way accountability shaped where effort was directed. Several participants described, with varying degrees of discomfort, a tendency for attention and intervention to concentrate on children judged to be close to the threshold mark, the “borderline” children whose results would most affect the school’s reported figure, sometimes at the expense of those far below it or those who had already passed. Claire, despite her broadly positive view of phonics, was candid about this:
“You’re not supposed to think like it, but you do start to notice the ones who are a few marks off, because those are the ones who could tip the percentage either way. The child who’s miles behind needs you more, really, but the system isn’t counting them in the same way. I don’t like that it works on me, but it does.”
This account is striking because it comes from an enthusiast for the method, and it illustrates how an accountability instrument can subtly redirect professional attention away from the very children, the furthest behind, that teachers in Theme One had identified as phonics’ chief beneficiaries. The threshold logic of the check, in other words, can work against the equity rationale that teachers most valued.
This finding resonates directly with Davis’s (2013) critique and with Clark’s (2018) concerns about the validity and consequences of the check, and the borderline-child pattern is a textbook instance of the curriculum-and-attention distortion that the high-stakes-assessment literature predicts (Ball, 2003). For the participants, the check was a double-edged sword: a lever that kept phonics on the agenda and surfaced struggling readers, but also a source of pressure that narrowed the curriculum, generated anxiety and, in the case of pseudowords, risked penalising the very reading behaviour teachers most wished to cultivate.
The third theme concerns the relationship between fidelity to a validated, often scripted, SSP programme and teachers’ exercise of professional judgement. All participants worked within an adopted programme, and all recognised the rationale for consistency, yet most described an ongoing negotiation between following the programme faithfully and adapting it to the children in front of them. This theme most directly addresses the study’s third research question, and it revealed the clearest tension in the dataset.
Teachers readily acknowledged the benefits of a consistent, whole-school programme. Kirsten, a deputy head, emphasised coherence:
“There’s a real strength in everyone singing from the same hymn sheet. The children know the routines, the actions, the order. Supply teachers can pick it up. When a child moves from Reception to Year 1 there’s no gap. Fidelity isn’t just a buzzword, it genuinely helps.”
Yet alongside this endorsement ran a persistent concern about the deprofessionalising effect of scripted delivery. Several experienced teachers chafed at the expectation that they follow a script closely, feeling that it treated their expertise as dispensable. Liam, with eighteen years’ experience, was pointed:
“I’ve been teaching children to read for the best part of twenty years. When I’m handed a script and told to read it more or less word for word, part of me thinks, what am I for? You could train anyone to read that out. The judgement, knowing when to slow down, when a child needs something different, that’s the job, and the script doesn’t want me to use it.”
Importantly, few teachers responded to this tension with outright non-compliance. Instead, they described a subtle, often private, adaptation, delivering the programme faithfully in its visible routines while quietly adjusting pace, adding explanation or providing extra support where they judged it necessary. Joseph described this as “colouring inside the lines, but pressing harder in some places.” This finding supports the view, drawn from policy-enactment theory, that teachers exercise agency even within prescriptive regimes, translating rather than simply transmitting policy.
The flashpoint for this adaptation was most often a particular child whose needs the programme’s pace did not accommodate. Several participants described the discomfort of being expected to move the whole class on when they knew that some children had not yet secured the previous step. Grace articulated the resulting double bind:
“The programme says this week we do this sound, so officially we do. But I’ve got children who still aren’t secure on last term’s sounds, and my professional judgement screams that moving them on is building on sand. So I teach the official lesson, and then I find the time, somehow, to go back and shore up the foundations. It’s two jobs, really, the one I’m told to do and the one I know I should do.”
Grace’s image of “two jobs” captures the hidden labour that fidelity, narrowly construed, conceals. The adaptation she describes is neither resistance nor non-compliance; it is additional, often invisible, work undertaken to reconcile the programme’s uniform pace with the uneven reality of children’s learning. That this work is invisible to the accountability system is precisely what makes it vulnerable, and it is a recurring source of the fatigue and frustration that surfaced across the more experienced participants’ accounts.
Early-career teachers offered a revealing counterpoint. Ben and Farah, both in their first years, found the structure of a scripted programme reassuring rather than constraining, giving them confidence and a clear model while they developed their own expertise. This suggests that the fidelity–judgement tension is experienced differently across the career span: what an experienced teacher may feel as deprofessionalisation, a novice may welcome as support. Any account of teachers’ perceptions of fidelity must therefore attend to career stage, a nuance to which the discussion returns.
The fourth theme captures a conviction expressed, in various forms, by nearly every participant: that phonics, however valuable, is a means to reading rather than reading itself, and that the current emphasis risks conflating the two. Teachers worried that the prominence of decoding, reinforced by the screening check, had crowded out attention to comprehension, vocabulary, and above all the cultivation of a love of reading.
The phrase that gives the theme its name was used almost verbatim by several participants. Amara, a Reception teacher, put it simply:
“Phonics is not reading. It’s how you crack the code so you can read, but if a child can decode a sentence and has no idea what it means, they’re not reading, not really. I worry we’ve started to act as though passing the check is the finish line, when it’s barely the start.”
Teachers were careful to position this not as an argument against phonics but as a plea for balance. They described reading as fundamentally about meaning, pleasure and connection, and expressed concern that the measurable, decodable element had come to dominate because it was measurable. Grace linked this explicitly to accountability:
“We measure decoding, so decoding gets the attention. Nobody checks whether a child fell in love with a book this year, so that quietly becomes optional. But ask any of us why we do this job and it’s the books, the stories, a child desperate to know what happens next. That’s reading, and it’s the bit that’s getting squeezed.”
Several participants raised the particular situation of children with English as an additional language and children with special educational needs. For some of these children, teachers argued, strong decoding could mask weak comprehension, precisely the pattern the simple view of reading would predict, yet the screening check registered only the decoding. Eleni worried that such children might be “passed along, sounding fluent, while nobody notices they don’t understand.”
Closely bound up with the concern for comprehension was a concern for reading for pleasure, which several participants treated as the ultimate purpose of their work and as the dimension most vulnerable to neglect. Liam connected the squeeze on reading for pleasure explicitly to the economy of time and measurement in the early years:
“There are only so many hours. Every minute on the check is a minute not spent reading a wonderful book together and talking about it. And nobody’s ever asked me, in twenty years, how many of my class choose to read for pleasure. If they measured that, I promise you it would get the attention the check gets now.”
Liam’s observation captures the logic that runs through this theme: that the measurable crowds out the meaningful not because teachers value it more but because the system attends to it. His remark that the unmeasured “quietly becomes optional” echoes across several interviews and gives the theme its critical edge. Teachers did not want less phonics; they wanted the breadth of reading, comprehension, vocabulary, and above all the disposition to read, to count for as much in practice as it did in their own professional values.
This theme connects directly to the scholarly literature’s insistence that phonics is a beginning and not an end (Castles, Rastle and Nation, 2018), to the research on building engaged, pleasure-driven readers (Cremin et al., 2014), and to the critical argument for a broad, meaning-rich approach to reading (Wyse and Bradbury, 2022). For the participants, the danger was not phonics itself but a system that, by measuring and rewarding decoding, risked allowing the narrow to eclipse the broad.
The four themes, together with their central organising concepts and the research questions to which they principally speak, are summarised in the table below.
| Theme | Central Organising Concept | Principal Research Question Addressed |
|---|---|---|
| One: Phonics as a Secure Foundation | Endorsement of systematic decoding as an equitable, explicit entitlement | Value and limitations of SSP |
| Two: The Screening Check as a Double-Edged Sword | Accountability as both safeguard and distortion | Experience of the screening check and accountability |
| Three: Negotiating Fidelity and Judgement | Quiet adaptation within visible compliance; career-stage variation | Reconciling programme fidelity with professional judgement |
| Four: “Phonics Is Not Reading” | Fear that the measurable (decoding) eclipses the meaningful (comprehension, pleasure) | Phonics in relation to the wider goals of reading |
Taken together, the four themes describe a profession that is neither resistant to phonics nor uncritical of its policy form. Teachers endorsed systematic decoding instruction as a secure and equitable foundation (Theme One); experienced the screening check as both a useful lever and a distorting pressure (Theme Two); negotiated, largely through quiet adaptation, the tension between programme fidelity and professional judgement (Theme Three); and insisted that phonics must serve, not supplant, the broader goals of reading (Theme Four). The connecting thread is ambivalence: a genuine commitment to the principle of structured decoding instruction coexisting with sustained unease about accountability, prescription and curricular narrowing. The following chapter interprets this ambivalence in dialogue with the literature.
This chapter interprets the findings in relation to the literature reviewed in Chapter Two and to the research questions. It is organised around the three subsidiary questions, concerning the value and limitations of SSP, the experience of accountability, and the negotiation of fidelity and judgement, before drawing the threads together in a synthesising discussion of teacher ambivalence and its implications. Throughout, the aim is not to adjudicate the “reading wars” but to understand what the findings reveal about how a mandated policy is perceived and enacted at the point of delivery.
The first subsidiary question asked what value and limitations teachers attribute to SSP. The finding that participants strongly endorsed the principle of systematic decoding instruction aligns with the mainstream evidence that systematic phonics benefits early word reading (Torgerson, Brooks and Hall, 2006; Castles, Rastle and Nation, 2018). Teachers’ emphasis on equity, on not “leaving it to chance” for children with less print exposure, echoes a central policy rationale and suggests that the core logic of SSP has been genuinely internalised rather than merely complied with. In this respect, the findings offer little support for a caricature of teachers as ideologically opposed to phonics.
However, the limitations teachers identified map closely onto the critical literature. The concern, voiced by Eleni and others, that a uniform pace ill-serves the youngest and least ready children reflects a tension between the “systematic” and the developmental that the critical scholarship has long noted. More significantly, teachers’ insistence that “phonics is not reading” directly parallels the argument, made even by proponents of phonics, that decoding is a beginning and not an end (Castles, Rastle and Nation, 2018), and the broader case for meaning-rich reading instruction (Wyse and Bradbury, 2022). The findings thus suggest that teachers’ evaluative stance is more sophisticated than the implementation-fidelity framing allows: they distinguish between the method (which they value), the policy form (which they question) and the ultimate goal (which they fear is being neglected). This tripartite distinction is, arguably, the study’s most important conceptual contribution to understanding teachers’ perceptions.
It is worth setting this alongside the contested state of the evidence base discussed in Chapter Two. The scholarly uncertainty about whether synthetic phonics is genuinely superior to other systematic approaches (Wyse and Goswami, 2008; Bowers, 2020), and the convergence of the major syntheses on decoding rather than comprehension (National Reading Panel, 2000; Torgerson, Brooks and Hall, 2006; Education Endowment Foundation, 2021), lend a certain legitimacy to teachers’ nuanced stance. Teachers were not, on the whole, aware of the detail of this literature, yet their lived judgements, that phonics reliably helps with decoding, that its benefits for comprehension are not automatic, and that its universal, scripted form may not suit every child, track the qualifications of the evidence more closely than the confident claims of policy discourse do. There is, in other words, a notable congruence between the careful conclusions of the research syntheses and the practical wisdom of experienced teachers, a congruence that the implementation-fidelity framing, with its assumption that teachers simply need to deliver a settled method faithfully, entirely overlooks.
The second subsidiary question concerned teachers’ experience of accountability, and particularly the phonics screening check. The findings here are strikingly consonant with the critical literature. Teachers’ reports of “teaching to the test,” curricular narrowing in the spring term, and both teacher and child anxiety instantiate, in the specific case of the screening check, the well-documented effects of high-stakes assessment on practice. The specific problem of pseudowords, that able readers seeking meaning may be penalised, corroborates Davis’s (2013) theoretical objection with experiential evidence and supports Clark’s (2018) concerns about the check’s validity and consequences.
What the findings add is an appreciation of the ambivalence even here. A minority of participants defended the check precisely because it imposed accountability on schools that might otherwise neglect phonics, and even its critics acknowledged that it surfaced struggling readers. This suggests that the check functions simultaneously as a safeguard and as a distortion, and that proposals for reform must reckon with both functions. A blunt call to abolish the check would discard its diagnostic and safeguarding value; an uncritical defence would ignore its documented costs. The findings point instead towards reform that preserves the surfacing of struggling readers while reducing the high-stakes pressure that drives narrowing, for example by moderating how results are reported and used rather than by the check’s existence alone. The study cannot adjudicate such policy questions, but it clarifies the considerations any adjudication must weigh.
A dimension that the outcome-focused literature rarely captures, but that featured prominently in participants’ accounts, is the affective cost of the check for both teachers and children. The anxiety that Farah described in a capable but cautious reader, and the more general worry that children might learn to construe reading as a test to be passed, point to a potential tension between the instrument and the disposition it is ultimately meant to serve. If an assessment intended to secure early reading inadvertently teaches some children that reading is a source of stress, its long-term effect on the motivation to read, which the reading-for-pleasure literature identifies as decisive (Cremin et al., 2014), may run counter to its short-term diagnostic benefit. This is not an argument that can be settled by the present data, but it is a consideration that the narrow metric of the check cannot register, and it exemplifies the broader pattern whereby the measurable and the meaningful come apart.
The third subsidiary question asked how teachers reconcile programme fidelity with professional judgement. The finding that teachers largely comply in visible routines while quietly adapting pace and support is well explained by policy-enactment theory, which holds that teachers interpret and translate policy rather than simply implementing it. The “colouring inside the lines, but pressing harder in some places” that Joseph described is a vivid instance of the agency that even prescriptive regimes cannot fully extinguish. This has an important implication: measures of “fidelity” that attend only to visible compliance may systematically misrepresent what is happening in classrooms, missing both the adaptive professional work that makes programmes effective and the quiet resistance that may undermine them.
The career-stage differentiation is a further significant finding. That early-career teachers experienced scripted programmes as supportive scaffolding, while experienced teachers often experienced them as deprofessionalising, suggests that the optimal degree of prescription may vary with expertise. This resonates with a developmental view of teacher learning, in which structure is valuable for novices but can become constraining as expertise grows. It implies that a one-size-fits-all expectation of fidelity may be both unnecessary for experienced teachers and reassuring for novices, and that a more differentiated approach, affording greater latitude as expertise develops, might better serve the profession. This nuance is largely absent from a policy discourse that treats fidelity as a uniform virtue.
A methodological implication also follows from Grace’s account of the “two jobs.” If experienced teachers routinely deliver the visible lesson while undertaking additional, unobserved work to meet children’s needs, then any evaluation of a programme that relies on observed adherence to its visible routines will capture only part of what determines its effectiveness. The adaptive labour that may be doing much of the educational work is, by design, invisible to fidelity checks. This has consequences both for research, which should be cautious about equating observed fidelity with quality of enactment, and for policy, which may be crediting programmes with outcomes that in fact depend on the professional judgement the same policy seeks to minimise. The point reinforces a central argument of this dissertation: that the implementation-fidelity framing does not merely undervalue teachers’ judgement but actively obscures its contribution, and in doing so misdescribes how early reading instruction actually works.
The findings on accountability and fidelity are illuminated by reading them together through the lens of performativity (Ball, 2003) and ecological agency (Priestley, Biesta and Robinson, 2015). The “borderline child” pattern reported in Theme Two is a near-paradigmatic instance of performativity: an audit measure, the threshold mark, reshapes professional attention away from the educationally neediest children and towards those whose results most affect the displayed figure. Claire’s discomfort, her acknowledgement that “it works on me” even though she disapproves, exemplifies the “values schizophrenia” that Ball describes, in which teachers act against their own professional values under the pull of measurement. The point is not that teachers are cynical but that a well-intentioned accountability instrument can produce effects that teachers themselves recognise as perverse, precisely because the measure has become a target.
At the same time, the quiet adaptation documented in Theme Three shows that performativity does not wholly determine practice. Teachers retain and exercise agency, “colouring inside the lines, but pressing harder in some places,” which is better understood through Priestley and colleagues’ ecological model than through a simple compliance–resistance binary. On that model, the agency teachers achieved depended on conditions: experienced teachers with secure professional identities and the discursive resources to articulate a broad vision of reading were able to adapt confidently, whereas the structural latitude available to all teachers was constrained by the programme’s scripting and the check’s pressure. This reading suggests that the policy architecture does not simply constrain agency uniformly; it distributes agency unevenly, affording more of it to some teachers than to others, and it is experienced differently across the career span. The implication, developed in the synthesis and conclusion, is that reforms aimed at improving enactment should attend less to exhorting fidelity and more to the structural conditions that enable principled professional judgement.
Drawing the discussion together, the central interpretive claim of this dissertation is that teachers occupy the position of the ambivalent professional. They are not the compliant implementers that the fidelity framing imagines, nor the resistant sceptics that a polarised reading of the “reading wars” might predict. Instead, they hold two commitments in tension: a genuine endorsement of systematic decoding instruction, and a sustained critique of the accountability regime, prescriptive apparatus and curricular narrowing that accompany it in England. This ambivalence is not confusion or inconsistency; it is a reasoned response to a policy that bundles a defensible pedagogical principle with a contestable institutional form.
This interpretation has implications for how the “reading wars” should be understood. The findings support Wyse and Bradbury’s (2022) call for “reading reconciliation” over continued conflict, but they locate the site of reconciliation not in a theoretical settlement between camps but in the daily, practical work of teachers who already combine structured decoding with a commitment to meaning. In a sense, the teachers in this study had already reconciled the “wars” in their own practice, valuing phonics while refusing to let it eclipse reading. The conflict they reported was less between phonics and meaning than between their professional judgement and a policy architecture that, by measuring and rewarding the narrow, pressed against the broad.
If this interpretation is sound, it suggests that the most productive policy response would be to trust and support the reconciliation teachers are already performing, rather than to intensify prescription. A more dialogic relationship between policy and practitioner expertise, in which teachers’ interpretive and ethical work is recognised rather than treated as a threat to fidelity, would be more likely to secure both the consistency that phonics requires and the breadth that reading demands. This is a modest and context-bound claim, but it follows directly from the ambivalence the findings disclose.
Consistent with the study’s reflexive stance, it is important to interrogate the possibility that the findings reflect the researcher’s own prior commitments. The sympathy for structured teaching combined with scepticism about high-stakes testing, declared in Chapters One and Three, maps uncomfortably well onto the pattern the analysis generated. Three considerations temper, without eliminating, this concern. First, the endorsement of phonics was so consistent and emphatic across participants, including those who knew nothing of the researcher’s views, that it is implausibly read as projection. Second, the reflexive journal’s repeated flagging of a temptation to foreground criticism prompted deliberate attention to disconfirming accounts, such as Dev’s and Kirsten’s defences of the check and fidelity, which are reported here. Third, the ambivalence itself, the holding of endorsement and critique together, is a more complex pattern than a simple projection of the researcher’s stance would predict. Nonetheless, in interpretive research the researcher’s influence is constitutive rather than removable, and these findings are offered as one defensible reading, transparently arrived at, rather than as the only possible account.
This dissertation set out to explore how primary school teachers in England perceive the mandated use of systematic synthetic phonics in the teaching of early reading. Motivated by the observation that a field dominated by outcome studies and policy analysis had paid little attention to teachers’ own perceptions, the study adopted an interpretivist paradigm and generated data through semi-structured interviews with twelve teachers across three schools, analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Four themes were generated: phonics as a secure foundation; the screening check as a double-edged sword; the negotiation of fidelity and professional judgement; and the conviction that phonics is not reading.
In answer to the central research question, teachers perceive SSP with considered ambivalence. They endorse the principle of systematic, explicit decoding instruction and credit it with providing an equitable foundation, especially for disadvantaged children (answering the first subsidiary question about value, while identifying limitations of pace, uniformity and curricular narrowing). They experience the phonics screening check as simultaneously a useful accountability lever and a distorting high-stakes pressure, with the pseudoword element a particular concern (answering the second subsidiary question). And they reconcile fidelity with judgement largely through quiet adaptation, complying in visible routines while adjusting pace and support, with the tension felt more acutely by experienced than by early-career teachers (answering the third subsidiary question). The study’s overarching contribution is the characterisation of the ambivalent professional, who endorses the method, questions the policy form, and fears for the ultimate goal.
The study makes a modest but genuine contribution. Empirically, it adds qualitative, teacher-centred evidence to a field dominated by quantitative outcome research, documenting how a flagship policy is perceived and enacted at the point of delivery. Conceptually, it offers the distinction between method, policy form and goal as a way of understanding teachers’ evaluative stance, and it advances the notion of the ambivalent professional. Practically, it suggests that fidelity measured only by visible compliance may mislead, that the optimal degree of prescription may vary with career stage, and that the reconciliation of the “reading wars” may be better understood as a practical achievement of teachers than as a theoretical settlement between camps.
A further contribution lies in bringing the theoretical resources of performativity (Ball, 2003) and ecological agency (Priestley, Biesta and Robinson, 2015) to bear on a domain, early-reading policy, where they are seldom applied, and in showing their explanatory purchase on concrete phenomena such as the “borderline child” effect and the career-stage differentiation of fidelity. By demonstrating that the careful, qualified conclusions of the research syntheses are mirrored in the practical judgements of experienced teachers, the study also offers a small corrective to a policy discourse that has tended to present phonics as a settled technical solution and teachers as its mere conduits. If the profession’s practical wisdom and the scholarship’s caution point in the same direction, that convergence is itself a finding worth taking seriously.
Several tentative implications follow, offered with due caution given the study’s scale. For policymakers, the findings suggest that intensifying prescription may be counterproductive, and that a more dialogic relationship recognising teachers’ interpretive and ethical work would better secure both consistency and breadth; they also invite reconsideration of how the screening check is reported and used, so as to preserve its diagnostic value while reducing its narrowing effect. For school leaders, the findings suggest attending to the quiet adaptation teachers already perform, differentiating expectations of fidelity by expertise, and protecting curricular space for comprehension and reading for pleasure. For teacher educators, the findings underline the importance of preparing teachers both to deliver structured phonics faithfully and to understand its place within the broader project of reading, so that they can exercise the judgement that effective enactment requires.
The study’s limitations are those appropriate to acknowledge in small-scale interpretive work. The sample of twelve teachers in three schools within one region is not representative, and the findings are not statistically generalisable; they are offered instead as transferable insights whose applicability readers must judge against their own contexts. The reliance on interviews means the study captures perceptions and reported practice rather than observed practice, and the two may diverge. The researcher’s insider status and prior commitments shaped data generation and analysis, a limitation mitigated but not eliminated by reflexivity. Finally, the study is bounded to the English policy context and to the early years in which phonics is most intensively taught, and it makes no claim beyond those boundaries. These limitations do not undermine the study’s interpretive contribution, but they circumscribe the claims that can legitimately be made from it.
Several avenues for future research follow. A larger, multi-region qualitative study, or a mixed-methods design combining interviews with classroom observation, could examine whether the ambivalence and the gap between reported and observed practice identified here hold more widely. Longitudinal research could explore how teachers’ perceptions evolve across the career span, testing the career-stage differentiation this study suggested. Comparative research across jurisdictions with differing phonics policies could illuminate how much of the ambivalence is intrinsic to phonics and how much is a product of the specifically English accountability regime. Finally, research centring children’s experiences of phonics and of the screening check would valuably complement the teacher-focused account offered here.
The teachers in this study were neither the compliant technicians of policy imagination nor the ideological opponents of the “reading wars.” They were thoughtful professionals who had, in the main, already made their peace with phonics as a method, while reserving a considered critique for the institutional form it has taken in England. Their ambivalence is, on this reading, a sign not of confusion but of professional seriousness: a refusal to let a defensible means become an inadequate end. If early reading policy is to serve children well, it would do well to listen to the reconciliation these teachers are already quietly performing, and to trust the judgement that makes it possible.
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