Nursery World - EYFS Best Practice: All about… literacy

Effective literacy teaching involves much more than synthetic phonics, explains Annette Rawstrone

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I want to see Reception classes looking like fairy tales, with lots of reading opportunities and provocations to draw children in and stir their imaginations,’ says Pam Jarvis, a chartered psychologist specialising in human development at Leeds Trinity University. ‘The first thing is for children to want to pick up books and want to access the code of reading, rather than be presented with a bunch of synthetic phonics which don’t make sense.’

The rich learning environment for teaching children to read described by Dr Jarvis, and supported by many early years practitioners, is seen by some to be at odds with the Bold Beginnings report published by Ofsted in November. The report on Reception class teaching has caused concern that Ofsted is advocating a move away from a play-based curriculum to a more formal approach. It states the core purpose of Reception is the teaching of reading, including systematic synthetic phonics.

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