Thanks for flagging up Mike's post, Susan, it's really good as always.
I also highly recommend Mike's very readable book, 'Phonics and the Resistance to Reading' - well worth a read!
On the same subject of schools cutting down their phonics teaching, this seems an appropriate place to provide a link to a graphic I've drawn up to illustrate pretty much the same issues as Mike has done in his latest post.
The Simple View of Schools' Phonics Provision:
http://www.phonicsinternational.com/Sim ... chools.pdf
I think it might be a good thing if all infant and primary school teachers could see a graphic such as this and could read Mike's post.
It would be interesting to see where teachers might place their phonics provision according to the graphic!
In teachers' defence, however, I have to say that they have been led to believe that 20 minutes of phonics daily is the expected norm.
I suggest that it is long overdue that we draw a line under the '20 minutes a day' notion to look at what phonics programme authors would suggest and the realities of providing for up to 30 different children in a typical infant class with all their different needs, different 'cultural capital' and their different learning capacity.