So important to share this context and the facts around it. Phonics worked for me. I struggled with dyslexia and I’m thankful my mom advocated for me at every turn. Many educators tried to dismiss me as “stupid” and told my mom not to waste her time. I earned my PhD so 🙌🏾🤩👏🏾👑
Ahem. In defense of students, parents, and teachers who have seen that phonics, while broadly successful, and easily "scaleable", does not work for everyone, however well executed.
Maple Hayes Hall targets a specific demographic; "...students who have struggled with traditional phonics..." (from their website), and states, "Our curriculum teaches literacy through morphological structures that suit visual and spatial learners...", (also on their website). They are not trying to replace national policy, and so do not need to be "scaleable".
If most of their students do have EHCPs, then costs are covered by local authorities, as they would be for other specialist schools, which means that this is not just accessible to those who can personally afford the fees.
The comparison of results to Michaela is moot, as Michaela is not a Dyslexia specialist school; I would be interested to see some comparisons with other Dyslexia specialist schools from around the country.
Blaming all failure of phonics on poor execution is disingenuous, and demonstrates a willingness to ignore the needs of the subset of students - those who receive well-executed phonics and still fail to decode. They also need a path to literacy.
Dr. Brown does not dismiss systematic phonics; he is providing an alternative decoding route for those who have tried and failed with phonics. It would be a waste of classroom time and money to try phonics again, rather than introducing the alternative route that has had demonstrable success.
Your argument misrepresents a specialist intervention as a threat to systematic phonics being used as a reading route. Literacy equity would be that all students are provided with whatever it is they need to succeed in their literacy, whether that be phonics, morphology or a combination of those. While scalability is vital for state-ran education to function, that there are those who are enthusiastically gathering in those who fall through the gaps is surely to be applauded.
The fact that this morphological approach is being taken in a fee-paying school has no correlation whatever with the cost of teaching in this way. A similar approach is being taken in classrooms around the globe with great success. It's often called Structured Word Inquiry, and has recently been given the nod from the likes of Shanahan and Ehri. However, it's a mistake to think that such an approach eschews phonics/phonology. It's just that the phonology is explained in the context of the morphology, which is essential for those who struggle with phonological processing but also very useful for all readers/spellers, as it fosters a deeper understanding of orthography. Teaching a word like "action" via syllables (perhaps ac + tion) is far less potent than explaining the fact that it's composed of act + ion. One approach does not take any more time than the other, or cost any more. The only cost involved is the cost of learning something the wrong way.
Thank you — you’ve made several important and broadly accurate points. It’s absolutely true that Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) integrates morphology with phonology and that advocates such as Shanahan and Ehri have acknowledged its potential. I’d also agree that understanding the morphemic structure of words like act + ion gives students more durable insights into spelling and meaning than rote syllabification.
However, I think the argument slightly misses the mark in two ways.
First, while you are right that SWI does not eschew phonics altogether, the key difference lies in instructional sequence and cognitive load. Systematic synthetic phonics begins by establishing solid grapheme-phoneme correspondences before layering on morphology. SWI often seeks to integrate morphology at much earlier stages. For highly literate adults or for advanced readers, this integration seems effortless. For novice readers — particularly those with weak oral vocabularies or limited background knowledge — frontloading morphology before decoding mastery may overwhelm working memory and obscure the very correspondences they need to become automatic.
Second, while in principle SWI may not demand greater financial resources, in practice it often does. The point about Maple Hayes is not that its fees reflect the intrinsic cost of SWI materials or lesson delivery, but rather the highly skilled, small-group or one-to-one instruction typically required to implement such nuanced teaching effectively for struggling readers. The training, expertise, diagnostic skill, and instructional time needed to deliver SWI with high fidelity are non-trivial. In publicly funded, large-scale systems where teacher expertise and instructional time are finite, systematic phonics has the advantage of being easier to scale consistently, particularly for disadvantaged pupils.
In short, SWI may well complement SSP beautifully — but it rarely substitutes for the careful, structured decoding work that lays the necessary foundation for most early readers. The issue is not whether SWI can work, but whether it can work at scale for the children who most depend on public education to give them access to literacy.
So important to share this context and the facts around it. Phonics worked for me. I struggled with dyslexia and I’m thankful my mom advocated for me at every turn. Many educators tried to dismiss me as “stupid” and told my mom not to waste her time. I earned my PhD so 🙌🏾🤩👏🏾👑
Ahem. In defense of students, parents, and teachers who have seen that phonics, while broadly successful, and easily "scaleable", does not work for everyone, however well executed.
Maple Hayes Hall targets a specific demographic; "...students who have struggled with traditional phonics..." (from their website), and states, "Our curriculum teaches literacy through morphological structures that suit visual and spatial learners...", (also on their website). They are not trying to replace national policy, and so do not need to be "scaleable".
If most of their students do have EHCPs, then costs are covered by local authorities, as they would be for other specialist schools, which means that this is not just accessible to those who can personally afford the fees.
The comparison of results to Michaela is moot, as Michaela is not a Dyslexia specialist school; I would be interested to see some comparisons with other Dyslexia specialist schools from around the country.
Blaming all failure of phonics on poor execution is disingenuous, and demonstrates a willingness to ignore the needs of the subset of students - those who receive well-executed phonics and still fail to decode. They also need a path to literacy.
Dr. Brown does not dismiss systematic phonics; he is providing an alternative decoding route for those who have tried and failed with phonics. It would be a waste of classroom time and money to try phonics again, rather than introducing the alternative route that has had demonstrable success.
Your argument misrepresents a specialist intervention as a threat to systematic phonics being used as a reading route. Literacy equity would be that all students are provided with whatever it is they need to succeed in their literacy, whether that be phonics, morphology or a combination of those. While scalability is vital for state-ran education to function, that there are those who are enthusiastically gathering in those who fall through the gaps is surely to be applauded.
The fact that this morphological approach is being taken in a fee-paying school has no correlation whatever with the cost of teaching in this way. A similar approach is being taken in classrooms around the globe with great success. It's often called Structured Word Inquiry, and has recently been given the nod from the likes of Shanahan and Ehri. However, it's a mistake to think that such an approach eschews phonics/phonology. It's just that the phonology is explained in the context of the morphology, which is essential for those who struggle with phonological processing but also very useful for all readers/spellers, as it fosters a deeper understanding of orthography. Teaching a word like "action" via syllables (perhaps ac + tion) is far less potent than explaining the fact that it's composed of act + ion. One approach does not take any more time than the other, or cost any more. The only cost involved is the cost of learning something the wrong way.
Thank you — you’ve made several important and broadly accurate points. It’s absolutely true that Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) integrates morphology with phonology and that advocates such as Shanahan and Ehri have acknowledged its potential. I’d also agree that understanding the morphemic structure of words like act + ion gives students more durable insights into spelling and meaning than rote syllabification.
However, I think the argument slightly misses the mark in two ways.
First, while you are right that SWI does not eschew phonics altogether, the key difference lies in instructional sequence and cognitive load. Systematic synthetic phonics begins by establishing solid grapheme-phoneme correspondences before layering on morphology. SWI often seeks to integrate morphology at much earlier stages. For highly literate adults or for advanced readers, this integration seems effortless. For novice readers — particularly those with weak oral vocabularies or limited background knowledge — frontloading morphology before decoding mastery may overwhelm working memory and obscure the very correspondences they need to become automatic.
Second, while in principle SWI may not demand greater financial resources, in practice it often does. The point about Maple Hayes is not that its fees reflect the intrinsic cost of SWI materials or lesson delivery, but rather the highly skilled, small-group or one-to-one instruction typically required to implement such nuanced teaching effectively for struggling readers. The training, expertise, diagnostic skill, and instructional time needed to deliver SWI with high fidelity are non-trivial. In publicly funded, large-scale systems where teacher expertise and instructional time are finite, systematic phonics has the advantage of being easier to scale consistently, particularly for disadvantaged pupils.
In short, SWI may well complement SSP beautifully — but it rarely substitutes for the careful, structured decoding work that lays the necessary foundation for most early readers. The issue is not whether SWI can work, but whether it can work at scale for the children who most depend on public education to give them access to literacy.