I have a 5 year old daughter who learnt to read through the phonics system. I was initially fairly skeptical but actually I think it's great. It's just explicitly teaching the pronunciation heuristics that we all learn implicitly.

They have a pretty good way of testing too - they show a list of 40 real words and made up words ("alien words") and the kids have to pronounce them. They only include words that closely follow the normal English pronunciation heuristics and are unambiguous. E.g. "glot" and "bime" would be ok but "sough" and "gow" would not.

> Critics say phonics training only helps children to do well in phonics tests – they learn how to pronounce words presented to them in a list rather than understand what they read – and does nothing to encourage a love of reading.

If this is the best criticism of it then.. that's pretty dumb. The entire point is to learn how to pronounce words. It isn't intended to teach them to understand words - they can already do that. And it isn't meant to instill a love of reading. That's basically innate.

I'm not too surprised it makes no difference to overall reading levels. It's not really that different to the previous method of teaching reading, and a very large component of reading ability is innate... But to say it's been a disaster is absolutely ridiculous.