It's pretty much impossible to find a school in the UK that doesn't use phonics. One of my sons learned to read mostly using phonics, whereas the other one I think learned through a mixture of phonics and whole word recognition (not necessarily taught by the school - he just seemed to remember and recognise words and not really need phonics so much).

It was interesting seeing how our particular school did teach reading using phonics. They used something called a 'Thrass chart'. It had 120 boxes, each one containing a letter or combination of letters that could make a particular sound and an example of a word containing that combination and sound. So, importantly, some combinations of letters appeared more than once on the chart.

It looks rather complicated when you first looked it at but obviously they introduced it all very gradually. So if somebody was stuck on a word, it would be 'Let's find those letters on the Thrass chart and see what sounds they could make'. I can't find a good image of it online, but you can see a slightly blurred one on this page: https://www.thrass.co.uk/