The government is quite right to support the teaching of systematic synthetic phonics in schools, and the forthcoming matched funding initiative for KS1 Phonics materials will be a welcome boost for many schools who need to invest in phonics resources at this level. It will also be a bonanza for the publishers who have got their programmes selected for the catalogue of approved resources to be released by ESPO later this year. However, for many of the people who really count – the children being taught, and especially those who are struggling with reading and who are therefore most at risk from educational failure – this “solution” misses the mark completely: like the nightmare scenario of a top exam candidate, it’s the right answer to the wrong question.

For many of these children, a high percentage of whom are among the dyslexic 10% of the population, the question to ask is not “Why can’t they blend the phonemes?”, but “Why can’t they see them?”. The answer is because they suffer from Visual Stress, which causes the image of the printed text on white paper to blur or appear to move around on the page. According to research from Essex University, Visual Stress may be the result of “cortical hyperexcitablity”: specific cells in the Visual Cortex over-reacting to particular wavelengths of the colour spectrum which are specific for each individual. Filtering out the wavelengths causing the problem enables the brain to “see” the words clearly.