'The first step in a radical change to the way that every child is taught to read was announced yesterday by Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary. She set up an independent review of "the role of synthetic phonics" in teaching reading, which will lead to a fundamental re-writing of the national literacy strategy introduced by the Government seven years ago.

'The change, which will require children to be taught the sounds and letters of the alphabet within the first 16 weeks of school, will be introduced in September next year.Teachers will be told to stop encouraging children to memorise words by their shape and guess at them by their context, as the national literacy strategy recommends. Instead, they will return to the traditional method of teaching reading that was abandoned in the 1960s in favour of such approaches as "look and say", which required children to treat words as ideograms, and "real books", which expected them to learn reading by osmosis.'