Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to help ensure that the systematic synthetic phonics programmes validated by her Department are affordable for schools to purchase.

In April 2021, the Department published the revised core criteria for effective systematic synthetic phonics teaching programmes and launched a new process to validate complete systematic synthetic phonics teaching programmes.

Programmes on the validated list meet all of the Department’s criteria for an effective systematic phonics programme. There are currently 31 phonics programmes on the list, giving schools a wide choice of programmes to select from. The validated list includes programmes with a range of price points, including school-to-school and not-for-profit options. There is no statutory requirement for schools to choose one of the systematic synthetic phonics programmes on the validated list and Ofsted does not have a preferred programme or approach.

The Government is, via the English Hubs Programme and Accelerator Fund, making funding available to eligible schools to support the take up and successful implementation of a validated systematic synthetic phonics programme. On 9 October, the Department announced that it is investing £24 million through our English Hubs programme to build children’s literacy, with a focus on enabling more schools to develop expertise in the teaching of early reading and embed high-quality phonics.

Over 750 schools have so far graduated from the English Hubs Programme and the Accelerator Fund has supported over 450 schools, with more schools taking part this year. Details of the network of English Hubs are available here: http://www.englishhubs.org/.