The so-called 'phonics wars' raged back in the days leading up to the publication of the 2006 Rose Review. The value of synthetic versus analytical phonics was one of the key educational debates of the first decade of this century. At that time, certain young readers that I worked with as part of my PhD, struggled to decode a simple C-V-C word (consonant-vowel-consonant) such as ‘cat’. Following the publication of the Rose Review, I felt it was appropriate that all children would be taught to recognise letter-to-sound correspondence, as well the smallest sounds of language using systematic approaches that were 'explicit' in the sense that no assumptions were made that the child would naturally 'bootstrap' oral language with print. At that time, it unacceptable to me that the phonemes of simple words such as ‘c-a-t’ were a new discovery for children at nine years of age.

Below the 'radar' of the mainstream media, music educators were digging deeply into their own entrenched positions around the teaching of musical notation. Unfortunately, these ideologies and their false narratives (such as 'sound before symbol') have, in my opinion limited children's access to the development of important musical skills and musical knowledge. Acquiring a basic skill such as decoding musical notes (like any other form of reading) unlocks participation in a multicultural global community of musicians. In the case of music, this community consists of performers, listeners, arrangers, publishers and composers, who engage across ever-expanding musical genres, including sound tracks for video games, film and television. Music educators’ ideologies have had a lasting influence and have limited widespread access to creative opportunities for far too long.

Most children start school with thousands of words and hundreds of melodies in their heads. Yet, in schools and music studios, one of the most limiting and perhaps most misunderstood ideologies stemming from high profile music educators, is that of ‘sound before symbol’. Music teachers have been told for decades that best practice involves singing and naming the shapes of tunes using doh, re, mi. Only when the tune has been learned ‘by ear’, are the visual symbols introduced. The idea that a sound must be taught before introducing a symbol to represent it, has a certain logic, but sound does not need to be taught in this way because sound is processed incredibly rapidly in the auditory system and was the first of our sensory processing systems to reach full maturity in utero.

Ofsted’s July 2022 publication supports moving away from the principle of 'sound before symbol' and recommends a stronger commitment to the teaching of musical notation as a part of a broad and balanced curriculum. In the teaching of reading, automated phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence is the key to the rapid development of fluency. Indeed this usually involves presenting the sound with the symbol using rapid response multi-sensory teaching. In the Rhythm for Reading programme, we teach sound with symbol correspondence using a rapid response to musical notation and therefore prioritise fluency as the main goal.

If this is of interest, and you would like to find out more - do reach out using the form in the contacts page. Our CPD is incredible value for money and will transform early reading and you also gain the additional benefit of teaching the children to read musical notation fluently in the very first session of the programme.

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