Chris Woodhead: How can teachers be made to adopt phonics?

Should the Secretary of State for Education force teachers to use synthetic phonics? Or, to be more realistic, should she try? Of course she shouldn't. In a sensibly organised world, schools would compete for the custom of parents who want their children to learn to read. Those that are successful would prosper; those that were not would fail and be closed down. Synthetic phonics would very rapidly become the norm.

But the world of state education isn't organised sensibly. The Secretary of State for Education tries to run 24,000 schools from Whitehall; a bloated bureaucracy consumes 40p in every pound that is spent on education; the reading "experts" continue to defend their discredited theories; and "competition" is, of course, a dirty word.

The national literacy strategy is a nice example of the seemingly inevitable failure of centralised initiatives. Back in 1996, I asked Jim Rose, the director of inspection at Ofsted, to organise a survey of the teaching of reading in 45 London primary schools. It confirmed our worst fears; large numbers of children were making little or no progress. Why? Because they were receiving little or no teaching. Sure, teachers sat listening to children read, but any kind of teaching, by which I mean formal instruction, was conspicuously absent.

Interviewed by inspectors, teachers said that they did not have the faintest idea how to teach reading. They did not know because they hadn't been taught.

That report led to the national literary strategy. I went to see the Secretary of State for Education, then Gillian Shephard, and she agreed that something had to be done. Work began on a programme that would give teachers the knowledge many did not have.

Immediately, predictably, the rows started. I remember a meeting with Ofsted colleagues responsible for the inspection of teacher training. None had any real experience of teaching children to read, and all were committed to an eclectic approach that played down the importance of phonics.

Labour won the 1997 election and sensibly decided to implement the National Literary Strategy. The problem was that Michael Barber, who was in charge of the Department for Education and Skills' newly formed Standards and Effectiveness Unit, did not understand that the phonics war had to be won if Government targets for literacy were ever to be met. It was not, and, as everyone knows, they weren't.

The programme was, therefore, flawed from the start. Over the years, various attempts have been made to rectify the problem. None has taken the thinking back to the drawing board and placed synthetic phonics at the heart of the initial teaching programme. And, of course, the roll-out of the programme led to a game of professional Chinese whispers in which the already limited focus on phonics was further weakened. The fact that progress has stalled should surprise no one.

Now, a month after telling us that there was no magic formula and that synthetic phonics was there at the heart of the national literary strategy anyway, Ruth Kelly has called for a review and commissioned Jim Rose to look at the evidence.

God knows what Jim must be thinking. Eight years ago, we reviewed the evidence and came to the conclusion that the first stages of the national literary strategy had to focus on synthetic phonics. Every study since has confirmed that conclusion. How many more children are we going to fail before the Secretary of State for Education admits that her pusillanimous predecessors made a very big mistake?

I suppose, to be charitable, that some sort of face-saving exercise is inevitable. I hope and I expect that Jim Rose will come up with recommendations that cannot be ignored. The question then is: what is Kelly going to do when they are ignored? For the one certainty is that, in a good number of schools, they will be. The levers aren't there; the chain of command is too tenuous. Who is going to check on what is happening? If compliance is what is wanted, how is that compliance going to be achieved?

Kelly does not know. Neither does anyone else. If parents had a real say, we would see real change. They don't, and we won't.

The writer is a former chief inspector of schools

education@independent.co.uk