At its annual conference in Manchester, the National Union of Teachers voted for the union to provide its members with alternative guidance to its members featuring a range of methods for teaching reading besides the Government's 'Letters and Sounds' approach.
The union also said that children are being put under 'intolerable' pressure by the current testing and assessment system and called for homework at primary school level to be scrapped. It also called for more play-based learning opportunities in the primary curriculum.
John Bangs, NUT head of education, said, 'We are concerned about a shift in the literacy strategy - the original strategy had phonics at the centre, but now the strategy at the first stages is almost exclusively phonics. We are concerned that there is no flexibility.'
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