Chloe McMeekin frowns in concentration as she reads aloud from a book given to her by her teacher. She starts slowly but soon gains confidence and reads the opening passage without faltering. Her teacher smiles proudly. The book — Daughter of the Sea by the award-winning children’s author Berlie Doherty — is aimed at teenagers studying English at secondary school. Chloe is 11.

Chloe and her classmates at Abercromby primary school in Tullibody, Clackmannanshire, are the bashful stars of a reading revolution which began seven years ago in central Scotland. The 304 pupils who started at 19 primary schools across the region in August 1998 were the first in Britain to be taught to read and write using a system which is being hailed as the key to improving literacy.

The system is called synthetic phonics. It is an imaginative way of introducing children to letters, words and sentences using sounds and has proved so popular with teachers, academics and politicians that it has already been adopted by more than 300 schools in England and Scotland. Now there is growing pressure for the scheme to be rolled out nationwide.

In a yellow-painted dining hall, older pupils from Abercromby school share their experiences of being part of an educational experiment. Gavin Brown, a primary six pupil aged 10, says: “The teachers made it exciting. We were taught to remember the way words were made by saying things like, ‘when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking’ and we learnt about ‘shy I and tough y’ which means that a word like busy is spelled busy and not busi.”

At the other end of the school corridor, a class of five-year-olds grapple with vowel sounds. “From day one the children are learning sounds. By the end of the first week they know six-letter sounds, recognise letters and can make words,” says Sheena Mailer, the deputy head teacher at Abercromby.

The success of the scheme has generated huge interest. Earlier this year, following the publication of figures which showed that almost a quarter of 11-year-olds in England leave primary school unable to read or write, Nick Gibb, the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, demanded to know why synthetic phonics was not at the core of the government’s national literacy strategy.

In a letter to Ruth Kelly, the education secretary, he asked if the government would now review its literacy strategy in light of irrefutable evidence uncovered by the Clackmannanshire study. Gibb also wrote to every director of education in England, enclosing a summary of the Clackmannanshire study, and asking them what action they intended to take.

The Scottish executive heaped praise upon the study’s results, with education minister Peter Peacock calling on schools north of the border to consider introducing synthetic phonics to all primary one pupils.

The idea behind synthetic phonics is simple. Children get to know letters through sounds. Instead of being presented with the jumble of letters on a page and using visual clues or guesswork to determine what they are, youngsters are taught the links between sounds and letters.

They are taught to synthesize, or blend, the sounds of letters to form simple words. The same strategy is used to build words into sentences. Within 16 weeks, after studying letter sounds for 20 minutes at a time, children have mastered the “decoding” aspect of reading. Compared to conventional methods, it is intensive and fast-paced. Using traditional teaching — look and say, where children are taught one letter at a time — the same skills can take up to two years to fully develop.

Once they are familiar with the 43 letter sounds and combinations which make up basic reading skills, children can move onto understanding the meaning of the words they see. They have, in the words of the scheme’s supporters, become code breakers.

“It accelerates word recognition and leads to good reading comprehension skills. They move onto sight-word reading which is underpinned by sound recognition,” says Rhona Johnston, a professor of psychology at Hull University, who worked with Joyce Watson, a psychologist at St Andrews University, to develop the synthetic phonics programme.

Unlike conventional methods, synthetic phonics eliminates the possibility of children guessing words or relying on memory. It also offers a multi-sensory approach to teaching with coloured magnetic letters moving around the blackboard, video presentations, rhymes and songs.

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