Johnny can read, if only he's given a chance The publication in America in 1955 of Rudolph Flesch's book Why Johnny Can't Read: And What You Can Do About It triggered the start of the Reading Wars, a battle of ideas about how children should be taught to read that continues to this day. Johnny was 12 and was being held back at school because his reading was so weak. Flesch attributed this to the fact that Johnny had been taught using a method known as "Look and Say," in which children repeat written words they see on the page until they recognise the whole word on sight. As they begin to recognise more and more words, they pick up the ability to read. This was regarded as easier than the time-honoured approach of teaching the sounds of the alphabet and how to blend these sounds into words, the method known as phonics. The "Look and Say" method spread to Britain in the Fifties. If you learnt to read using Janet and John books, as I did in 1965, this was predominantly the "Look and Say" method: "Look John look. Look Janet look. In the following decades, a mixture of methods - including "Look and Say," an element of phonics and so-called "Real Books" - added to the confusion in the way reading was taught. With the Literacy Strategy in the late 1990s came the Searchlights Model, in which children were encouraged to guess words using pictures and the context of the story. In 2005 Rhona Johnston and Joyce Watson, psychologists from Hull and St Andrews universities, published the results of a seven-year study of 300 primary school children from Clackmannanshire who had been taught to read using a systematic form of phonics known as "synthetic phonics." This blends or synthesises the sounds of the alphabet into words, for example C-A-T, cat. The study showed that teaching children to read using synthetic phonics was hugely successful. By the end of primary school these children had a reading age three-and-a-half years above their actual age. Following the Clackmannanshire study, the tide began to turn. The last government commissioned a review by the former chief schools inspector Sir Jim Rose, who concluded that "the systematic approach, which is generally understood as 'synthetic" phonics, offers the vast majority of young children the best and most direct route to becoming skilled readers and writers." Following the election, the Coalition was determined to push ahead with ensuring that phonics was at the heart of teaching children to read. It gave each school £3,000 to pay for training and new teaching materials, and a "Phonics Check" was introduced to ensure that by the end of their second year of primary school every child is able to read simple words such as "spoon," "train" and "dentist." Half of the 40 words in the Check are made-up words, to test that children have mastered the basic skill of decoding: words such as "elt" or "poil" or "thend." The first such check, which is administered by the pupils" own teachers, took place in June this year and the national results will be published later today. Last year we ran a pilot in 300 schools and published the overall results. This has helped schools focus on improvements in the teaching of phonics and, as a consequence, I expect today's results will show good progress. Those children who don't manage to read at least 32 out of the 40 words will be given extra help so they can take and pass the check next year. For years we have allowed too many children to slip through the net with their reading skills poorly developed. They rarely catch up and go on to fail at secondary school. All children, regardless of their intelligence or background, are capable of being taught to read. The fact that so many have struggled for so long is because of an ideological commitment to methods of teaching that have failed the most vulnerable. Challenging this orthodoxy has been controversial, but the evidence is overwhelming that the early teaching of reading through systematic synthetic phonics is the most effective approach. If Rudolph Flesch were alive today, I hope he would soon be able to write a new book, namely, Why Johnny Can Read, and declare an end to the Reading Wars. Nick Gibb is Conservative MP for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton and was minister for schools, 2010-12