patch – a piece of cloth or other material used to mend or strengthen a torn or weak point
(OED, my emphasis)
Here’s a weak point in teacher knowledge that crops up frequently:
Q. “Can someone please explain why letter X in word X does this but letter X in word Y doesn’t?”
If you, or someone you work with, need to know more about why words are spelled the way they are, the solution can’t simply be an isolated rule, or a spelling patch. That’s an incredibly inefficient way to build knowledge. That’s discovery learning for the teaching profession.
You have to build up to it systematically and teach the moving parts that constitute the convention. If spelling is presented as a set of isolated, incidental rules/patterns/conventions/expectancies/generalisations that everyone has to somehow remember, it’s no wonder that teachers turn away. It’s no wonder that the cry of, “We got them reading but the spelling is terrible!” goes up the world over.
Just because teachers are crying out for patches doesn’t mean they should get them. Spelling patches give the concept of systematic spelling instruction a bad name. In that climate, the alternatives creep in. Myths like
‘English is crazy’
‘just memorise the whole word’
‘all letter sequences represent sound’
flourish. The result is slow or no forward progress in raising literacy levels.
On the broader subject of patches: A brief history of something you may already be familiar with:
When you consider the events on and around the year 2020, you start to see the problem with ‘patches’. Authors and vendors of resources for teachers that pushed whole language finally acknowledged that phonics must be a more visible component of those approaches. This was due to several factors, including the Covid pandemic which shone light on classroom practices and the real skills students had to otherwise oblivious parents.
The advent of easy video producing and sharing lent itself to faster and better communities of practice.
The work of journalists such as Emily Hanford, who reported on the paths leading to and from big business in literacy raised the momentum in promoting the use of phonics and structured literacy.
Many scrambled back to their drawing boards and invented sound-symbol activities, re-released their updated but minimally changed materials, sat back and said, ‘We’ve always done phonics’.
This phenomenon of sticking to the status quo, but paying lip-service to a different approach came to be known as the ‘phonics patch’. See Stephanie Stollar’s excellent critique of the phonics patch and misunderstandings that abound.
Well, I have some interesting (I won’t call it ‘bad’) news for you. There are other patches. One that I mentioned at the start of this article is the spelling patch. Do you have one?
Let’s think about your training and resources for spelling currently in use in your classroom/school/system. We’ll refer to those as your toolkit for spelling. Here’s how to audit it for spelling patches:
- Does your toolkit teach ‘sight words’/’high frequency words’/’heart words’ that children just have to sort of stare at and remember? That’s a spelling patch.
- Does your toolkit use the term ‘split spelling’? That’s a spelling patch.
- Does your toolkit engage children in word-sorts? That’s a spelling patch.
- Does your toolkit create spelling word lists for you to distribute for memorisation and test after a period of time? That’s a spelling patch.
- Does your toolkit talk about spelling being the reverse of something, i.e. speaking or reading? That’s a spelling patch. The word ‘encoding’ usually does a lot of heavy lifting here.
- Does your toolkit ask you to wait to ‘do’ morphology AFTER phonics? That’s a spelling patch.
How did you do?
Oh, and by the way, there are morphology, etymology and syntax patches too. I can help you audit those if you like.
If you’re being told that phonics in the first three years is just fine but beyond that the answers lie in ‘a little bit of morphology’, you’re being sold a patch. Don’t buy it. Get all the layers right from the start.
I’ve drawn a diagram to show you what the layers are:

I’ve developed programs for 20 years to show you how to incorporate them. I’ve recorded 300+ videos over the last decade to offer support on implementing them. That’s not a spelling patch.
If we are to change the literacy landscape for teachers and students, it starts with systematic teaching at scale. It starts with pressing the reset button on what teachers know about the following two fundamental concepts:
- How words are formed
- How people remember words
When teachers understand 1 & 2 above, they will need frameworks in order to deliver effective teaching that aligns with this knowledge. Not patches. Frameworks. Frameworks that have been developed, field-tested, and improved upon over many years. Those frameworks need to be delivered at scale, and woven into literacy teaching from the first day of school. Then, and only then, will we see the upward trend in literacy outcomes that we all say we want.