More and more schools are looking at the reading books their children access, particularly those which help children to become early readers.
For so long, lots of schools have relied on a book-banding system and have often supplemented this with a miss-cue analysis approach. Running alongside this, often in reception and KS1, the school will have implemented an approach for the teaching of phonics but in too many schools the two worlds of reading books and phonics have not met. The grapheme phoneme correspondences taught in phonics have not correlated to reading material children have accessed. This has then often left children relying on clues from pictures and context and for some children this turns reading into an impossible task. The aim of decodable reading books is to stop our children meeting this impossible task and instead, gain a feeling of success.
In my opinion, knowledge of the progression through the teaching of grapheme phoneme correspondences is often not matched with the same knowledge about the progress through a collection of early reading books. If schools are working on implementing a fully decodable reading approach then they should consider the idea of progression. The set of decodable reading books schools choose should have a clear progression through them. Ideally, this is clearly laid out in a guidebook. With this knowledge and effective assessment, schools are then in a much better position to give the children the right book. By 'right book,' I mean a book which has tricky words and the GPCs in them that the child knows.
As well as success, a child with the right book will also have the opportunity to practise retrieving and blending GPCs. With sufficient practise and support, this process should speed up in a child's brain and allow them to read with more fluency. With this fluency, their working memory is freed up more to then consider prosody (story voice) and comprehension of what they have read. The GPC retrieval becomes automatic and a child is not laboured with thinking about the mechanics of reading.