Letters and Sounds was launched by the Department for Education and Skills in June 2007, following an independent review into the teaching of reading. It details a rigorous "high quality" phonics teaching programme which is aimed at rasining standards so that all children can read fluently by the age of seven (end of Key Stage 1).

The programme is intended to help children learn letters and sounds for reading and spelling, starting with developing their speaking and listening skills as a preparation for learning to read. When teachers judge that the child is ready, usually around age five, the phonics teaching programme is introduced, with children learning letter sounds, blending and segmenting while continuing to develop their speaking and listening abilities.

As part of the Letters and Sounds phonics teaching programme, children are taught letter sounds, rather than the names of the letters. Once they have learnt some basic sounds, they will learn graphemes such as sh, th, ee and oo.

As soon as they have learnt just a few letter sounds, they will start learning how to blend and sement the sounds. Blending sounds is a skill used in reading words. For example, seeing the word cat, the child will say the sounds c-a-t and blend them together to make the word cat. Segmenting is a skill used in spelling. In order to spell the word cat, it is necessary to segment the word into its constituent sounds; c-a-t.