Dr Jennifer Buckingham is Director of Strategy and Senior Research Fellow at MultiLit, a publisher of evidence-based reading programs and interventions, where she also heads the Five from Five project. In this episode, Jennifer talks to Greg Ashman about how her interest in literacy developed, the evidence for synthetic phonics and the Australian phonics check, modeled on the check used in the UK, that has been rolled out in South Australia and is about to be trialed in a third of primary schools in New South Wales. Along the way, Jennifer and Greg discuss why it is that teaching methods become lumbered with ideological baggage.