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Of all the rules, formulae, instructions and well meaning guidance you received at school perhaps the most memorable phrase was ‘i before e except after c’.

The ‘i before e’ spelling rule has been around for decades and has been taught in classrooms the world over as a way to help learners deal with words containing ie sounds.

The rule has even spawned a children’s book entitled I Before E (Except After C) by Judy Parkinson.

Now the government, in the form of the National Strategies Body, has published a document entitled Support for Spelling which encourages teachers not to teach the rule as it claims it confuses children and is largely irrelevant to learning how to spell correctly.

The report says: ‘Thei before e except after c rule is not worth teaching. It applies only to words in which the ie or ei stands for a clear ee sound and unless this is known, words such as sufficient, veil and their look like exceptions.

‘There are so few words where the ei spelling for the ee sounds follows the letter c that it is easier to learn the specific words.’

The weighty document, it is 124 pages in total, goes on to list these as receive, ceiling, deceit and perceive.

The report is aimed at improving children’s attitude to spelling and encouraging teachers to look for novel ways of teaching a topic which many learners view as tiresome.

Teachers are given suggestions for whole class, group, individual and homework scenarios including games where learners attempt to make as many different forms as possible from a root word with suggested examples including comfort, kind and obey.

Other suggestions include looking at TV listing for compound words, exploring the change of meaning by adding a prefix or suffix to a word and getting children to research older texts to find less frequently used connectives.  

Among other recommendations are that children keep a spelling journal of their progress at school and that short lessons of around 15 minutes are more effective than traditionally longer skills sessions.