report was released in December 2017. It reports on the reading abilities of students aged 9 and 10 in 50 countries, and shows that England has risen to Joint 8th place in 2016; its best since 2001. This confirms "that our approach is working", according to Minister Nick Gibb. PIRLS 2016 has a summary of England's Language/Reading Curriculum in the Fourth Grade that shows the increased emphasis on "phonic knowledge and skills as the route to decode words until automatic decoding has become embedded and reading is fluent". In 2016 the London School of Economics published a paper that supports the teaching of synthetic phonics to disadvantaged children because it helps to close the literacy gap. Some critics continue to raise concerns about how Systematic Synthetic Phonics is being taught and assessed, and whether it puts too much emphasis on decoding at the expense of other factors such as vocabulary and "learning to read". In 2018, Ofsted, as part of its curriculum research has produced a YouTube video on Early Reading. It states "It is absolutely essential that every child master the phonic code as quickly as possible ... So, successful schools firstly teach phonics first, fast and furious." As of September, 2019, the Ofsted inspections will focus more on what is taught and how it is taught, and less on the test data. While there has been concern expressed about the phonics screening test at the end of year one, some report that phonics is especially valuable for poor readers and those without English as a first language. In January 2019 Ofsted published a report entitled Education inspection framework: overview of research that further supports systematic synthetic phonics together with phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. In January 2022, a report from University College London said that the current emphasis in English schools on synthetics phonics is not underpinned by the evidence. It says their analyses of the PISA data suggest that teaching reading in England has been less successful since the introduction of more emphasis on synthetic phonics, "although the correlations reported here require further research". In addition, statisticians from several universities question the validity of the PISA results. The report also says "although there remains no doubt that phonics teaching in general is one important component in the teaching of reading, the research certainly does not suggest the complete exclusion of whole language teaching". It recommends that