Children to read by six - Tories

Children to read by six - Tories is the headline on this morning's BBC news website. SIX? I was reading by age three and by six was on my way to completing the Secret Seven series as well as the Famous Five. Mind you I did have the unfair advantage of learning to read before my parents and teachers had heard of phonics, synthetic phonics ("psycholinguistics"), look and say, language experience method or context support method. Having read about these methods here, it would appear that I was taught to read using phonics, which is obviously why this was abandoned in favour of look and say so people stopped learning to read.