In the UK they claimed that girls did worse on one-off exams and so the one-off exams structure favoured boys. When course had more graded coursework, girls did better.

So that was the justification used to switching to a less impactful final exam.

No idea how true that is.

We were also told learning a phonetic alphabet was better for young children learning to read than using the old ABC system.

As far as I have heard, that turned out to be based on one person's fantasy and zero evidence and has actually had negative impact on children learning to read.