Parents’ Guide to the Phonics Screening Check

As primary-school children head into the last half term before the summer break, there are a couple of assessments – or rather – measurements of progress, on the horizon. These can feel daunting for children, though arguably more so for parents, who may feel that their children are being tested. So let’s take a moment to unpick the Phonics Screening Check – used in English schools - its purpose, value and what it really means for the children who take it.

Phonics is widely accepted as the key ingredient to equipping children with the tools they need to be able to read and write. It teaches five key skills, systematically and methodically:

• what the letter sounds are – these are called phonemes, the sound a letter makes rather than the name of the letter
• how to write the letter shapes – these are called graphemes
• how to blend individual sounds together to read whole words
• how to separate and identify the different sounds in words to write
• what the tricky (unblendable) words are

With those foundations in place, the idea is that most children will be able to successfully decode any word they comes across, regardless of length. Because it isn’t based on using illustrations to guess words or deciphering context (both of which are dependent on other literacy skills such as comprehension and vocabulary) children all start at the same point, master the skills together and progress together.

The Phonics Screening Check was never intended as a test, but a check – hence the name, and is carried out in a relaxed, informal way: one-to-one with a teacher and takes about five minutes. Children are shown 40 words – some real, some made-up – to check children’s competence with skills listed above. The purpose of the pseudo-words is to check children’s ability to sound out and blend without prior knowledge of the word and the risk of them recognising and reciting it. It ensures a fairer, more effective check – a level playing field.

The expected standard is to successfully decode 32 of the 40 words, but scoring under that threshold is not a ‘fail’ but a way of flagging areas of challenge that need further support. The purpose of the check is to provide schools with information on who needs more help as they progress into Year 2 and in what phonic area, hence the reason the ‘result’ is rarely relayed to parents.

It’s useful to understand the premise of phonics, and there are lots of creative ways to help children recognise their sounds and practise blending at home. Cutting out letters from magazines and newspapers, using focus sounds to organise treasure hunts, blending words while out and about can all work to freshen up phonics learning and give it an everyday relevance which is really valuable.

But, the most important thing you can do at home is enjoy books together. Because phonics learning is so technical – it can make reading feel quite mechanical, more about the means than the end. Reading aloud as often and with as varied a selection of material as possible, is a really useful way of reminding children of the end, that the purpose of phonics is being able to read for pleasure and interest.

Show your children that there are choices around books – that the content available is vast and worth exploring. Talk about what you’re reading, share opinions and thoughts and predictions. Talk about the characters and plot and pictures. Take your time, it’s more about the conversations than rattling through the pages, so make it enjoyable, cosy, relaxing and engaging.

Establishing positive reading memories is critical in developing your child’s reading habits as they grow up into independent readers. By all means, encourage them to read out the tricky words that they should know as you go, or sound out decodable words at their level – it can be a non-threatening, relaxed way to practise and make phonics learning feel relevant and meaningful. Ultimately though, testing children on their sounds and tricky words on its own is never going to develop a love of reading, but sitting together to read a book of their choice, on their terms and finding out what they like about it, just might. The phonic screening check marks progress at a moment in time, reading for meaning and for pleasure are skills honed over a lifetime.