A new, statutory phonics screening check for all pupils will be introduced in Year 1 this academic year. The check will be administered during the week commencing 18 June.

In January 2012, schools will receive the Assessment and reporting arrangements (ARA) for the Year 1 phonics screening check. Headteachers and Year 1 teachers should familiarise themselves with the assessment arrangements set out in the document.

Purpose of the Year 1 phonics screening

The purpose of the Year 1 phonics screening check is to confirm whether individual pupils have learnt phonic decoding to an appropriate standard.

Pupils who have not reached this standard at the end of Year 1, should receive support from their school to ensure they can improve their phonic decoding skills. Pupils will then have the opportunity to retake the screening check.

Background

The Year 1 phonics screening check was piloted in approximately 300 schools in June 2011. The Department invited a representative sample of schools to take part in the pilot. Each school in the pilot administered a version of the phonics screening check to their pupils in Year 1. A summary of arrangements for the pilot is available in the associated resources below.

The pilot was independently evaluated by Sheffield Hallam University. The evaluation looked at the process of administering the screening check, in particular whether the assessment is manageable for schools and appropriate for Year 1 pupils. Scores were collected by the Department. The results from the pilot will be used to determine the reliability of the assessment and to design screening checks for future years.

The design of the screening check in the pilot

The screening check used in the pilot was a list of 40 words, which pupils read one-to-one with a teacher they knew. Half the words were real and the other half were non-words. Pupils who can read non-words should have the skills to decode any unfamiliar word. Non-words were included in the pilot to make sure the check assessed phonic decoding as intended. As non-words are new to all pupils, they do not favour pupils with a good vocabulary knowledge or large visual memory of words.

The screening check was divided into two sections:

Section 1

  • grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) usually introduced first to pupils learning to decode using phonics
  • simple word structures.

Section 2

  • GPCs usually introduced later and graphemes that correspond to more than one phoneme
  • more complex word structures, including two syllable words.

The details of different GPCs and words structures used in the pilot screening checks are shown in Annex A in the associated resources on this page.

The structure and content of the screening check may change for future years depending on feedback from teachers and pupils involved in the pilot.

Example screening check materials

Information is now available on the structure and content of the phonics screening check to be administered in June 2012. This is contained in sample materials, which are available to download.

The documents in the associated resources section of this page contain information about the screening check for schools and parents, along with evidence of the effectiveness of systematic synthetic phonics as the best way to teach young children to read.