Nearly every pupil in Year 1 has met the standard for the phonics screening check:

• 97% pupils reached the pass mark of 32+ out of 40 marks;
• 78% pupils achieved very highly with 37+ out of 40 marks.

We are delighted with these results for our pupils. This reflects the work of every adult in school who has worked with this group of pupils from Reception and Year 1. It is also thanks to all of the practice that parents do at home, giving children time to read and rehearse the letters and sounds that they know.

 

Individual pupils' results will be published in annual pupil progress reports on 12 July.

 

Phonics is very important to us. Learning to read by matching letters to sounds is a key milestone in a child's learning at primary school. Rightly, our ambition and expectations for our pupils is very high. We aim for our pupils to achieve high marks, not just meeting but smashing the threshold pass of 32 marks. 

 

The phonics screening check is a government test for children at the end of Year 1. Pupils take the test one-to-one, usually with their class teacher. Whilst children learn phonics to help them with both word reading and spelling, the Phonics Screening Check only tests their skills at word reading. This is sometimes called decoding. During the Phonics Screening Check, children are asked to read (decode) 40 words. Most of these words are real words but some are pseudo-words. Pseudo-words are included to ensure that children are using their decoding skills and not just relying on their memory of words they have read before. Some children may misread these pseudo-words based on their similarity to words in their existing vocabulary, so each pseudo-word is clearly identified with an image of an alien. This means most teachers and children, refer to pseudo-words as 'alien' words.

 

Our results mean that our pupils can access the whole curriculum, especially from Year 3 onwards. For the 4 pupils who are yet to pass, we will work intensively with them from now and through Year 2.