It is essential not to use other strategies to work out words (including guessing words, deducing meaning from pictures, grammar, context clues or whole word recognition). Year 1 class teachers will hold a meeting for parents in the Spring term to ensure that parents feel confident in supporting their children during the phonics screening check. This progression is based on the DfE’s publication ‘Letters and Sounds: Improving Rates of Progress 2021’.

You can use these with your child at home to help them with their pronunciation of phonemes and recognition of corresponding graphemes. We use the Rapid Catch-up assessments to identify the gaps in their phonic knowledge and teach to these using the Rapid Catch-up resources – at pace. As reading and spelling are reversible processes, and because we teach spelling alongside reading, children will learn to spell words with these suffixes too. We timetable daily phonics lessons for any child in Year 2 and above who is not fully fluent at reading or has not passed the Phonics screening check.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. All children no matter their attainment level are included in the lessons and we use ‘Keep Up’ interventions to make sure no child falls behind.

If your child is reading it with little help, please don’t worry that it’s too easy – your child needs to develop fluency and confidence in reading.

I too don’t really like the uncertainty of this being a new scheme not directly comparable with the old book bands as it’s harder to choose what books to read together at home of a similar level. Small group reading provides children with an opportunity to practice and apply what they have learnt in phonics.

We understand that all children have different abilities, and some pupils may struggle with reading and need more specialised texts. This system judges the level of difficulties based on how many letters per word, how many words per page, how many lines per page, how many pages per book not on reading progression. Children leave Key Stage 2 as competent readers with a shared love of stories and a secure understanding of what they have read. Parents should use voices, expression, discuss unfamiliar vocabulary, talk about the pictures, and predict what might happen next. The purpose of the screening check is to confirm that all children have learned phonic decoding to an age-appropriate standard.To meet the demands of the new programme we have invested heavily as a school in the matching Harper Collins reading books for both the main Little Wandle programme and the Rapid Catch Up programme for ages 7+.