Accurate information about the Phonics Screening Check.
England’s year 1 Phonics Screening Check (PSC) rapidly assesses children’s ability to accurately decode new words, using their previously-taught phonics code knowledge and skills. It does not test their language comprehension, visual memory for high-frequency words or their ”reading ability”. Note, children’s English language comprehension is assessed in the KS2 reading test taken in the final year (Y6) of primary school, but see ‘Is England’s End-of-Primary Reading Comprehension Test Fit for Purpose?’ on this page:
https://www.dyslexics.org.uk/teaching-all-children-to-read-and-spell/
By the time of the PSC in mid-June, most year 1 children will have received around two years of almost daily, discrete synthetic phonics teaching. Their average age will be 6 years and 4 months.
The PSC is designed to flag up, at a prudently early stage, any pupils who are falling behind and need to be given individual tutoring to ensure that they master the content of the first two years of the school’s phonics programme. Because of its timing, only 85 of the 175 common GPCs (Darnell et al. 2017) are usable in the check; in actual practice, around 70 are used.
”The phonics screening check assesses around 70 of the 175 spellings: there are around 100 more spellings to teach.”
(Charlotte MacKechnie. 2022. Teaching phonics from Reception – Year 6 (and beyond)
The check consists of twenty lower-frequency real words and twenty pseudo/nonsense/nonwords. All forty words are composed entirely of common (high frequency in print) sound-spelling correspondences which the children should have been taught in their daily, discrete phonics lessons previous to the check. Four of the words have two syllables, the rest have one. The words are changed each year to avoid any possibility of children being taught to memorise them by sight alone.
The PSC is a quick (it takes about 5 minutes for a child to complete), simple and valid (Duff, Snowling et al. 2014) way to identify, at an essential early stage, those children who are in need of extra help with their phonics code knowledge, segmenting and blending skills. Children who do not meet the expected standard in year 1 are required to retake the check in year 2.
The ‘pass’ mark is released after the PSC has taken place. It has been 32 since the first check took place in 2012. This “appropriately challenging” expected level was set by about 50 teachers whose schools were involved in the pilot study.
”The actual PSC takes less than five minutes. A fluent reader can complete it in under two minutes with zero errors”
(Y1 teacher & SENCo)
The PSC is, in the opinion of many teachers, ”valid but unnecessary”. They assert that the check does not tell them anything that they didn’t already know and that regular assessment by the class-teacher is the best way to discover if a child is struggling with any aspect of reading. However, the check quickly proved its necessity when the 2011 pilot study (298 schools) revealed that only 32% of the children were able to decode new words with common spellings accurately. The following year, the 1st actual check flagged up that nearly half (42%) of year 1 children were in need of extra help with basic phonics decoding. Clearly, the check had uncovered major malpractice; the essential phonics decoding component (Simple View of Reading) was missing or being very badly taught in the majority of primary schools. Furthermore, the class-teachers’ reading assessments had failed to flag up the widespread deficits in children’s phonics knowledge.
There is good news though. In its final evaluation (2015), the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) found that the phonics check’s introduction three years earlier had already triggered improvements in phonics teaching and assessment: ”These changes consist of improvements to the teaching of phonics, such as faster pace, longer time, more frequent, more systematic, and better ongoing assessment.”
The phonics check ”is quick, objective, and based on a model of reading (the Simple View) which stands up to scientific scrutiny, unlike the widely-used but slow and subjective Running Record, which is based on a model of reading so far from reality that nobody has ever come forward to admit they made it up.”
(Alison Clarke)
After the first phonics check in 2012, some teachers complained that the children they judged to be ‘good readers’, including a few they had registered as gifted and talented for reading, did badly in the check. A year 1 teacher grumbled, “I had over 50% of my class fail the check and, given some of the children are reading above the level they should be in Year 2, to have to report to their parents that they have not met the standard in decoding seems ridiculous. Many children made mistakes trying to turn pseudo words into real words – ‘strom’ became ‘storm’. The lack of context meant many children made mistakes they would not have made if the word was in a sentence.” (London Evening Standard 03/09/2012)
The PSC technical report’s data (2012) provided evidence that there was little basis for the argument that good readers (fluent and accurate decoders) did fine on the real words but fell down on the pseudo words because they are so used to reading for meaning. If children were competent decoders they did well on both pseudo words and real words, and if they were poor decoders they did badly on both types.
The NFER’s final independent report on the PSC confirmed the technical report’s findings above:
”Over the course of the study, a small number of respondents have expressed concerns that the check disadvantages higher achieving readers. However, as reported in Chapter 2, the analysis of the NPD data found no identifiable pattern of poorer performance on the check than expected in those children who are already fluent readers.” (NFER. PSC report 2015 p.10)
Do nonword reading tests for children measure what we want them to?
An analysis of Year 2 error responses.
Castles A. et al. 2018. Australian Journal of Learning Difficulties.
”We conclude that nonword reading measures are a valid index of phonics knowledge, and that these tests do not disadvantage children who are already reading words well.”
”The check should consist entirely of pseudowords.”
(Mills T. 2021)
The check is not strictly diagnostic and its purpose is to quickly identify children at risk of phonics decoding difficulties. Teachers need to thoroughly assess the phonics code knowledge and skills of every child who fails to reach the expected level. Once assessed, an individually tailored phonics intervention needs to be put into place rapidly. All the DfE-validated phonics programmes must provide guidance on using the programme for intervention:
”Children who are at risk of falling behind need extra practice to consolidate and master the content of the programme. Programmes should provide guidance on how to support these children so that they keep up with their peers. Options for support could include 1 to 1 tutoring. They should not suggest or provide a different SSP programme for these children.” (DfE. Phonics Validation Criteria. Note. 9)
Giving children lists of pseudo words containing illegal or statistically improbable English spellings for homework, to practise for the check, is likely to have a negative effect on children’s spelling abilities. Elizabeth Nonweiler points out that there are plenty of real words even able six-year-olds are unlikely to have come across before. Using low-frequency real words will provide plenty of the practice children need to read the pseudo words in the phonics check and increase their language comprehension.
Some examples of low-frequency, one and two-syllable real words with common spellings:
newt scribe farthing sphinx paw ploy tar ail glide joist prime glade void adorn croak gloat shoal shorn theme thorax bait twine plight mope probe hark yarn larva moat curd lurch spurn bane dale stoat hake abode
(Example words provided by Elizabeth Nonweiler)
”For most children, [the Y1 PSC] will probably be the last time that decoding will be formally assessed in their education.” (Ricketts & Murphy. The ResearchED Guide to Literacy. 2019). This is a major error, as the two studies below illustrate:
– In the DfE’s 2016 pilot study for a proposed Year 3 phonics screening check retake, 49% of participating Year 3 pupils did not meet the expected standard. The pilot involved 1,625 Year 3 pupils from 282 schools.
A questionnaire accompanying the pilot revealed that 77% of teachers believed that the extension of the phonics check to Year 3 ”had no impact on the teaching of phonics to pupils who had fallen behind.” Following the pilot and the teachers’ responses, the DfE capitulated and confirmed it would not proceed with a Year 3 phonics check retake (DfE. 2017).
– There is a commonly held belief that phonics teaching is no longer necessary, even pointless1, once the PSC has taken place at the end of Y1. A recent research study looked at the outcome of putting this belief into practice. The researcher (Mills T. 2024) checked on the phonics decoding abilities of every child in years 3, 4 and 5 across 7 schools. They had been taught SSP daily in YR and Y1, using one of the DfE-validated phonics programmes, then phonics teaching stopped. Dr Mills discovered, through the use of the Bryant Test of Basic Decoding Skills (Bryant. 1975)2, that although most of the children had met the expected standard in the Y1 phonics check and did not appear outwardly to be struggling readers, 70% had not mastered phonics decoding.
1If pupils ‘fail’ the PSC after 2 years of daily SSP teaching, some teachers believe that they need ”alternative teaching methods as phonics doesn’t work for some children.”
2”The Bryant test has a high reliability factor with Juel et al. (1986) reporting reliabilities between 0.90 and 0.96” (Mills T. 2024).
To guard against phonics deficits causing decoding difficulties for pupils in later years, The Reading Ape recommends a ”Year Three phonics pseudo-word check that assesses the whole alphabetic code, including polysyllabic level.” (The Reading Ape’s Blog: Decisions, decisions – can research help identify the best phonics programme?)
”Children hot-housed for a few months in a desperate attempt to get them through the Screening Check never to do any phonics again are going to fall back on whole word memorisation and guessing to the detriment of their education and the chronic, long tail of underachievement will go on.”
https://theliteracyblog.com/2016/07/20/phonics-across-the-curriculum/
It’s not me, it’s you – the problem with the phonics screening check. Charlotte MacKechnie. 2020.
https://linguisticphonics.wordpress.com/2020/12/16/its-not-me-its-you-the-problem-with-the-phonics-screening-check-part-1/
”The phonics screening check assesses whether a child has learned phonic decoding to the minimum expected standard for a 6-year-old… The phonics screening check does not assess whether a child has mastered phonic decoding.” (bold in original)
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/key-stage-2-tests-past-papers#phonics-screening-check
Free downloads of the DfE’s past phonics screening check materials.
DfE: Scoring the check: ”For real words, inappropriate grapheme-phoneme correspondences must be marked as incorrect (for example, reading ‘blow’ to rhyme with ‘cow’ would be incorrect). However, alternative pronunciations of graphemes will be allowed in pseudo-words.”
N.B. alternative pronunciation of GPCs is also allowed in real words if due to a regional accent.
Has the Phonics Screen Improved Children’s Reading? Prof Kathy Rastle. 2024
https://www.rastlelab.com/post/has-the-phonics-screen-improved-children-s-reading
”It is manifestly clear that the PSC has fulfilled its original purpose of assessing pupils’ decoding skills and identifying children in need of extra support.”
Duff, Snowling et al’s independent study (2014) focused on the reliability and validity of the year one phonics screening check.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-9817.12029/full
”We have shown that the new phonics screening check is a valid measure of phonic skills and is sensitive to identifying children at risk of reading difficulties. Its slight tendency to overestimate the prevalence of at-risk readers (as compared with standardised tests of reading accuracy and fluency) is arguably a favourable property for a screening instrument. We agree that early rigorous assessment of phonic skills is important for the timely identification of word reading difficulties.” (bold added)
Although the PSC is not called a dyslexia screening test, if a child legitimately3 achieves the expected level in the check at the end of Y1, then it’s correct to say that they do not have ‘dyslexia’. Prof. Snowling agrees; she told the now ex-MP Matt Hancock, who proposed a bill to require screening for dyslexia in primary schools (ChamberUK. 2022), that “we’ve got a screening test” already. “It’s called the phonics screening check, it’s at the end of Year 1; it’s a statutory assessment.” (TES. 2022)
3Data from the phonics screen: a worryingly abnormal distribution. Prof Dorothy Bishop.
https://deevybee.blogspot.com/2012/10/data-from-phonics-screen-worryingly.html