So, this idea that more able readers fail the phonics screening check...

[HarveySchlumpfenburger]

appears not to be supported by the figures from the statistical first release.

www.gov.uk/government/statistics/phonics-screening-check-and-key-stage-1-assessments-england-2014

99% of children who meet the standard in year 1 go on to attain level 2+, compared to 88% of those that didn't meet the standard in year 1 but did in year 2 and 34% who hadn't met the standard by the end of year 2.

43% of children who met the standard in year 1 went on to attain level 3, compared to 5% that only met the standard by the end of year 2 and 0% that hadn't met the standard by the end of year 2.

That's quite a striking difference.

:)

I hope the HTs and SENCOs see this. Not just us parents.

I don't know where the whole idea came from in the first place. I have never had a child good with phonics yet not pass it. Granted a couple of them might have got ONE wrong by reading too fast and using a real word but not even close enough to not pass.

However, I haven't had one child not pass that I was expecting to. It's a pointless test. I know my children, a test is telling me what I already know.

I think it probably came about because of a need to discredit the test. Either because some teachers are still firmly in the mixed methods camp, or because they are trying to justify low school pass rates or an individual child's result to parents.

It's often accompanied by statements about more able readers having moved beyond the use of phonics or using a wider range of strategies to decode with less able readers relying on phonics. Occasionally people drop in the phonics=barking at print, understanding what you are reading is more important. The assumption being that mixed methods are a better way to achieve this or poor decoding isn't a barrier to good comprehension and doesn't matter.

It might be that the 'good' readers in year 1 are failing. We don't have they end of year 1 levels to know for certain. But if they are, it raises a question about why those readers are being outperformed by 'weaker' readers a year later on an assessment based on comprehension.

Expeditititititititition
It may be a pointless test to you, but it clearly isn't a pointless test at a number of schools where they claim that "good readers fail it"!

Teen. I do not have that many tits!

I am wondering whether it is a case of good readers failing. Do they? I know many teachers and they haven't seen it. Certainly they have them make a mistake but not enough to fail.

I'm with Rafa. I think that the idea of good readers failing is one put about by those teachers who use mixed methods and want to discredit the test. From their point of view children they regard as good readers because they can recognise a reasonable number of words are failing the test. The reason they fail is that they do not have adequate decoding skills so when they are faced with words they don't know they struggle.

I also agree with TeenAndTween. Good teachers won't learn anything from the test. Nor, unfortunately, will those teachers that try to justify poor results. But some teachers will learn things about their pupils from this test.

I'm not sure that it's ever been the case that most able readers were failing the test. It just seems to be a myth that sees to have popped up around the test.

A handful of children with good visual memories and poor phonic knowledge do read well and fail the check. And it's those children that are used to discredit the test.

A couple of the teachers I trained with do believe this and it's definitely the line that 2 of the schools here take when talking to parents. I doubt that even in those schools most, or any of the able readers failed.

As a Year One teacher I've never come across a good reader who has failed the test ( I've personally heard 220 children take the test).

However, I've come across many parents who THINK their child is a good reader, who criticises our phonics teaching and fully decodable reading scheme ( as their child is reading chapter books at home !) and some of these children have failed the test. But they were sight readers and were not able to blend or segment.

Lost, I think the definition of 'good' readers can be a bit variable. Personally I agree with you and I wouldn't consider a child a 'good' reader unless they could decode and comprehend well.

But I've seen a document written by an LA phonics advisor (not mine fortunately) that says that they did have 'good' readers assessed as 2b and above at the end of year 1 that failed. It suggests the issue might be with the use of pseudo words and then clearly says that as long as those children can read the real words then there isn't a problem. Nowhere in the solution to this is the fact that these children are sight readers with poor phonics skills hinted at.

This is the person whose job it is to go into schools and advise teachers and run the LA training sessions on how to teach phonics and reading.

I feel the phonics test is one of the best things to happen to British eduation. I expect that many of these so called "good readers" who fail the test are bright dyslexic children who are able blagg other assessments of reading. Sometimes bright dyslexic children run into problems at university or A-levels when the reading demands racket up and their sticking plaster type strageries can't cope.

The phonics check is about giving support to children at an early stage so that they child reaches their full potential. Its not about labelling a child as a "failure".

I think it's 'look and say' that is barking at print, because it's learning to recognise and repeat by rote.

Phonics is about code breaking, which then lets you explore everything.

I've never taught year one so aren't going to comment on the rights and wrongs of it. Other than to say I think if any teacher is waiting for one test per year to tell them anything then they aren't doing their jobs.

However my colleagues in year 1 seemed to think it wasn't so much of an issue with goods readers somehow failing. It was more to do with child teacher dynamics eg children expect the teacher to give them work that can be worked out and answered. So when they are given a nonsense word, even though they can read it, they know it isn't a word or not one that they are used to, so they try to make sense of it and get it wrong.

Now I would suspect that after the first year of the tests, most teachers spent time teaching children to read the nonsense words as they were and not try to make sense of them.

Would those children, if confronted with a picture of a real creature they had not seen or hear of before, and we're told its real name was (to use a random example) narwhal, read it as 'narwhal' or would they make that into a different word?

Because as that's what they are doing with new names of creatures in the test (for all the nonsense words are billed clearly as alien names), presumably they are foxed with all new words in texts and do need help to read accurately (or at least more confidently).

So my DD is one of only 5% that didn't pass it until year 2 and gained level 3's. Is that right ? If so I'm more impressed with the school's intervention than I thought I was

Edith As I said in my previous post I'm not a year 1 teacher. To be honest I didn't know that they masked the nonsense words as names. That may mean that the children understand to read the sounds as meant.

However since names often don't follow phonetic rules it may still cause issues.

Let's say a made up name is Tarum pronounced tar-um.

However the child taking the test has a friend called Sarah (S-air-rah). Since most humans use previous experience to solve new problems the child is stuck because they know phonetically it should be tar-um but as part of the test they have been told it's an alien's name and names follow different rules, so maybe it should be t-air-um.

I don't think anyone suggested that great numbers if children would fail the test because of essentially over thinking the test. It was flagged by teachers and unions as a possibility.

Testing doesn't allow for the variability of children when trying to obtaining a true reflection of their abilities. Summative assessments and tests have their place but they should be used as one tool in a teachers toolkit.

If there is more than one possible pronunciation (as there was one year with 'jound') then any that is phonically possible will be marked as correct. So there would be no loss of mark in the 'tarum' situation you describe.

I think that some of the myth comes from people like me - a generation that weren't consistently taught phonics and struggled with using phonics, but not with reading, until quite a surprising age. I was very much a whole word reader and have to think fairly hard to read longer words using a phonics approach. But that isn't to say that I would have been the same type of reader if decent phonics teaching had been around.

soapbox, the words aren't mixed. Each page has either 4 real words or 4 pseudo words and the children are told at the beginning of each page whether that page has real or made up words. Teachers can choose to tell children that the pseudo words are alien names but there's no requirement to do so.

As Edithhas said any phonetically plausible pronunciation is accepted as correct.

And that's fine but what i described was the worry expressed by teachers when the tests were started. Most of the reservations expressed through unions, that made headlines, that coloured the opinions of many were aired before the tests were administered. I dare say in no small part to the shambolic way most changes in education seem to occur and from feed back passed along the grapevine from those who had been part of the trial tests.

As I said, even at the time, the worry was that a small number of able children might fail. Not all or many of them.

My point is that there was so much confusion and worry before the tests were implemented it has become accepted 'knowledge' that bright children fail. Like 'actually nits only like clean hair'.

There are a million and one ideas that float around in education that have no basis. I for one was surprised to know that some of my colleagues believed that only middle class children were dyslexic. Poor children just weren't very bright.

Some schools will always come up with reasons why a child has failed that is a 'fluke' or just mainly not their fault.

Actually I think we are talking about the same thing then.

It's not that many children have ever failed but it's a baseless belief that has persisted despite the fact that if some of the teachers peddling it looked at their own results they might see that all of their able readers have passed.

The HT of the infant school told me this when I asked her about the phonics check - that it was the good children who were failing.

Now I know and knew this wasn't true. But it's a very effective thing to say because there was no response I could make.

I couldn't accuse her of being a lier.

The phonics check caused them to buy a modern phonics reading scheme and their Y2 levels improved dramatically.

But there is still no polite response you can make to a HT when they say 'it was our good pupils who didn't pass'

Of course the reason their SATs results were as they were was due to 'the cohort.' Which equally makes my blood boil.

Well, I guess "lier" is phonically plausible.

I think either 'tar'um' or 'tair'um' would do (but not a year 1 teacher) as both show ability to decode, which is the point of the test. Nonsense words are only words you do not know e.g. hobbit, stromkarl, narwhal, yeti etc. The test is to see if the child can decode - and it is names of aliens, not proper nouns.

So I was interested in this as I have a very able reader who passed phonics check but didn’t do brilliantly in it. She got all of the real words right but by the sounds of it didn’t get all of the made up ones. I’ve always thought she reads using memory rather than phonics. I don’t think any of the most able children failed in our class but there were children who definitely did better than mine who were less able to read as well.