The new Y1 phonics screening check

[SoundsWrite]

The government's new phonics screening check is to be launched in England in June.
The results of the test will be given to the parents of each individual child but each individual school's results will not be made public.
What is the view on Mumsnet? Do you think the results should be made public or not? Either way, why or why not?
You can find out more about this test by going to the DfE site: www.education.gov.uk/schools/teachingandlearning/pedagogy/a00198207/faqs-year-1-phonics-screening-check

Perhaps that's what I was really asking, Indigo. You are right re: Roald Dahl, but that said the context will help - a child will anticipate that a slew of nonsense words are probably on the cards if they've read similar before. I suppose I am also asking can you read quite fluently through memory and guess work and working things out in context?

For example, as a young child I was a fluent reader completely unfamiliar with phonics, would I have been able to read the nonsense words in this test I wonder?

The nonsense words are things like 'tazz' - so yes, I assume you would have been able to read them.

Right, ok. :) I took a quick look and a few looked more complex but it was only a brief look. Hope all is good with you, haven't been around that much lately.

Cortina -

a) the point of the test is not to get 100%, but to assess your phonics knowledge.

b) most people learn phonics through reading (if they weren't taught it) and so still would pass the test.

c) a very few people, like my son who has ASD, don't learn phonics through reading - and they never become good at reading. He appears to be very good he reads lots and lots and enjoys reading. But if you listened to him read aloud (which noone at school does!) you would notice he reads very badly.

He's in Y6 and is a rubbish speller and can't read out loud. He will however get a L5 on his SATs.

I regret not teaching him phonics when he was in the infants. But I knew nothing about it then.

I worry about my DS on this test. He has tried very very hard to get up to ORT level 6 (he is in y1 and also has SN). He has learnt that if he sounds out a word and it sound nonsensical, then you think about the context/pictures and what you might need to adjust, sound wise.

eg the word "word". Phonics tells you w-or-d (as in ward)
but you may adjust to "wurd" if you can see the context.

I don't really understand why there are so many nonsence words. When Y1 children have learnt that nonsense sound outs need adjusting somehow.

It just seems a bit heavy handed to me.

But, Arghmyear, if you teach children that the sounds in English can be spelt in different ways, your approach to the word 'word' will be quite different.
In the case of 'word', for example, the sound 'er' is spelt . This is one of the patterns in the language: w or l d, w or k, w or m. I often say to young learners that, after the sound, 'w', we often spell the sound 'er' in this way .
Last week I was teaching a child who had fallen behind the principal ways of spelling the sound 'er'. They are (her), (fur), (shirt), (word), and (learn).
If you teach these and give lots of practice in reading and spelling words with these spellings of 'er' in them, it doesn't take long for most children to recognise them when they're reading. In regard to spelling, in the first instance, they should start spelling words with the sound 'er' in them with one of the common spellings and then, in the second instance, spelling these words with the correct spelling.
And, if your child reads 'work' as 'w' 'or' 'k' (i.e. to rhyme with 'fork'), you point to the and remind them by saying, 'This can be 'or', but in this word it's 'er', say 'er' here.

I disagree with this. I'm not good at explaining myself on these matters, but I will attempt.
IMO, there is something fundamentally wrong when the government believes it needs to intervene in such a way. Teachers should already know who is struggling with reading. Moreover, whose business is it? Learning to read is a personal issue concerning the child, teacher and parents. Why on earth would I want to know whether another child in my son's class knows his/her phonics? Or a random child at any other school for that matter?

Also, phonics is useful to a degree but it is not the be all and end all of reading. Some words do not follow the phonics route. Common words like are, was, they, she, the, my, me. Learning Phonemes, Graphemes and split digraph are just as important. Those are the principles which seem to be overlooked in primary schools, as oppose to the phonics of m-a-t, g-e-t, c-u-p etc.
The following link explains matters better:
www.childrenscentres.org.uk/media/File/ey/07-05-22%20Phonics%20Term%20&%20HF%20Wd%20Rec.doc

No, you are not good at explaining yourself, CrashLanded, because you haven't got a good grasp of all the issues and arguments.

SoundsWrite - I take your explanation, but think that my DS is not quite at the level to know a good amount of the variant spellings. He knows simple ones like ee could be ea. Or that ai could be a-e or ay. So I suppose that because of how (not) far he is through the phonics, he will still want to be adjusting some soundings out a bit more randomly to find a word that makes sense. I just worry that he will fail the test when he shouldn't really.

Crashlanded, I think you make an important point that this Phonics Check will, because of its timing, not address. Another more sophisticated check at the end of Y2 should ensure that schools have gone beyond simple phoneme-grapheme correspondences [this is still phonics however CrashLanded].

My concern, Crashlanded, is that parents, such as, for example, one of my daughters, who is about to send her four-year-old to a local primary, want to have a very clear idea of how schools are doing. If the information isn't available, they can't do that.
However, painful it might be for some schools, I am strongly in favour of transparency.

pickledsiblings - I thought that there already was another test, SATS, that measured reading ability?

"However, painful it might be for some schools, I am strongly in favour of transparency."

I agree that transparency is the moral course.

Quite apart from an issue of skills or compliance, I think that the phonics revolution has demystified the teaching of reading and that of itself is quite destabilising for teachers. Their professional expertise and credentials can very easily be questioned now, in a way that was harder in the past.

Arghmyear, you said: 'I take your explanation, but think that my DS is not quite at the level to know a good amount of the variant spellings. He knows simple ones like ee could be ea. Or that ai could be a-e or ay.'
I and my colleagues have trained over eight thousand teachers and TAs in England over the past nine years and we know that you can teach at least three or four spelling alternatives to children in YR/Y1, if their segmenting and blending skills are good (i.e. they can segment four- and five-sound words like 'crab' or 'twist').
I'd start with three or four different spellings of each sound. When he has covered all the sounds, you can go back and teach more spellings.
The pupil I was talking about is eight years old, which is why I taught her five spellings of 'er'. For your DS, I'd teach, perhaps, three , and and add in others as you cover them in his reading.
The problem with teaching one spelling of a sound, as advocated in Letters and Sounds, is that you teach one sound and one spelling, followed by another sound and another spelling. Pretty soon, you lose the connection between sounds, which children learn naturally, and the spellings we have invented to represent them. In the meantime, children see in their reading lots of other spellings of sounds, which they can't work out because they've not been taught them and then they think that the the 'system' is madly chaotic. It isn't if it's taught properly.
There are only forty-four sounds (forty-five if you're a Scot) in English. If they are always your anchor, after the one-to-ones (the sounds represented by a, b, c, d, e, etc, plus ff, ll, ss, zz, and sh, ch, etc.), you then teach all the rest of the vowel sounds/spellings and the consonant sounds/spellings, a few at a time for littlies and more for older children.
And then, whenever you come across a sound/spelling combination not yet introduced, just point to the spelling and say, 'This (whatever it is) is X. Say X here.'

I think it's a bit unfair to call someone who has a different viewpoint 'ignorant', Bonsoir.

SoundsWrite, yes, I've been stunned how easily reception dd and others have just picked up that different letters make the same sound, and just apply it immediately.

Where did I do that, Rosebud?

Crash - do you think it's acceptable that some schools teach 60% of kids to read while others teach 100% of kids?

It will be stats that are published - not personal data. So you will learn that your school is or isn't good at teaching kids to read.

If they were to use the same criteria as they use in KS2 sats, ie only publish the data if their is over so many kids in the class and only publishing data for kids who have been in the school for 2 years, it seems totally fair.

If a child doesn't learn to read, it's not just the child whi is failed - it's society.

Teachers have hidden behind excuses for far too long. Publishing the results of this test will improve reading in this country. I am 100% sure more kids will pass the phonics test this year than last year, and more again next year.

There is no reason not to teach 90% + of kids to read within 2 years (in a MS school)

this phonics test is hardly war and peace. It's only checking that the children have aquifer the basics appropriately.

SoundsWrite - I accept what you have written. In my DS's school, when he was in reception, they sent home the 42 Jolly Phonics sounds. They were learning 4 or 5 a week and we were supposed to practise them. All fine. In Y1, we have only had a few variants home (a-e for example) and that's it. I am quite sure you are correct that you can teach many variants to Y1 children but it seems that the school are not doing this very much. So...I will do it myself!

Bonsoir, the KS1 SATs reading assessment is not designed to 'check' whether or not phonics have been systematically taught in phases or even if SSP have been taught at all.

The stats aren't going to be reported to parents though, Indigo - only individual results. Sorry if I've misunderstood you and you know this.

Also, phonics is useful to a degree but it is not the be all and end all of reading. Some words do not follow the phonics route. Common words like are, was, they, she, the, my, me. Learning Phonemes, Graphemes and split digraph are just as important. Those are the principles which seem to be overlooked in primary schools, as oppose to the phonics of m-a-t, g-e-t, c-u-p etc.

Crashlanded, all the words you mention are at least partially decodable although some have a 'tricky' bit. And even phonics in Reception goes beyond initial letter sounds. Phonemes, graphemes and split diagraphs ARE included in phonics teaching - that's phonics!

You may find this helpful CrashLanded
www.sounds-write.co.uk/docs/sounds_write_leaflet_for_yr_parents.pdf

Sorry. I haven't read all the comments. I am infuriated really that the results will be reported individually to parents, when the point of the test is to see how well the school is teaching phonics as a whole. I entirely expect my ds1 to do badly as he just doesn't 'get' 'phonics'. But another person may blame the school, when actually the school's results overall are brilliant.

So anyway, what I'm saying is. What's the point of telling the parents their child's individual result? So they can be mortified, or over the moon at how brilliant their child is? Or blame the school if their kid gets a bad result?

It's odd that people like Michael Rosen are prepared to display their ignorance in public.

Here, Bonsoir.

My incredibly able dd would have done badly in this test, purely because she is a perfectionist and would not have allowed herself to answer a word that was not a real word. She was and is a fantastic reader, 'got' phonics at age 3, to the extent she could read fluently, and also deconstruct words to get the spelling. But a test with made up words would have reduced her to tears, even though she would have KNOWN the answer.

This is her character. She is not a child whose reading needs flagging up.