Phonics Test

[SnowieBear]

DS (6) came back yesterday from school with a slip of paper saying that after being tested against the government's phonic test, he had not reached the standard required and will be receiving additional support with his reading.

DS is a rather good reader and has progressed all the way to stage 9 ORT since the start of Y1. However, I am not surprised he didn't do well at the test, as he finds it difficult to decode words he cannot adscribe meaning to. In general, that's not a problem as he is a very wordy kid, but it was always going to be the spanner in the works for the phonics test.

Am I right to be utterly unconcerned about it? (Well, as utterly unconcerned as someone can be that then goes on to post under the primary education thread...).

It's the thought of how much you still want to do and how little time to do it in with all the extra's at this time of year

Yep, no idea how it's going to happen, tbh. It will somehow, I know. But looking forward to not doing any of it in 3 weeks time.

SunflowersSmile oh the publishers had packs out even before the test ... I was getting two emails a day at one point trying to sell me resources for the test lots of teachers were buying them as they panicked when they realised they hadn't taught all children because they were/are so hung up on those stupid phases and/or they were still using pictures and initial letters as clues to what a word is.

There was a poster here who joined specifically to sell her newly created Year 1 phonics test app and touted herself as an ex-Literacy advisor who should know better. I was delighted took the opportunity to point out the misspellings in her post before reporting. Her website was exactly the same!

My class have a photography project to complete for the Comenius calendar and lots of recycled art to complete that I've just not had time to do yet so hopefully good end to the year ... plus transition swap ... producing new KS1 topic curriculum ... complete all the SEN paperwork ready for Sept ... and them my brain implodes

Thanks for replies - not heard anything. Schools have to inform parents at some point, don't they, how their dc did in the tests?

Yes, it's a statutory obligation.

We are sending our results out with reports like Feenie's school and parents will have the chance to discuss it with me (Y1 teacher isn't available and I administered the test). There were no surprises from the test but they have provided a good diagnostic to pick up specific issues even in the children who scored 32-39

^In a few years time when we've had the phonics test for a while, and teachers' whole careers are based on the test alone, then authors and teachers will start publishing books made up of complete nonsense words with titles like: Noof imo goof blada.

And our children won't be able to make head nor tail of them. When that happens I'll enrol my children in nonsense sounding classes (not reading classes, mind you.) Because I wouldn't want my children to be the only ones who couldn't babble pointlessly.^
Beautifully put, Learnandsay.

I wonder how children would be taught to pronounce
'nere'?
To rhyme with the common words 'here, there' or 'were'?

The test was insane and completely pointless. A horrendous waste of time and money: to produce the materials and to cover teachers when doing it. Virtually no teacher learned anything from it that they did not know about their pupils' decoding abilities already.

Interesting too that phonics advocates are normally against using pictures to help with decoding, but the test used pictures of aliens for the nonsense words.

I thought U would find learnandsay a kindred spirit masha

I wonder how children would be taught to pronounce
'nere'?

personally I would always go with the old Norse

If teachers didn't learn anything from the test then they weren't looking masha ... even for those who scored 32-39 it highlighted areas where they weren't confident. In the case of our Y1s mainly with split vowel spellings and polysyllabic words. (interestingly real not pseudo words). The pictures certainly didn't help the children to decode the words and they weren't aliens (according to the administrators guide)

Virtually no teacher learned anything from it that they did not know about their pupils' decoding abilities already.

Masha, how could you possibly know that - and don't tell me TES threads, which obviously would not cover the entire population of Y1 classes, and on which weak phonics teachers would be unlikely to post.

I know my ds's school will have learnt plenty from their two Year 1 classes - they didn't have a clue before.

I wonder how children would be taught to pronounce
'nere'?
o rhyme with the common words 'here, there' or 'were'?

The answer would be that all those pronounciations would be palusible and therefore accepted - but that word would be unlikely to be selected as a nonsense word for that very reason.

Interesting too that phonics advocates are normally against using pictures to help with decoding, but the test used pictures of aliens for the nonsense words.

Oh don't be so silly, Masha.

plausible

Has anyone given you the pseudo word list you are so eager to see masha?

they just say pass or fail bread, as a parent I have no idea why parents are getting their nickers in a twist, surely at this stage in the childs education the teachers know what children require extra help. It is another exersise to check standards IMHO, so they need to direct this kind of intervention and checks to the schools that are highlited as under performing and look at those teachers and heads who are responsible for the standards in those schools.

My dds schools Y1/2 and Yr/1 teachers are fantasitc and Im pretty sure at this stage of the school year is all they needs particularly with y1/2 teacher to have SATS and then this on top of it, let alone any prep and paper work that goes with it.

However saying that I do know some failed and have no idea if there where any surprises or if any of them where already recieving extra help or if performance on the day was the issue with children who other wise may have passed on a different day.

The official printout gives the child's score out of 40 and says has/has not met the expected level.

is that given to parents mrz in your school? when the school had the parents in to introduce the test in my dds school they said that parents arent given the score just pass or fail, which is all we had sent home.

We plan to give it with the reports and information about what their child needs to practise.

Really interested to see this, snowiebear. Dd has been taught phonics very systematically, took to it very well, and is now reading Roald Dahl, Horrid Henry etc independently both to herself and out loud, so I was surprised when she brought home the practice phonics test and was making mistakes with some very basic made-up words. I'm not particularly worried about it either, but I'm wondering whether once children get past that initial stage of learning to read, their phonics knowledge sort of goes out of focus as they start taking in their stride the different pronunciations of similar groups of letters, and they start relying more on context and memory. Could that be the explanation for your ds?

It's up to each school what they tell the parents and how they phrase it.

The problem is not that teachers don't know whether or not their students can decode. The problem is that in some schools almost all the kids passed the test, while in other schools most failed. In some schools kids weren't being taught to decode - because their teachers didn't know how to or didn't want to.

And something has to be done to encourage the schools which fail their kids, not to.

And to that end the phonics check has certainly helped. Up and down the country kids Y1 kids have been taught better this year than ever before. Far more kids passed the test this year than they would have any previous year.

So that point of the test was definitely not to tell teachers something about their students they didn't know.

If teachers are happy and confidenet in the test and are sure it is a valued task then as a parent I am too.

To be perfectly honest I would be concerned if a confident reader couldn't decode the pseudo words in the test

Could it possibly be that in some cases the phonics test has shown that some children aren't quite such brilliant readers as their proud parents think they are? Just a thought!

I think the test picks up on reading accuracy

Not every child does phonics well. This doesn't mean that they are poor readers/poorly educated/going to do badly in foreign languages. My dd is useless at phonics and currently useless at spelling. She is 9 and tested as highly gifted and is a very very advanced reader. She is also good at languages. As she gets older, her spelling will improve because she will figure out ways to compensate for her lack of phonics skills. How do I know this....because I am the same way and I'm a fantastic speller. Interestingly, I used to get very frustrated when doing writing in Italian or Spanish when the teacher would say..."it's spelled just like it sounds" but to me, it wasn't because I couldn't differentiate the sounds.

I think that one of the big problems with our current public/state education system (I am in the USA, but it's really not that different from my experiences in the UK)is that there is no place for bright kids who learn differently from the norm. As a parent of two bright kids who learn differently, I have had to do a lot of re-evaluating of the assessments and information that comes home about my children. And in the end, as they got older, this was so time consuming and non-productive, that I have finally moved them both to private schools that can accommodate for their learning differences while still allowing them to be challenged and stimulated.

If they don't do phonics well they will be very likely to flounder at some stage Sofia. Some children deduce how the code works for themselves others need to be taught. Incidentally I'm speaking as the mother of an early fluent reader (assessed in primary as having a reading age in the high teens and high IQ and also SEN)