Parents of children who have had their phonics screening

[bronze]

Have you all heard how they did?

I haven't and I'm worried as I'm pretty sure dd is going to fail. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to know by now or not or if I'll be told at all

Mrz I can see what she struggles with was ou words shoulder could but she knew you and out...she didn't know cent...so I will have a meeting with teacher to find what she actually got. I didn't know they did a test an when I got the letter I wasn't at all worried as they said they would get extra help. I know she has had phonics help but DH has been doing drop off and missed session. I'm sure she will be ok

In could spelling represents /oo/ as in book, hood
In shoulder spelling represents the sound /oe/ as in to

There isn't anything to worry about ... it is better that any small gaps in knowledge are identified and supported early

Ill try and do some as I found them words could and shoulder hard to split up an explain the sounds!! Thanks for your help mrz.

DD got 39 and, thanks to this thread, I now know that that was out of 40! Don't know what % of DC in her year 1 passed/didn't pass. DD also says she doesn't remember doing anything different to her usual phonics stuff

My dd got 31/40...so failed, but is a 2b for reading and 2c for writing. Have to say a bit confused as to what it is meant to mean for her. She doesn't have a problem reading with writing...

It means she might have a problem when she is reading more advanced things and coming across new words, if her phonic knowledge isn't secure enough to sound them out. Hopefully the school will give her extra help on the sounds she struggles with.

So it transpires that almost 60% of my Ds2's cohort of 60 kids did not pass the test. (Ds did pass, despite apparently being below the expected level in literacy generally). As I posted earlier, some of these are very able children. This is a very successful primary school in a city containing a world-leading university - many parents are academics, medic, scientists etc and the school's Sats results are always excellent. I'm not being smug,; I just don't really get how this cohort can have done so badly with teh phonics screening. I do think it may be the case that the school failed to prepare the children sufficiently so that they understood what they were being asked to do, ie lodged the concept that many of the words were rubbish, but I also suspect that had this cohort done the test in reception, when they were still using phonics to read, they would have got better results. I honestly think my DS passed because he is still at the level most of his peers were in reception, and the children who are free readers were completely wrongfooted by this test. In that 60% there will of course be some children who are genuinely struggling to read, but for many I think it just wasn't what they were expecting and they must have tried to make sense out of words that mean nothing.
Cue lots of worried parents,a head teacher who looks stressed, slightly bewildered Y1 teachers who thought they'd been doing a good job with a cohort that is clearly making excellent progress in all respects other than this test.

But Biscuitsneeded this screening check is an indication of how those children approach words which are new to them. The non-words are very clearly presented as names. It stands to reason that a child who tried to 'make sense of' names in the check is also likely to misread names or new words in their personal reading.

The phonics check shows whether children have an appropriate strategy for reading new words. Apparently a lot of the children in your DD's cohort don't- so this is something that the school can now address.

Biscuitsneeded as adults we use phonics to read even if we aren't aware that is what we do ...
Can I ask what reading scheme the school uses?

ORT. My son is on Stage 6, which is apparently rather below the expected level, but many of his friends have finished the scheme and are free readers.

I can understand why the head is stressed by the results and teachers believed they were doing a good job and why so many children have been failed

but I also suspect that had this cohort done the test in reception, when they were still using phonics to read, they would have got better results.

I think that this might be a clue. Is this an understanding of the use/extent of phonics which you have got from the school?

Phonics for reading is a lifelong skill. Stanovich, way back in the 1970s, discovered that adult skilled readers used phonics for reading unknown words. It is certainly a whole word/look and say proponent's belief that skilled readers use 'other strategies' but the key word here is 'belief'. Actual cognitive research showed that they don't.

You have to understand that we have a whole generation of teachers who, in the main (with honourable exceptions) believe, because of their largely 'look & say' training, that skilled readers don't use phonics. It's a belief that dies hard...

I know, from working with KS3 pupils, that it is perfectly possible to get a L4 in 'reading' ( actually a comprehension exercise) without being able to accurately read unfamiliar words. In fact, without being able to accurately read common words. Well drilled children can get the gist of a passage without much reading accuracy and have been intensively taught how to answer the questions.

Thanks all for helpful insights. Maizie, the inference was entirely mine, not the school's, that the children would have done better in reception. I just felt they did a LOT of work with phonics last year and may have focused a bit less on it this year as so many of them are reading so well. But nobody at school has said this - it's just my own hunch. I'm still confused though. If they are failing the phonics test does that mean that they cannot in fact read nearly as well as they appear to be able to, or does it mean the school hasn't taught phonics very successfully but the children's reading is fine anyway? (I have heard some of them read and they are great). And if you flip that, and look at my DS who school says is marginally below the expected standard but who was one of the 40% who passed, should I be asking school on what basis they deem him below standard, given that he performed well on the test when so many didn't, or does it just mean he 'got' what the test required but his ability to decode the phonics has no real bearing on his ability to read?

my friend's little DD got a score of 10. She is very upset - the stats for the school show that she was the only one that failed and I assume that 10 is a very low score given the passmark of 32. She is already getting some extra classroom help but I don't know how much. I see that there are some SEN co-ordinators on here - what would you advise her to do? The teacher has recommended Mum uses the summer holidays to give her "extra work" to catch up but she is working "substantially" and "considerably" below the expected levels across all areas. Should they be doing an IEP for her?

ORT are Look & Guess Say books which don't encourage accurate reading which is what the Phonics Screening Check is assessing. The texts are very predictable so some children get very good at "reading" these books (some will struggle with other texts). The fact that the school uses these suggests they aren't teaching phonics effectively and are perhaps clinging to mixed methods.
Your son is obviously developing the skills he needs to tackle any text without needing to guess ...well done him!

toomanyprojects if your friend's child is already getting extra help then her needs have been identified. Not all schools use IEPs

That's also interesting because to me the limitation of the Biff and Chip books is that they (at first anyway) tend to stick to words that can be decoded phonically, which doesn't make for particularly interesting reading...

Which set of ORT Biff and Chip books are you referring to? The older series or the Floppy's phonics. The original Biff and Chip books are about as far from being phonically decodeable for early readers as you can get.

These? fdslive.oup.com/www.oup.com/oxed/look-inside/9780198481539.pdf?region=uk

fdslive.oup.com/www.oup.com/oxed/primary/literacy/ort/primary_ort_classics_structurechart.pdf?region=uk

Not sure if they are exactly the same series. Ours have the Magic Key stories. But we have seen some Floppy's phonics ones too. Not sure what the school can really do now, as they enter Y2. I can understand that for the poor readers they can now really focus on the phonics that caused problems in the test, and I am 100% convinced that doing so will help them to read better, but for the kids who are voluntarily reading Roald Dahl, the Worst Witch, Beast Quest, Captain Underpants etc surely they can't make them do the phonics all over again?? Is it really not possible that there is more than one way to skin a cat? As far as I am concerned those children can read, whatever the phonics test says.

Biscuitsneeded my son was a fluent reader before starting school (Financial Times, NATO defence magazine etc reading age in the teens at age 4) and therefore not taught phonics ... result a child who struggled later.

Roald Dahl is full of nonsense words - how will children read them if they can't work out new words?

Any word not in a child's spoken vocabulary is effectively a nonsense word until such time as they learn it. At age 5-6 a child will have a vocabulary of approx 1500 spoken words compared to 250000 words in the OED and an estimate million plus words in the English language

How did he struggle later? If he could read fluently at 4 and understand the FT, how could he regress/struggle further down the line? Or was he reading words without understanding them?
Re the Roald Dahl nonsense words, if they are not used for exchange of meaning with an interlocutor it doesn't matter how you pronounce them, surely?

His lack of phonic knowledge impacted on writing as he got older ...

Biscuitsneeded 6 year olds don't know every word in the English language so when they meet new words they need to have the skills to read them accurately non words are the most effective way to assess if children have these skills ... they could use obscure real words (to ensure they aren't words a child knows already) but then some people would rant about why children are being asked to read words they are never going to need.

www.spelfabet.com.au/2012/12/nonsense-words/