DS1 failed the Year 1 Phonics test. Is he alone?

[AnnieMated]

Shocked and upset actually. Trying my hardest not to be, but he's a pretty good reader and is finishing ORT level 6 and reading fluently with no trouble.

He got 28 out of 40 and the pass mark is 40.

What I most concerned about is that the school didn't even inform parents their children were going to be tested, we just got a bland, round-robin letter today in their book bags with the results.

Anyone like to reassure me? Don't want to ask the other mums from the school but will have a chat with the teachers tomorrow if I can...

No FamiliesShareGerms it was in the pilot studies that only a third of children passed but the pass mark was higher. So basically the made the real check easier so more children would pass.
The results of these checks haven't been published (and won't be) ... lots of schools are reporting 80 -100% pass rate.

One of my children is doing everything he should with phonics, his SEN teacher (dyslexia) says. He is now 9, and we have started Whole Word learning, which works (miraculously) for him. I mean, really, amazing progress (finally!).

So clearly, the new (phonics) way of learning does not work for everyone. DS1 has a very maths/logic-sort of brain and he did know all the phonics rules, but there are simply too many exceptions. There is no REAL logic to the English language. Pretending there is logic where there isn't, and having rules with many exceptions, does not work for people who have a very "Left brain" mind.

Phonics isn't "new"!

Learning to read by sounding out is centuries old. It it mixed methods and look and say which are newfangled, and they are the ones which have been demonstrated over and over again to fail for around 20% of children. The traditional phonics approach succeeds with 95% plus.

If a child knows "all" the phonics rules, which includes dealing with homonyms and homophones, then only foreign import words will be unreadable. If a child has not learned all the phonics rules, then the screening should show this and additional support arranged. This might mean tackling the correspondences which are not securely known, or in cases of some SEN might mean a different approach. But the important thing is that the need for support is identified, any underlying reasons considered, and the right support put swiftly in place.

I guess it is "new" to me, my English friends say they were not taught like that in their day...

(I am a native speaker of a phonetic language, so this is all new to me!).

Chandon
He is now 9, and we have started Whole Word learning, which works (miraculously) for him.

This is what many SEN teachers are finding. Because English phonics is so unreliable (an - any, apron), quite a few children get very confused if exposed to too much of it. So they do better with a short dose of phonics followed by imprinting of whole words.

They use some phonics with that too, because the pronunciation of consonants is fairly stable even in English (b, ca, co, cu, d, f, ga, go, gu...).

The phonics evangelists spread stupid myths about learning to read - as if it has to be either nothing but phonics, or guessing. Reading is about getting to the meaning which the squiggles on the page intend to convey. We can and do use different means for it. It is not a matter of either or.

Any parents who knows that their child can read and enjoys reading should ignore this stupid test. The fact that some very able readers did not score 40 out of 40 on it is all the evidence anyone should need for its utter stupidity and pointlessness.

Using nonsense words in a reading test is pure nonsense. It should be dismissed as that. There is no need for it whatsoever.

My children are way past this stage and reading was one of the few things we did not have trouble with. I would say though that if you only use the reading scheme books they can be restrictive and a good primary school should be sending home an additional library book as well which will enhance and broaden their reading even if it is a cartoon annual as it will have character names and illustrations. My children's old primary school over 6 years ago had a suggested reading list to enhance children's reading and a copy of each book was also in school and available to borrow.

I do remember reading lots of Dr Suess books with mine as young children which had lots of nonsense words in them e.g. a "Zither, Zather, Zog" which tested their phonics knowledge ( though I did NOT do this consciously), I had them as I remember loving them as a child myself with great rhymes and illustrations. We also played rhyming games making up silly words on purpose - children with lively imaginations and had been exposed to a broader range of texts I suspect coped better with the tests.

I can't see what the issue is with nonsense words - many character names and words used in books such as Roald Dahl have lots of nonsense words so with a good phonic knowledge a child would be able to read these words fairly easily. DS1 loves the nonsense words in such books and finds them quite funny!

A nonsense words test might possibly be useful for very weak readers, to establish exactly where there weaknesses lie. Although most teachers can probably identify those by just asking them to read a few sentences.

To test good readers with a test in which half the words are nonsense ones is simply insane.

This was simply a shockingly bad, pointless, wasteful test. It should never be repeated in its current form again. Gove should have to resign over this profligate waste of public funds, especially in the current economic climate.

Warrah. You think you read the post without decoding it but that is not true. You certainly didn't consciously sound it out but you were certainly utilising your phonic knowledge. When weak readers, who would have struggled to read the post are checked by experts their weakness is in phonological awareness (and they are over reliant on guessing and other strategies). Experts know that weak reading is diagnosed by checking for poor phonological awareness and those weak readers would struggle to read the passage while utilising all the other 'strategies' they have been taught.
I agree that a poor performance in the check tells as much about the way the child has been taught as any innate weaknesses in the child. In most cases they will gradually improve their phonological awareness without explicit teaching but the test highlights that this hasn't happened yet and progress in reading will come when the child no longer has this weakness. If taught well with phonics there is no weakness to be overcome. Children dont rely on weaker strategies and 95 percent plus learn to read well. Not so when children are taught explicitly to use other strategies.

I don't have KS1 children any more, but I would be curious to know what proportion of children passed the test nationally, and how that broke down according to sex and month of birth. It would be interesting to see if the younger children are less ready for phonics (parent of August and July children).

Dd1 would probably have failed the test at 5 whereas dd2 would have passed it - both summer girls, but dd1 didn't grasp phonics early.

The issue I have with this is the underlying politicised message that there is only one way to learn to read. And that way is to be taught in a school that spends public money on a limited range of resources published by consultants advising government that their methods are the only ones that work.
My own observations based on 20 years of teaching children in remote areas, often on a 1-1 basis, is that your 'weaker strategies' are some children's stronger strategies, especially where those children have any kind of speech and language delay or recall difficulties. Flogging phonics exclusively also does a disservice to more able readers who will naturally associate reading with meaning, knowledge and, heaven forbid, enjoyment. They will seek out text in all its forms and try to read it whether you want them to or not. The idea that you should forbid them books with any non- phonically decodable word in it is insane. Are teachers supposed to stop labelling the scissors drawer as well?
I'm not an anti- phonics dinosaur. I think letters and sounds, Jolly Phonics and all the rest of it are a great way of teaching phonics, and phonics are an important skill. They always have been. They aren't the whole story.

I'm afraid I am an anti-phonics dinosaur and proud to be! One size doesn't fit all, I have seen too many children struggling and losing confidence because their brain wants to do things differently from how they are being taught. Luckily for us, DD1 learned to read before the school system got hold of her. She is top of her year for reading, just going on to "free reading" as she ends yr1. She got 37 out of 40 in the test - I haven't really spoken to her about it but I'm sure the nonsense words would have thrown her.

I've posted this lots, but both ds1 and dd would have struggled with the phonics test for different reasons - Ds1 because his brain just didn't 'get' phonics for ages, but he does have a very quick memory, which meant he accessed reading by a different route - and the phonics clicked with him around about the end of Y2. He's just got level 5 in his KS2 SATs.

Dd would have failed because, even if she knew full well that 20 of the words were nonsense words, her response to those words at age 5 would have been to cry. So her maximum score would have been 20, despite being an amazing reader (and having a massively secure grasp of phonics!).

Ds2 IS Y1 this year, he is a May birthday and is a fantastic reader, he got 39/40, I don't know which one he got wrong, but having done some of the practice tests, the only ones he might have slipped up on were ones where he tried to make it into a real word, or rushed a made up word (eg Strom read as Storm), because he reads so much that he is way beyond the sounding out stage, and we all sometimes misread a word, through haste. It's no reflection on his phonics (ie he doesn't ACTUALLY think Strom is pronounced Storm, it's just a slip).

Where I find issue with the phonics is that all 3 of my children have to a greater or lesser extent, learned through actually reading books - ds1 learnt ALL his reading through just doing it (he was taught phonics at school, but he basically learnt through his own patent look and say method - eg 'Mummy what does that say?' 'Well, let's sound it out c-a-t, cat' 'ok, learnt that one, on to the next one'. Dd is an amazing writer, she is working at KS2 NC level 5, and is 8 (but in Y4), and this is largely because she reads so much.

And ds2, who is the only one to have gone through with this phonics screening, has amazing grammar, punctuation - because his brain memorises things from books - he uses speech marks, commas, full stops, capitals, colons, semi-colons, apostrophes, almost 100% correctly, because his brain soaks that sort of thing up from the written word. He is the antidote to sitting down and learning these things by rote (which is Gove's logical next step after the phonics, I know it's not directly the same thing), because he just absorbs it by osmosis. As does dd with the language she is using, she hasn't learnt to do that in class, it's just seeped into her through the huge range of books she reads.

Strom is apparently the word that was said incorrectly the most times at DSs school just because of children rushing really, at first glance it is so similar to storm, the other nonsense words were fine as they didn't look as much like real words from what I've been told.

DS1 learnt to read before school and was reading Y2 books when he started so he didn't learn phonics in the same way of course, when he asked me, I told him as I knew it and I generally used phonics rather than him learning high frequency words (his school does not do HF words at all) but probably not how the school would have taught him. I must have done ok as he knew all phase 4 and was on phase 5 when he started.

I am a big advocate of phonics as I can see the benefits through DS1 who can decode any word and rarely gets one wrong but I can of course appreciate it doesn't always work and DS2 may find it hard. He is 4 and is not reading yet and does not even know all his letters, he starts school September.

I am a bit about using words that look so like real words, tbh, because these are 5 and 6 year olds, and you don't need to have words that will trip them up if they go a bit fast, especially if they are used to reading advanced books fluently, where they don't sound everything out!

You could check the phonic skill for that sound just as easily with a word that didn't resemble a real word!

It seems to me that people who are dismissive of phonics at school because their children didn't need it should consider the fact that an awful lot of classroom disruption comes from children who can't read, and consequently can't do/understand what's being expected of them. They are not surprisingly bored and humiliated, so they play up. Phonics works for most of the children that other methods don't; and it's in everyone's interest that all children in their child's class can read well.

kesstrel, I think the problem I have is the opposite really - ds1 would have been held back by doing purely synthetic phonics - he didn't understand it, his brain didn't do the blending, but he does love reading and books, it was a much better way in for him.

I understand the argument that for most children it works, and if that's so, then great, but for the children for whom it really doesn't work (and ds1 is that child! - he did 'get' it eventually, end of Y2-ish), I don't think it's unreasonable to tackle reading from a different direction.

And to add to that, I'm not advocating using mixed methods, for most children, if the phonics works, go with it, 100%, but if it's not working, then teachers shouldn't be forced to bang on with the phonics, when a child can learn another way.

My ds is on the same level and failed. I knew he would as I read with him daily and I know that there are phonic sounds that he doesn't know despite the fact that they should have been covered in school.
I'm not bothered but at the first parent's evening next school year I will be asking about the extra help that he should be getting.

The people who have "politicised" reading are the university lecturers whose reading list for Early Years trainee teachers includes Marx and Foucault but nothing about the effective teaching of letter-sounds or phoneme awareness. (I've seen this list, by the way). They are the whole language campaigners who are against phonics instruction because it involves directly teaching children things, rather than "facilitating" their learning by discovery. They are relying on a philosophy that thinks it's more important for teaching to be "liberatory" than actually proven to be effective. Ordinary parents mostly have no idea of how much damage these political idealogues have done to the idea of "evidence-based" teaching practice. They are still pushing onto trainee teachers ideas like guessing from pictures or first letters, even though the theory behind these practices has been completely debunked by their colleagues in psychology departments.

Very confusing. My child was given a 1A in her report (on the cusp of a 2C her teacher said) and then have just heard that she failed the phonics test. How does that add up?

The test only tests phonics, not understanding. The NC levels will check reading level - ie what they are able to decode/understand/comprehend. No understanding is necessary for the phonics check.

strandednomore she could hardly have been thrown by pseudo words if she scored 37/40

My child was given a 1A in her report (on the cusp of a 2C her teacher said) and then have just heard that she failed the phonics test. How does that add up?
It's a very silly test.