Interesting take on phonics check results.

[agoodinnings]

www.theguardian.com/education/datablog/2014/sep/26/primary-school-teachers-game-phonics-check

It seems pretty compelling to me.

The only way to drill children to the test is to teach them to decode - which is what they are supposed to do in the first place!

When you say the intake they've had, are you referring to the level of the children when they entered the school or as they are entering year 1.

It's difficult but not totally impossible to get at or near to 100% with an intake that enters the school with a low baseline if you get the teaching right in reception and year 1. If you leave it to year 1 though it becomes a lot harder.

Does it matter if some children were given the benefit of the doubt and their 31 became a 32?

32 isn't a magic number. Children who got 31,32 or 33 right are all probably very similar in decoding ability. And all still have a lot up learn.

They do all have a lot to learn, but those on 31 are likely to get extra help in Y2 to get them up to a standard to pass the test in a year's time. That might not happen to the children on 32 in some schools and may just have the normal classroom teaching.

I would use the check as a diagnostic tool for any child who scores less than 40 and look for gaps in knowledge

Good readers are quite likely to fail the test unless they have some training for it.

A crucial part of learning to read English is learning to look for meaning, rather than merely decoding. That is the only way that words like here - there, mean - meant, once - only can be read correctly.

For decoding the 20 nonsense words in the phonics check, readers who have moved past the basic decoding stage, and acquired the habit of assuming that words must make sense, have to suspend this skill. They must not try to look for meaning.

It's a very silly test.

Have you ever administered the check masha? I have and not one good reader has failed to achieve less than 40/40 in the three years the check has been in place ... It's a really good excuse for schools that encourage guessing from picture clues and initial letters when their good guessers fail to decode the words.

But masha the pupils have the context - the 'nonsense' words are names of aliens. That is the context. They can either read these alien names - or they're not good readers.

The KS1 statistics released last week, really really don't support your view that good readers are quite likely to fail.

Quite the opposite in fact. Unless all the good readers that failed the screening check in year 1 were mysteriously out performed in the KS1 assessments at the end of year 2 by the weaker readers that passed. Which would be a whole other discussion.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=SoX21V8-p40

And this: The school I work in train the children from day 1 in year 1 how to pass the test. They test them on old tests every term (including a September Baseline) and juggle the phonics groups around accordingly
is sad.

They're 5-6 year olds ffs.

I said that good readers are quite likely to fail
unless they had some training for the test.

More teachers must now be wasting their time on taking their ablest readers who have moved way past the decoding stage back to it by training them to decode nonsense words, because first time round many good readers failed the test by trying to make sense of the nonsense words. It's a perfect example of training for a pointless test.

It's like taking someone who has passed several grades for piano back to playing chopsticks.

I have not administered the test. I no longer teach. This does not prevent me from knowing that phonic decoding is only a very small, initial part of learning to read English, because of its many phonic inconsistencies (man - mAny, end - English, dOEs - shOEs) which cannot be tackled with the kind of basic decoding which the nonsense words test.

It will take a while, but i can predict with 100% certainty that the test will not help to reduce the number of children who leave primary school will poor reading skills (which is the UK's main educational problem).

It's not for lack of basic decoding skills that many pupils fail to learn to read well. They have trouble coping with the many different pronunciations for identical letters or really stupid spellings, like kEY, QUAY, thrOUGH.

Masha, genuinely good readers surely come across made up words in children's fiction all the time - or, in this multi-cultural world, real names that they haven't encountered before. How long does it take to say "here's some words, some of them are real English, but some are names of aliens." Thirty seconds? Hardly a massive waste of time.

Your concerns about spelling reform may have merit but don't affect the fact that all readers need strong phonics skills to cope with the words (real and made up) with which phonics can deal easily.

To return to the topic, I still want to know why that graph was so radically skewed.

'past the decoding stage'...

I'm not 'past the decoding stage' when I meet a word I've never met before. Since I have 2 degrees and a Postgrad qualification I consider myself fairly highly educated, but there are still words I have never read before. If I come across one of those in my reading, be it a biological term, a foreign name, whatever, I have to decode it to have any idea what it says. If I am told (or can use context to discover) that it is an alien name, then I will use my knowledge of phonic rules to have a good guess. Yes, there are some words that won't work for, but in the phonics test I believe as long as the attempt is phonically plausible it is given as correct.

You love getting bogged down in the minutiae of irregular spellings, Masha, but a solid phonics basis gives children the tools to tackle most words they will come across. Yes, they will get some wrong, and it is not until someone tells them those words that they will get it right, but without decoding skills they won't even come close.

Are there things that Year 2 teachers 'should' be doing with children who failed the phonics test? Should they be going back to the beginning of the Letters and Sounds scheme for example and doing it all again? My 6 year old got 0 in the test and I'm not too sure what the school should be doing in terms of helping him.

We did a lot of work over the summer but as far as I can gather he is now only having a specific phonics session once a week and I would have thought it should still be daily. Or is that not the case in Year 2?

They should be using the results as a diagnostic tool to help them plan. If the check shows that a child was unable to read words containing split vowels then the teacher can focus on these ... If there are huge gaps then it might be best to do a quick recap of basics before focusing on more complex spellings of the sounds.

I have not administered the test. I no longer teach.

A tad disingenuous, Marsha. You wouldn't have to administer the PSC even if you were still teaching as you were a Secondary English teacher. And not many of them, in my experience (having worked in Sec for over a decade), have any knowledge of how to teach children how to identify words.
(As you so ably demonstrate in your posts)