Yr1 phonics check

[shoelaces]

How does your school tell you the results?

I know/hope they would contact me if they had concerns. But is that it? Is it normal to not know anything at all?

Not even a note saying well done/brag/boast our school/class average was x

catkind Of course anxiety is bad, but I just don't see how misleading a year 1 kid about a phonics check (not a test) and not just being open and making it out to be the normal part of school life that it is. That's the whole point of it being a check, you cannot fail it, so yes I'd be outraged if they were told they failed, but equally I'd be pretty annoyed if it came to a surprise about where they were with phonics.

Were going to check your phonics, every kid gets this in year 1, it's a good way of making sure we're teaching you well, did you know 20 years ago lots of kids didn't manage to learn to read?

Last week we were practicing the sounds and you were finding tch tricky right, are there others you think you might be tricky? Anyway, it won't take long...

I just don't believe pretence and hiding what you're doing reduces anxiety, you can't control the message enough to actually make a child think it's as irrelevant as you need them to, so being completely open is the way to go.

Yes being positive and encouraging whilst you're reading with them, and teaching anything, you need to be at a very high and self aware level of a skill where genuine criticism can be useful, I'm sure that would never apply in these situations or ever for primary kids. Telling them if they still need to learn more about phonics is not that though.

They know what phonics they know and what they don't yet. Their individual targets and learning. They don't know phonics checks and SATs are anything special because from the child's point of view they aren't. Teachers are checking their progress all the time. At 6 feedback weeks after the event on a learning task is a waste of time, the other tasks where they get immediate feedback are much more useful. Phonics check is for the teachers not for the kids.

They get the feedback about the phonics check immediately, the teacher immediately knows the mark - that's what you give to the child, not what that mark means for the purposes of the check (has the school done its job) So sure, if you're saying the kids should get immediate feedback - you got 35 of those right, these are the ones you got wrong, or you got 12, you were right when you said oo would be tricky. Then yep, it's much more important than finding out 32 was the mark that triggered more help.

But the kid above who got 18, didn't need to be given the impression that he'd done well.

Even as a volunteer I can tell which kids read at home.
No, nobody can, if a particular kid has some difficulties. For one 15 min of reading at home even occasionally may lead to a progress, for the other regular and systematic efforts at home may have no visible result.

That's the whole point of it being a check, you cannot fail it
So why is there a passing mark? :-) You can fail it if not scored enough. And this is a piece of real life: you pass or fail and if you fail, you need to work more to succeed. I mean 'work' as reading is no way easy for kids who cannot get it till the end of Y1. Kids already spent 2 years at school, they are 6 y.o., it's a reasonable age to introduce responsibility, imho.

Are they even allowed to do that? Tell them how many they got right immediately?

Well hopefully they do practice psc which they would get feedback from immediately and directed to the phonics they are weaker on.
Dd and i did the 3 past papers on the Sunday just before.

Not getting immediate feedback on the real one makes less difference when you have provided it before.
Phonics truly can be fun. But i still think those stuck on it for a third year would be bored of it all.
I wonder if you can tell how much a child has read/been read to in that even if their reading was weak they would be doing better at the comprehension /inference than expected. I would think where parents 'cant be bothered' both skills would be weak.
I can see how kids get behind though as a strong reader will be reading to themselves learning more, faster more independent. Whereas a weaker reader going into say yr 2 is still spending 15min a day struggling with simple language and shorter stories.
Looking at sats papers for ks1 compared to the psc they look pretty tough (for some only nearly 7yo).

Trying to force something when they are not ready definitely turns kids off. Dd is already saying she is rubbish at maths. She isnt particularly but it is putting her off wanting to do any, whereas she is happy to do the reading.

Not sure if doing practice PSC is a hope. I'm rather sad they seem to have spent large swathes of year 1 practising reading lists of alien words. I don't think that was the idea of it.
I meant actually I can literally tell who reads at home from the reading book system. But I do think it also shows up in how they interact with me and how they progress. Non home readers pick stuff up quickly in class relative to their current knowledge level, home readers progress faster from one month to the next.

I didn’t practice with ds but they had done practices through the year and he got them all right according to teacher. He was also shown them in reception when they were trying to assess him for rwi and book bands, alongside the word lists they use in ks1.
Tbh it is not just them reading to you to helps their reading but you reading to them.
Also things like the summer reading challenge help with their reading skills as they can see there are good books out there that aren’t book band books. It also helps prevent summer slide.

Are they even allowed to do that? Tell them how many they got right immediately?

The guidance appears silent on it, I can't remember when DD was told (she's YR2 now), it was certainly long before the end of term reports and the parent reporting, but can't remember if it was immediate.

They talked individually about the SATs the week after though. It's also entirely possible that this is just something they do with some kids in the class and isn't normal.

So why is there a passing mark? There's not, there's an expected standard. As I said above, I'm really up on kids taking their own responsibility for learning this stuff, but I do think it's important that to make a distinction between pass/fail and not the standard expected. As it actually enables them to take responsibility for reaching the standard, and is much more aligned with other kid progression (moving into the next swimming group when they've reached the right standard etc.)

But it's a universal standard. Easy for most, incredibly hard for others. Friend's child was not capable of meeting that standard. His mum's a primary teacher, he had all the support in the world, but due to issues he had he was not capable of meeting that standard. Making him feel responsible for something so completely out of his control would be cruel. Like putting a beginner in stage 5 swimming and holding them responsible for their lack of progress.

Why should he feel responsible? The check is to identify children who for whatever reason struggle with decoding so that they can be supported rather than left to flounder or sink.

sirfred said children should be taking their own responsibility for learning this stuff mrz. I was disagreeing. Do you tell children they're taking a test and what their results are? They don't really talk about testing with our infants, it's all just learning.

Ds told me off for calling it a test, school are very clear it’s a screening check

I don't tell them but increasingly I'm finding parents tell them. I had a complaint from one parent this year because I wasn't sending home lists of pseudo words to learn at home.

We had a pop in event at the beginning of the year about it. It was interesting but a lot I knew anyhow as ds was a strong reader from the start.

sirfred said children should be taking their own responsibility for learning this stuff mrz.

Their own responsibility for knowing what they are learning - that doesn't mean they have to teach themselves or anything like that, just know what it is they need to learn and practice, and the next steps of getting there, guided by teachers. It's an essential skill, and the amount of giudance required lessens all the time.

There are very few children for whom the phonics check represents appropriate next steps in learning. For most they're way past it. For a few they're not there yet. They shouldn't be practising for it, they should be practising reading books and other materials for their learning, being able to pass the phonics screening check should be a byproduct of the fact they can read and can use phonics to decode unknown words, not a target in itself. Surely?

Tbh though the phonics test is also great for children who have bluffed through two years of phonics by memorising words.

mrz, sad thing is we have literally been sent home lists of pseudo-words to practice, all year.

These angst over this PSC is just silly. For most kids, it's nothing to worry about. But for some, it's a big deal.
And I don't agree with sir, it's not children's responsibility at this young age.
It's either the school have problem teaching them properly, or, the child has some difficulty. Neither is children's responsibility.

catkind, I don't think there's nothing wrong in sending pseud words to read at home. It's either they can read it or not. How the parents and teachers use that info to help kids with problems that matters.

Irvine, I think there's an opportunity cost to reading word lists when you could be reading a story or a poem or something. Didn't do mine any harm as she reads for hours anyway, and mostly didn't bother with the lists. For kids not already hooked though, word lists aren't the most engaging.

That's the thing, Cat. The child who has no problem, they get through in few seconds. Child who has difficulty with phonics, parents can realise that earlier than actual PSC, tell the teacher, and they can give them extra support. Don't need to wait until actual PSC.

That doesn't explain why so many teachers were surprised that their "good" readers were unable to decode 40 fairly simple words.

Don't even know when we get the results from it fed back to us - I know generally the year group have done "really well" just from chatting with the class teacher but no idea how mine has done on an individual basis.

One local school to us has been coaching the absolute living daylights out of the kids stressing them out over this - loads of "mock phonics tests" and pushing them to beat their last score before the test (lots of parents I know have kids there and were really pissed off about it) - ours did a couple of weeks of making sure the kids were OK with the alien words concept and that was about it.