Helpful hints for phonics decoding check

The week of 16th June 2014 is the third annual decoding check for Year 1 children and resits for Year 2 children who either failed the test or did not take it last year. Despite the proximity of the week, there are still things you can do to prepare children at this stage.

· In the couple of weeks leading up to the check, go over particular graphemes again. The analysis of the last couple of years show the most mistakes were on split digraph and the Phase 3 /oi/  grapheme. This was regardless of whether they were real or pseudo words. Further analysis has shown that unless the pseudo words were too similar to real words as in the first year (remember ‘strom’ and ‘frist’) or unless they had bizarre spellings (‘quorg’ and ‘quigh’) children were equally able to read real or pseudo words. So don’t worry about pseudo words, concentrate on the graphemes and use www.phonicsplay to encourage decoding skills.

· Do as much reading with children as you can. Expose them to opportunities where they have to decode and read for meaning. Whilst it is still true that some really good readers, who are almost past the stage of needing to decode, do find the check particularly challenging, with a real focus on decoding unfamiliar words, those children should not have problems with the check. They do however need reminding to carefully use their phonics rather than quickly glancing at a word.

· This year the pass mark will not be made available till after the results have been sent in. This is because in previous years statistical analysis has shown the very unlikely event; that there was a spike in the number of children who just managed the pass mark. The insinuation is that teachers were ‘helping’ children to pass and so the pass mark will be delayed, only being made available on Monday 30th June. Whether this has a big impact on the national and local data remains to be seen….

Whilst OFSTED do have a huge focus on the phonics and the decoding check data, it is important to remember that there will be some children who are just not at that point yet. So long as it is a handful of children and not half a class, that is perfectly acceptable. OFSTED always look at what you are doing to support those children who are underachieving rather than expecting every single child to be at the same level.

Finally– don’t panic– phonics is a tool for learning to read rather than the end result– we want readers and not just decoders in our schools.