Find out about the Year 1 phonics screening check at the Better Tuition Centre in Urmston

The Year 1 phonics screening check (not test!) will be run by all schools beginning in June of 2012 until such times as decoding phonics is no longer fashionable at the Department for Education.

The introduction of the screening checks have been somewhat controversial.  Why, ask parents, is my child being asked to sit a test (sorry, not a test – a ‘light-touch assessment’) in something that sounds like it comes straight off a nuclear physicist’s curriculum vitae (Activities and Interests: rocket science, quantum mechanics, decoding phonics…)?  In fact, decoding phonics is just the educational term for sounding out words and letters.

The Department for Education want to carry out the Year 1 phonics screening checks in order to identify those children who are struggling and will need extra help in Year 2.

There are two points of view to take into account here: on the one hand, it should be remembered that in many developed countries across the globe, children do not start school until they are seven years old.  For example, Finland’s education system is highly regarded but Finnish children are not expected to read as early as our children.  It is an accepted fact among educators that many children are not ready to read before the age of seven.  This being the case, some educators fear that children will be ‘labelled’ as ‘needing extra help’ simply because they are not yet ready to read.

On the other hand, if there is a difficulty with literacy (and this doesn’t just mean dyslexia) early intervention is key:  The sooner a child gets help, the quicker they will be able to catch up and hopefully not need the help any more. 

A further controversy is the use of non-words in section two of the Year 1 phonics screening check.  The Department for Education has admitted that some children found this confusing during trials of the screening check last year; presumably they are coming up with strategies to avoid this before the checks are rolled out in June of 2012.

The purpose of the non-words is to avoid children scoring higher than they should simply because they recognise words. 

This brings us onto the next point of contention: some educators feel that the test will lead to parents and schools placing too much emphasis on decoding phonics (sounding letters and words out) rather than word recognition and reading for understanding. 

You can read more about the detail of the Year 1 phonics screening test here on our website, but in the meantime we’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter, so why not leave a comment and tell us what you think?

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