The spelling paper is one of my favourite things to do a breakdown for. I find the process quite methodical and I love looking at how it matches up to the National Curriculum. This year, I really have started to notice how badly the National Curriculum is ageing compared to current word knowledge. If you want even more on how to teach spelling, make sure you check out our ‘How to Teach Spelling Effectively’ series. Start here with Part One.
Spelling Paper Part 1
The word rough kicks off the paper which I think is a good start, although it does have its fair share of things going on. It has three phonemes, one syllable and one morpheme, the same as last year’s count. It is a homophone too, with ‘ruff’. I’d wager rough is the more common spelling, unless you’ve just been studying the Tudors. I could picture this context sentence being said in a classroom, which really helps when it comes to homophones: ‘I did a rough sketch before starting my painting.’
The ‘ough’ letter pattern in words can have between seven and nine different pronunciations, depending on your accent. Sometimes these pronunciations are one phoneme. In this instance, we get two with /u/ and /f/ phonemes. Normally, with only one syllable and morpheme, the best route into spelling this word is to focus on the phonemes, but with these rarer graphemes, it is worth looking at the etymology of the word to support this pattern.
Next up, we have the word confusion. A word containing one of my favourite morphemes (‘com’/’con’). It is one of the non-statutory examples for the year 3 and 4 objective ‘endings which sound like /ʒən/’. Confusion is in Stage 3 Step 30 and the revision lesson at the end of the stage. These revision lessons are great because it is more like a spelling test. It’s easier to spell any word correctly if you know the whole lesson is about that letter pattern, hence why these revision lessons are so important.
Third up on the paper is flour. You won’t find this word in the National Curriculum or in the main Spelling Shed scheme, but you will find it in Phonics Shed. As a four-phoneme word, the patterns for spelling this are not overly complex. It is there because of the ‘homophone’ objective. I always think it is mean when they use homophones that are not the examples given, because there are ~12,000 in English. However, that might be why they stuck with a less complex spelling pattern and one that is likely to have come up in Key Stage 1. The syllables are a little odd on this word, because the letter ‘r’ is representing a schwa in this one and the schwa is a vowel phoneme, so it gives it an extra, unexpected syllable. The syllables are a bit easier to see in the homophone ‘flower’. In some pronunciations, it might appear as one syllable.
Our first statutory word appearance comes with the word ‘possible’, but that is not enough here. The word in the paper also adds the prefix ‘im-’ to the statutory word, meaning we have a lot of pattern combination here. The word possible appears in the non-statutory examples for year 5 and 6 with the ‘-ible’ ending and the word impossible appears in the year 3 and 4 objective of more prefixes. In the Spelling Shed lesson with the word ‘impossible’ we directly teach the children when to use ‘im-’, ‘il-’ or ‘ir-’, depending on the beginning letter. We also have the word ‘possible’ appear in the scheme four more times, so children will have spelled this word multiple times.
In our pre-SATs webinar, I predicted we would see the ‘ure’ at least once and it appears in the fifth word, pleasure. Due to the lack of words for this pattern, Spelling Shed has this word in three times across stages 2 and 3. Children find repeating patterns helpful when spelling and it helps that ‘measure’ and ‘treasure’ also follow the same pattern with ‘ea’/e/ and ‘s’/zh/ before the ‘ure’ helps too.
One of my predictions was that we would see the return of ‘y’ representing /i/ as it was missing in the 2025 paper. I did think it would be a more complex word than ‘crystal’, but the /l/ or /uh/ /l/ ending on words is a common spelling challenge for children, mixing up ‘il’, ‘al’, ‘el’ and ‘le’ endings. In Spelling Shed, we’ve included more work on this in stage 3 as we know it is such a tricky pattern. Despite ‘crystal’ not being in the non-statutory examples, we did include it in our scheme and explored the etymology in Stage 6, Step 1.
Machines is next, which was a bit of a surprise with machine appearing in the 2022 paper. This word is another where the objective might not be the challenge, with that /ee/ phoneme in there. I use this word a lot in my training when talking about exceptions in phonics. You really want to pull on all your threads for this word to stick: phonics, syllables and etymology.
My favourite morpheme is back, this time in the word confidently. It is another good example of combining patterns, with the suffix ‘-ly’ from year 3 and 4 and the word ending ‘-ent’ from year 5 and 6. Although the word confidently doesn’t show up in the examples, ‘confident’, ‘confidence’ and ‘confidential’ do a few times on page 18. Morphology and etymology are needed to support this word.
The “silent” letter words appear again and I was surprised to see it was another ‘kn’ one, after ‘knight’ last year. Knitting combines the “silent” letter pattern with adding ‘-ing’ to single syllable words from year 2. As ‘kn’/n/ is also a year 2 pattern, everything about this is covered in Key Stage 1 so the real challenge is tying it together amid other patterns. It is also covered by the year 5 and 6 pattern, “words with ‘silent’ first letters”, hence the inclusion in the paper. The word knit is a homophone for nit and I can certainly picture some people referring to the process of getting rid of them as ‘nitting’ or ‘denitting’, even if they aren’t ”officially” words.
The ‘fer’ morpheme is back and it is not the most common word either, with no trace of ‘differ’ or differed in the National Curriculum. This combined with the elision (omission of sounds when speaking) makes differed a bit of a challenge for the last word in section one. Using morphology matrices, children can get used to working with the bases and affixes they know in different combinations, just like this one from Stage 6, Lesson 17 where children could create the word differed and others.
I thought the start to part two was fairly mean. The word session can cause debate on the grapheme-phoneme correspondences in it, where the syllable break might go and the morphology is not obvious. This is one of the things we are hoping the new curriculum might fix. Children might have seen the ‘sess’ morpheme in words like ‘possess(ion)’ on the year 3 and 4 list or in a word like ‘obsession’, but ‘sess’ on its own is obscure. In the absence of prior knowledge of this morpheme, approaching it with syllables might mean some children would still succeed in the spelling. As session doesn’t appear in the National Curriculum, this further emphasises the point that we need to use multiple words to represent the patterns we are teaching, not simply stick to the words given. You will see the word session in Stage 4, Step 21 for exactly that reason.
When I said “I wonder if we will get ‘anti-’ this year” I was thinking where it would be a more obvious prefix, like antisocial or antibody. Instead, we get it combined with the ‘que’ pattern for antique. There are not many ‘que’ words to use so children will have worked with this word before and I think phonics paired with etymology, highlighting the French origins, will really help the spelling.
The only word directly from the year 3 and 4 statutory word list, probably. It returns under the year 5 and 6 pattern ‘words ending in -ably’ too. As the word is taught before the pattern, children might have learned to spell this through phonics and syllables, before learning about the suffix, so they might favour a non-morphological approach.
As we haven’t had a ‘cious’ word for a while, I predicted that one would appear this year. Suspicious is morphologically complex, so might have children pulling on other strands to spell it correctly. It is the last non-statutory example in the paper and the Spelling Shed activities link it to the dictionary definition, as well as encouraging children to use it in their own sentence composition. Definitely a tough spelling.
Next up we have elegant, another one without an obvious base to work with. For me, I start thinking of Bridgerton ballrooms, although it might not have the same impact for the children. I think if you were trying to tie this year’s words into a writing topic, something historical would hit the mark. Spelling Shed includes this word three times, even though it is not one of the non-statutory examples.
Here we meet more unstressed vowel phonemes with the word potential. Both syllables and morphemes would help you get to a successful spelling here. Thankfully this word follows the general pattern for adding ‘tial’ to words after a consonant. Spelling Shed uses the word in stage 5 and stage 6.
Overall, the words aren’t too unusual or far removed from vocabulary we are teaching children, even if they are using fewer and fewer curriculum examples each time, with only ten of this year’s words being found in the National Curriculum. Suffixes are still a huge focus, especially those with the /sh/ and /zh/ phonemes linked to the letter patterns around them, like ‘cious’, ‘tial’ and ‘sion’.
For a short(ish) word, this one gets four syllables packed in. As long as children are confident with ‘x’, examiner hopefully shouldn’t present too many problems and could even be covered by year 2 with the patterns involved in it.
The last three are considered the most difficult on the paper, which I do agree present a fair challenge this year. However, it is worth noting that all three of these harder words are from patterns taught in year 3 and 4, not year 5 and 6, reminding us it is an end of Key Stage assessment, not end of year.
Registration (along with ‘disastrous’) tends to come with the question, “where has the ‘e’ gone?” When you look into the etymology of these words you soon see the reasons why. It wasn’t there in the first place. I think needing that background knowledge of a word that wasn’t in the examples is what makes this one of the tricky three, despite the ‘ation’ part being a year 3 and 4 pattern.
Here we go again with the unstressed vowel phonemes. Hazardous should be ok for adding the suffix, but as every vowel grapheme can be used as a schwa at some point, it can be very hard to know which to use in an unfamiliar word. Etymonline.com suggests Spanish or Arabic have similar connections, so if you speak either of those languages you may have had an advantage on this word.
Every prediction I read suggested we couldn’t possibly have any more variations of ‘scene’ for the ‘sc’/s/ pattern and thankfully we did not. Instead, we had it as the last word on the paper: fascinating. ‘Fascinate’ is on the non-statutory examples for year 3 and 4 so children just needed to add the ‘-ing’ suffix to that. I think for the final word, considering it is meant to be more challenging, it is a fair assessment choice.
Overall, I think this paper really tested the depth of teaching patterns rather than words, with only 50% of the words appearing within the National Curriculum itself. To throw in words with schwas and homophones where they weren’t used as examples is a little mean as you need word experience to deal with those. The assessment seems to be heavily weighted on the suffixes again and combining patterns so anyone making full use of morphology matrices will have had greater success.
| Word | Pattern Years | Statutory List | Non-Statutory Example | In Spelling Shed | Homo-phone |
| rough | 3 and 4 & 5 and 6 | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| confusion | 3 and 4 | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| flour | 1 & 3 and 4 & 5 and 6 | No | No | No | Yes |
| impossible | 3 and 4 & 5 and 6 | Yes (possible) | Yes | Yes | No |
| pleasure | 2 & 3 and 4 | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| crystal | 2 & 3 and 4 | No | No | Yes | No |
| machines | 1 & 3 and 4 | No | Yes (machine) | Yes (machine) | No |
| confidently | 2 & 3 and 4 & 5 and 6 | No | Yes (confidential) | Yes (confidential) | No |
| knitting | 2 & 5 and 6 | No | No | Yes (knit and indirect) | Yes (part) |
| differed | 3 and 4 & 5 and 6 | No | No | Yes (different/ difference) | No |
| session | 3 and 4 | No | No | Yes (indirect) | No |
| antique | 3 and 4 | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| probably | 3 and 4 & 5 and 6 | Yes – 3 and 4 | No | Yes | No |
| suspicious | 5 and 6 | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| elegant | 5 and 6 | No | No | Yes | No |
| potential | 5 and 6 | No | No | Yes | No |
| examiner | 2 & 3 and 4 | No | No | Yes (re-examine) | No |
| registration | 3 and 4 | No | No | Yes | No |
| hazardous | 3 and 4 | No | No | No | No |
| fascinating | 2 & 3 and 4 | No | Yes (fascinate) | Yes (fascinate) | No |