The Phonics Screening Check takes place in June each year. All eligible Year 1 pupils will participate and some Year 2 pupils will resit it if they did not pass it when they were in Year 1. If children are absent during this week, then they will complete the check during variation week (the week after).
What Is the Phonics Screening Check?
The phonics screening check consists of 40 words. 20 of the words are real words and 20 are pseudo-words. Pseudo-words are words that do not have any meaning in English, although they do have plausible spellings in English, so the children should be able to decode them. There is no time limit on the check. Although the pass mark is variable, it has consistently been 32 since the check began in 2012. The pass mark is released after the check.
The check consists of two sections and gets progressively more complex. The pseudo-words, also commonly referred to as nonsense words or alien words, have an image of an alien-like character next to them, hence the term ‘alien word’. The words in section 2 contain slightly more difficult GPCs than the words in section 1. Some of the words are longer and there are more letter-sound correspondences. Children are allowed to sound out the words and are allowed to self-correct. Children can have a break during the phonics screening check.
What Is the Purpose of the Phonics Screening Check?
‘The purpose of the phonics screening check will be to confirm that all children have learned phonic decoding to an age-appropriate standard. Children who have not reached this level should receive extra support from their school to ensure they can improve their decoding skills, and will then have the opportunity to retake the phonics screening check.’
Standards & Testing Agency, 2017
The phonics screening check can help educators identify the pupils that need more support. Early reading is vital! If children cannot access texts, then accessing the rest of the curriculum will be more difficult for them.
Why Does the Phonics Screening Check Include Nonsense Words?
The phonics screening check includes pseudo-words or nonsense words, as this is the purest form of assessing decoding. It helps assess that the children can decode the words rather than memorising them.
Even as adults, sometimes we must decode words, whether it is the name of a new place, unfamiliar vocabulary or a nonsense word in a book, such as ‘jabberwock’ coined by Lewis Carroll, ‘hobbit’ from the world of J.R.R. Tolkien or ‘snozzwangers’ created by Roald Dahl.
Administering the Phonics Screening Check
The educator administering the phonics screening check should be familiar, experienced and well-trained in phonics and teaching phonics. This is because there is a lot of phonics knowledge needed, as set out in the ‘Assessment framework for the development of the year 1 phonics screening check’ guidance document. The administer must be known to the pupil and cannot be a relative of the child. The check should take place in a quiet room, which is well-lit. The room should be prepared before the check is administered, including covering or removing display materials that could help pupils. If multiple adults are administering the check at the same time, you should use separate rooms, so the pupils don’t disturb each other.
Access Arrangements
There is a lot that you can do to make the phonics screening check more accessible for pupils. The following access arrangements should only be put in place if this is normal classroom practice for that child.
Rest Breaks
Although it usually takes pupils between 4 and 9 minutes to complete the phonics screening check, there is no time limit and therefore you can take as long as you need. If more rest breaks are needed, we recommend using fewer words per page. If a pupil takes rest breaks, they must be kept separate from the rest of the cohort until they have completed the check.
Cued Speech
Cued speech can be used if a pupil with a hearing impairment is familiar with it.
‘If a pupil with a hearing impairment is familiar with cued speech, it can be used by an appropriately trained professional to make their responses clear.
If a pupil with a hearing impairment would prefer to speak the words, you should use cued speech to help clarify what sounds they are aiming for.’
Standards & Testing Agency, 2025
Which Pupils Should Not Take the Phonics Screening Check?
The Standards & Testing Agency administration guidance details pupils who are recommended to not participate in the phonics screening check.
Pupils who
- have shown no understanding of grapheme-phoneme correspondences
- have not completed the first year of the KS1 English programme of study
- have recently moved to the country and are unable to understand letters and sounds in English
- use British Sign Language or other sign-supported communication, such as communication boards, to spell out individual letters
- are non-verbal, or selectively mute
- have been absent during the check window
should not take the check.
Speech Difficulties and Visual Phonics
If there are pupils in your class who have speech difficulties, this can be taken into account. For example, if a child consistently produces the /f/ sound when attempting /th/ with their tongue, this pattern can be taken into account when interpreting their responses. Additionally, if children typically use visual phonics, where an action supports the sound that they are making, this strategy can also be incorporated. This does not mean that you can show the action to the child; however, if a child says a word and you are not sure which sound they are trying to say, then they can do the action linked to your phonics scheme to help you know which sound they are aiming for. For example, if you use Phonics Shed, they could use one of the actions to help you know which sound they are aiming for. You cannot tell them if they are correct or not.
Sound Buttons
‘If a pupil uses sound buttons to help them decode words as part of normal classroom practice, they may use them during the check. You must give the pupil a clean copy of the check so they can mark the sound buttons against the graphemes. You must not mark the graphemes for the pupil.’
Standards & Testing Agency, 2025
Often educators will laminate the check or use an overlay; however, it does not explicitly state in the guidance whether this is acceptable. We recommend photocopying or printing it.
Adapted Check Materials
If you require Braille versions, these must be ordered in advance. During the week, you can download different versions of the phonics screening check, including black and white images or without images, if children find the images distracting.
You can change the font, font size, have fewer words per page or have coloured overlays.
What Is the Structure of the Phonics Screening Check?
The structure of the check is clearly outlined in the Standards & Testing Agency (STA) Assessment Framework, which can be downloaded here.
The real words will include between 40 % and 60% less common words, which children are less likely to have read previously. This means that the real words used in the check are likely to be obscure. Less common words are included so that most children will need to decode using phonics rather than rely on sight memory of words that they have seen before.
Each section in the phonics screening check is organised by difficulty and real and pseudo words. Real words and pseudo-words will not be on the same page. As the phonics screening check increases in complexity, the final pages represent the expected standard of phonological decoding proficiency for children by the end of Year 1.
Over time, the phonics screening check will include all the single letters of the alphabet and all the GPCs listed in the STA guidance document. This is over the course of a few years, so not all in one phonics screening check. The inclusion of the graphemes does not necessarily represent how common they are, so the letter ‘x’ could occur as much as the letter ‘t’, even though the letter ‘t’ is more common in the English language.
Phonics Screening Check and Phonics Shed Comparison Chart
This handy Phonics Screening Check and Phonics Shed Comparison Chart shows the graphemes that are listed in the STA guidance and where they are taught within Phonics Shed’s DfE validated SSP programme. It details the grapheme, phoneme, an example word and the Phonics Shed Chapter and Set that it is taught in.
All of the GPCs that appear in section 1 of the phonics screening check are taught in Chapter 2 or Chapter 3 of Phonics Shed, which is taught in Reception. That means that by the end of Reception, pupils should be able to decode and read all of the words in section 1, which is 20 of the words in the phonics screening check.
Phonological Structure and Orthographic Structure
The STA guidance outlines the structures of the words, as shown in the table below. You can see the phonological structure of words or the orthographic structure.
C is used to mark each consonant or consonant digraph.
V marks a vowel phoneme, including ‘y’ when it represents a vowel phoneme. For example, in the word ‘by’, the letter ‘y’ represents an /i/ sound, which is a vowel. Therefore, the phonological structure is CV.
In the orthographic structure, the C is used to mark each consonant letter and the V is used to mark each vowel letter. Therefore, CC is used to mark a consonant digraph, VV is used to mark a vowel digraph, VVV to mark a vowel trigraph and VCV to mark a split digraph. They are underlined to show that they are connected.
That is a lot of ‘C’s and ‘V’s!
You may also notice that this is shown on Phonics Shed’s word lists on the website. The blue shows the phonological structure of the word and the red shows the orthographic structure of the word.
Section 1 of the phonics screening check usually follows the phonological structure of CVC words, one VCC word, CCVC words and then CVCC words.
The example above from the 2024 Phonics Screening Check paper demonstrates how section 1 follows this criteria.
Section 2 of the phonics screening check becomes more complex, the phonological structure of the words becomes longer and it includes split digraphs. The end of the check includes two-syllable words.
This example from the 2024 Phonics Screening Check shows that the first page of section 2 includes two split digraphs and on the second page, there are consonant blends. In contrast to section 1, section 2 contains more real words than pseudo words.
The final page of the phonics screening check includes a five-letter two-syllable word, a six-letter two-syllable word, a seven-letter two-syllable word and an eight-letter two-syllable word.
What Does the Phonics Screening Check Not Include?
Some grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPC)s are not included in the phonics screening check. Additional doubles, for example, ‘pp’, ‘tt’ and ‘dd’, are not included in the phonics screening check. The trigraph ‘ure’ will not appear in the phonics screening check, as there are a lot of different pronunciations and a lot of regional variability of this grapheme.
Other graphemes that are not included are:
‘ear’
‘oe’
‘ew’ representing the /oo/ sound
‘ey’
‘are’
‘or’ representing the /ur/ sound
‘ey’ representing the /ay/ sound
‘o’ representing the /oo/ sound
‘a’ representing the /ai/ or /o/ sound
‘y’ representing the /ee/, /i/ or /igh/ sound
‘zh’
Despite this, these should still be taught as they are part of the curriculum and important in teaching phonics. The assessment should not dictate the curriculum.
Other curriculum objectives that we need to consider that are not assessed in the phonics screening check are:
•High Frequency Words including Common Exception Words
• GPCs that are not covered, e.g., ‘ure’, ‘ear’
• Appendix 1 of the National Curriculum
• Appendix 2 of the National Curriculum
• Other reading skills: comprehension
• Writing: transcription and composition
How Can You Help Pupils Prepare for the Phonics Screening Check?
Online Games
Online games can help consolidate knowledge. The images above show some of Phonics Shed’s online digital games that are included in Phonics Shed’s 30-day free trial and subscription. There are games for every GPC and they can easily be assigned to pupils.
Reading Books
Reading as many books as possible will help children practise reading. This could be Phonics Shed’s decodable reading eBooks and physical books, as pictured above, but it doesn’t have to always be a book from a phonics scheme.
Claude at the Circus by Alex T. Smith
Books like in the example above, where children can read most of the words, but need assistance with some of the words can be used with adult support for the words that they don’t know the GPCs for yet.
Provision
If you want to increase the amount of exposure children are getting to phonics, you can use different provisions within your classroom. All of Phonics Shed’s lesson plans include continuous or enhanced provision suggestions, which can help bring phonics into other areas of your classroom. Additional suggestions are included at the bottom of each lesson plan, which can be used as homework or within the classroom.
Phonics Screening Simulator
Phonics Shed’s phonics screening simulator can be used as an assessment tool. It follows the structure of the real deal. After launching the assessment, children will be presented with a practice section (skippable, not scored), section 1 and section 2. You can easily mark the pupil’s responses and a data report for each child can be printed.
Phonics Shed Planning
The image above shows Phonics Shed’s Year 1 Medium Term Plan. The Year 1 Medium Term Plan has been purposefully designed to give educators time to consolidate learning and prepare for the phonics screening check in summer 1 and the beginning of summer 2. This is named ‘Recap Chapter 2 to 4b’ and consists of guidance, planning and resources for Chapter 3 recap, 4a recap and 4b recap, planning and resources for word level fluency recap and sentence level fluency recap. Recap Chapter 2 to 4b can be viewed and downloaded in the Phonics Shed hub.
Common Problems
Missing Split Digraphs
One of the common problems that children have difficulty with is split digraphs. Therefore, this is a key focus in Phonics Shed’s Recap Chapter 2 to 4b, including identifying them in pseudo-words and in real words and sorting words according to whether they include a split digraph or not.
Switching Letters
Switching letters is also a common problem. In the example above, we can see the pseudo-word ‘strom’, which children might mistake for the real word ‘storm’. Sorting activities and use of sound buttons can help children with this.
Easily Confused Graphemes
Children can often confuse graphemes such as ‘sh’ and ‘ch’ or ‘ay’ and ‘oy’ or ‘b’ and ‘d’. It is important to know your pupil’s strengths and weaknesses, as this could impact pupil’s results if the grapheme occurs a lot in the phonics screening check. For example, it is likely that a lot of the words in the phonics screening check will include a ‘b’ or ‘d’; therefore, if children struggle with those graphemes, this could significantly impact their score.
Forgetting to Blend
Children often forget to blend the words and the administrator of the phonics screening check cannot prompt them to blend the sounds together. In the lead-up to check, make sure children are saying the phoneme and then blending the word without a prompt. It is also important for children to practise this with longer words.
Making the Pseudo-Words Real
Pseudo-words are often mistaken for real words if they look similar to a real word. Make sure you practise pseudo-words; talk about what the ‘alien’ character next to the word means so children know whether it is a real word or not.
Independence
Make sure everything you do in class is leading to the children reading independently and independently blending in the check. If you want children to use sound buttons, they must do this independently and not at the prompt of an educator.
Video Webinar Recording: Teachers: Ensuring Success in the Phonics Screening Check
Watch this free webinar recording for all of the above.
Video Webinar Recording: Parents: What is the Phonics Screening Check?
Please share this free webinar recording with parents and carers at your school.