Phonics screening check: Jonathan Glazzard, Professor of Education for Social Justice at the University of Hull explains why this test taken by six-year-olds in England just isn’t needed.
At the end of year one, when they are five or six, all children at state schools in England must take a test called the phonics screening check. The check measures their ability to use synthetic phonics – an approach to teaching reading – to blend sounds together to read words. If they don’t pass, children take the test again in the next school year.
However, recent research from think tank the Education Policy Institute suggests that there is no evidence that the phonics screening check leads to improvements in reading later in a child’s school journey.
In addition, the report found no evidence that the check has narrowed attainment gaps in reading – such as the difference in results between children from richer and poorer backgrounds – by the end of primary school.
The Education Policy Institute report argues that, according to data from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls) which takes place every five years, results do not provide any indication that the phonics screening check has positively affected the reading skills of children in England.
This message is in stark contrast to claims made in 2023 by the previous government that more children are reading confidently and reaching their potential as a result of the check. But the Pirls data shows that, although the average reading score improved very slightly in 2021 compared to the average score in 2011, there has been little substantive variation in the scores since 2001. Therefore reading scores are not improving substantially over time.
These are worrying findings, because this is a high-stakes assessment for schools. The results of the phonics screening check are reported annually to the Department for Education. In fact, the Education Policy Institute report found that nearly 40% of teachers believe the test should be scrapped altogether.
These results chime with the findings of my own research, carried out with Margaret Clark in 2018. We found that 94% of teachers did not think that the phonics screening check provided them with any useful information about children’s reading. We also found that 68% of teachers did not think that schools should be legally required to carry it out.
All in on phonics
The PSC was introduced in 2012, following the introduction of synthetic phonics in all English primary schools. Synthetic phonics is an approach to teaching reading in which words are broken down into the smallest meaningful units of sound, called phonemes, which are represented by groups of letters called graphemes.