Essential Letters and Sounds Phase 5

Essential Letters and Sounds Phase 5 is the Year 1 phase, and it is about spelling rather than sound. Your child already knows the sounds. Phase 5 teaches the other ways those sounds get written, including the split digraphs that turn hop into hope. ELS splits the phase into two stages: the new spellings first, then the split digraphs. Nothing about it means your child has gone backwards, even though Phase 5 often feels slower than anything in Reception.

Below are the questions parents actually ask about this phase, answered plainly.

What is Essential Letters and Sounds?

Essential Letters and Sounds, usually shortened to ELS, is a systematic synthetic phonics programme published by Oxford University Press for Reception and Key Stage 1. It uses the same phase numbering that most UK parents have heard of, so Phase 2 is the Reception autumn territory, Phase 3 adds the digraphs, Phase 4 works on adjacent consonants, and Phase 5 is the Year 1 alternative spellings phase.

One thing ELS does slightly differently is the order inside Phase 3: it teaches the consonant digraphs before the vowel digraphs, so sh, ch and th arrive before ai and ee. That is worth knowing if you are comparing notes with a parent at a school running a different scheme.

What does Phase 5 actually teach?

ELS uses the Letters and Sounds phase numbering, and in that numbering Phase 5 is where children meet spellings including ay, ou, ie, ea, oy, ir, ue, aw, wh, ph, ew, oe and au, along with the split digraphs a-e, e-e, i-e, o-e and u-e.

The exact order is set by your school's ELS progression rather than by the phase label, so the reliable source is whatever sound comes home in the book bag that week. ELS matches books to the sounds taught that week, which is the single most useful thing to know about the scheme. If the letter sent home on Monday is oy, the book on Friday will be full of oy.

Why does ELS split Phase 5 into two stages?

Because they are two different jobs. The first stage is new spellings for known sounds: your child knows the sound in rain, and now learns it can also be written ay. The second stage is split digraphs, where the two letters making one sound are separated by a consonant. Grouping them separately gives the split digraphs the run at it they need.

For a parent the practical effect is that Phase 5 lasts a long time. It is a whole school year, not a half term. Progress inside it looks like more spellings arriving rather than a new level appearing on the book, which is why a Year 1 parent can feel stuck on the same label from September to July while the reading underneath is changing week by week.

What is a split digraph and why does it confuse everyone?

A digraph is two letters making one sound. A split digraph is two letters making one sound with another letter sitting in the middle. In hope, the o and the e are working together and the p is in the way. The e at the end is not saying anything on its own.

Children find this hard for an honest reason: everything before now taught them that letters sit next to the letters they work with. If your child reads hope as "hop", they have not failed, they have applied the previous rule. The fix is simply to point at the two letters and say they are a team, then move on.

Every phase before this one taught your child that letters work with their neighbours. Phase 5 is the phase where that stops being reliably true.

Which words does my child simply have to be told?

Some words cannot be sounded out cleanly. ELS calls these the harder to read and spell words, and in Phase 5 they include oh, their, people, Mr, Mrs, looked, called, asked, could, should and would.

There is no technique for these. Tell your child the word, let them read the sentence, carry on. Watching a five year old grind at should for thirty seconds teaches them that reading is a trap. Telling them takes two seconds and they will know it soon enough.

It is also worth knowing that these lists differ slightly between schemes, so a word your niece brought home last year may not be on your child's list this year. Go by the words your school actually sends home rather than by a list you find online.

Why does my child seem slower in Year 1 than they were in Reception?

Because there is now a choice to make. Up to Phase 4, one spelling reliably gave one sound, and your child could barrel through. From Phase 5 onwards a spelling may mean more than one thing, so the child has to decode, listen to what came out, decide whether it is a real word, and go back and try the other option if it is not.

That extra decision shows up as time. It can look like a child who has stalled and is actually a child doing more work per word than they used to. The phrase worth teaching at home is "try the other sound". Say it out loud yourself the first few times so they hear what trying again sounds like.

How do I say the sounds correctly at home?

This matters more in ELS than parents expect, because a sound said with a grunt on the end will not blend. The guidance published for parents on Oxford Owl is to say the sound cleanly with no "uh" after it. It is "mmm", not "muh". It is a crisp "t", not "tuh".

ELS sorts the sounds into two kinds. Bouncy sounds, which includes b, d, g, k, p and t, are said short and crisp. Stretchy sounds, which includes m, s, f, l, n, r, v and z, are stretched out. If you are unsure, the sound videos on Oxford Owl take about a minute each.

Why is the book that comes home so easy?

Because it is meant to be. The book is practice, not a test, and it is matched to sounds your child has already been taught in class that week. Fluency is built by reading easy text quickly, not hard text slowly, so an easy book is doing exactly its job.

It is also why the book looks thin compared with the picture books on your shelf. Those two things are not competing. Keep reading much harder books aloud to your child at bedtime; that builds vocabulary, comprehension and appetite, which their own decoding cannot yet reach. More on the logic of matched books is in our explainer on decodable books.

How does ELS Phase 5 compare with other schemes?

Schools run different programmes and the labels vary wildly, but a Year 1 child is in roughly the same place whatever the scheme calls it.

If you are not sure which of these your school uses, the book itself usually tells you. A bare phase number points to ELS or another Letters and Sounds descendant; a phase number with a school term beside it points to Little Wandle. There is a fuller rundown in our guide to the phases.

What if Phase 5 is not going well?

Use concrete signals rather than a feeling. If your child is stopping on more than about one word in ten in a book sent home at their own level, that book is too hard for them today, and the teacher will want to know. The same applies if they read every word accurately and then cannot tell you a single thing that happened.

Two habits help while you wait. Wait five seconds before you help, because most children get there at about four. And when five seconds have gone, give the sounds rather than the word: saying "s-t-r-ay" hands them the win, because they still do the blending.

What you should not do is form a view about a condition. That is not a kitchen table call. Send a short, specific message to the class teacher instead: this is what I am seeing, this is how long a page takes, what would you suggest.

Where to go next

Phase 5 is long and undramatic and it is where reading quietly becomes automatic. Ten calm minutes a day from a book that is slightly too easy will do more than an hour of the hard stuff at the weekend. If you want to know what the next stretch of Year 1 holds, our Year 1 phonics books guide covers it.

Lindo Phonics is not connected to Essential Letters and Sounds or Oxford University Press and is not endorsed by them. We match the published progression so a story only uses sounds your child has already been taught.