Letters and Sounds: The Six Phases

Letters and Sounds is the 2007 government framework that divided phonics teaching into six phases, and its phase numbering is still the common language of primary reading in England even though the framework itself is no longer on the Department for Education's validated list. That is why your school can tell you your child is "on Phase 3" while using a programme called something else entirely. The phases outlived the document.

The six phases at a glance

If you take one thing from that table, make it this: two of the six phases teach no new sounds at all. Phase 4 and Phase 6 are about doing more with what is already known, and both are routinely mistaken for stalling.

Why does my school say Phase 3 if it does not use Letters and Sounds?

Because the vocabulary stuck even where the framework did not.

Letters and Sounds was published by the government in 2007 and became the default across English primary schools for well over a decade. An entire generation of teachers trained on its phase numbers, and reading book publishers banded their books against it. In May 2021 the Department for Education removed it from the list of validated systematic synthetic phonics programmes, with schools using it given until spring 2022 to move.

The phases did not go anywhere. Most replacement programmes kept a similar structure, publishers kept labelling books by phase, and teachers kept talking in phase numbers because parents and colleagues understood them. So "Phase 3" survives as a shorthand for a point in the progression, roughly the spring term of Reception, regardless of which programme a school actually runs.

How the phases line up with school years

The mapping most schools work to is Phase 2 in the autumn term of Reception, Phase 3 in spring, Phase 4 in summer, Phase 5 across the whole of Year 1, and Phase 6 in Year 2, with Phase 1 running through nursery and alongside the early weeks of Reception.

Two caveats, and they are the reason comparing children is such a bad idea.

The first is that schools genuinely differ. Some finish Phase 3 before Christmas and some run it well into spring, and both are within normal practice. A friend's child being "a phase ahead" may say more about the two schools than the two children.

The second is that children within a class are spread out, deliberately. Most schools group by the sounds a child is secure on rather than by age, so a single Reception class will have several phases running at once. A child sitting in the lower group in November is very often in the middle group by February. Movement between groups is designed in, not exceptional.

Was Letters and Sounds discredited?

No, and this is worth being precise about, because a lot of parent-facing explanations get it backwards.

The Department's own explanation was not that the phases were wrong or that the teaching order was flawed. It was that the 2007 handbook was not a complete programme. In the Department's words, it "isn't a full Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) programme because it doesn't provide the support, guidance, resources or training needed".

In practice that meant every school using it had to build the missing parts themselves: the detailed weekly sequence, the matched books, the assessment, the staff training. Some did that well and some did not, and the results varied accordingly. Validation was about requiring a programme that arrives complete rather than one each school has to finish on its own.

Nor was the change a blanket ban. Schools achieving strong results with their own Letters and Sounds based approach could continue; the requirement to adopt a validated programme applied to schools being supported through the English Hubs programme.

The framework was removed for being incomplete, not for being wrong. That distinction matters if you are trying to work out whether your child's phonics is any good.

What replaced it?

A set of validated programmes, several of which are direct descendants and use recognisably the same progression.

The first four are why phase language is still everywhere. The last two are why a parent moving between schools can suddenly find that nobody mentions phases at all.

Phase by phase, what is actually going on

Phase 1 has no letters in it, which reliably worries parents who were expecting reading. It is oral: hearing rhyme, spotting first sounds, clapping syllables, and above all oral blending, where an adult says c-a-t and the child hears cat. A child who cannot blend sounds heard aloud will not blend them on a page either, so this is foundational rather than warm-up.

Phase 2 is the first nineteen or so letter sounds plus the double letters ff, ll and ss. By the end of it a child can read simple three-sound words: cat, dog, sun, hill.

Phase 3 is the big vocabulary expansion. The remaining single letters, then the consonant digraphs ch, sh, th and ng, then the long vowel sounds. This is where most simple stories become possible and where reading usually starts to feel like reading.

Phase 4 teaches no new sounds. It is entirely about adjacent consonants, words like stamp, crisp and drift, where every individual sound is familiar but holding four or five in sequence is new. Children often appear to stall here, and it is the single most misread moment in the whole progression.

Phase 5 is Year 1 and the longest. One sound, several spellings. It is also the phase covered by the Year 1 phonics screening check in June.

Phase 6 shifts from reading to writing. Suffixes, prefixes, spelling rules, and building reading speed. By this point decoding is largely done and the work is fluency and accurate spelling.

Tricky words, phase by phase

Alongside the sounds, each phase brings a handful of common words that cannot yet be sounded out. Letters and Sounds called them tricky words, and the replacement programmes mostly kept both the term and the rough order.

• Phase 2: the, to, I, no, go, into
• Phase 3: he, she, we, me, be, was, you, they, all, are, my, her
• Phase 4: said, so, have, like, some, come, were, there, little, one, do, when, out, what
• Phase 5: oh, their, people, Mr, Mrs, looked, called, asked, could, should, would

Programmes shuffle a few of these between phases, so your school's list may differ slightly. The principle does not. These words break the rules the child currently knows, so there is nothing useful to sound out and no reward for trying.

Worth noticing that most of them stop being tricky later. He, she and we are perfectly regular once a child has met the e that says /ee/. They are only exceptions relative to what has been taught so far, which is a more hopeful way to think about them than "words English got wrong".

What this means for books at home

Phase numbers are useful for one thing and misleading for another.

They are useful as a rough position: knowing your child is at Phase 3 tells you they have met the long vowel sounds but not the alternative spellings, and that is enough to judge whether a book is fair.

They are misleading as a precise level, because two programmes can place the same sound in slightly different weeks. A Phase 3 book from one publisher can contain a spelling your school teaches in Phase 4. Practically, that means checking the book rather than trusting the label. Open a middle page and ask whether your child could work out every content word from what they have been taught.

The most useful question for a teacher is still not "which phase" but "which sounds are secure and which are we working on". A phase number is a summary. The sound list is the thing you can act on.

The Department for Education's explanation of the 2021 change is published on the Education Hub blog. Your school will tell you which validated programme it now uses, and its own progression document will show where your child is this term.