The Year 1 Phonics Screening Check: What It Is and How to Help

The phonics screening check is a short, one to one reading task taken in June of Year 1, in which a child reads 40 words aloud to a teacher: 20 real words and 20 made-up ones. It takes a few minutes. There is no writing, no comprehension, no time limit in the sense your child would notice. It is a check on one thing only, which is whether they can turn letters into sounds and blend them into a word.

Most children do not know it is happening. That is deliberate, and it is the right starting point for how much to say about it at home.

What the check actually is

It runs in England. Every Year 1 child takes it in June, sitting with a teacher they know, usually in a quiet corner of the school rather than a hall. The words are on a sheet. Your child reads them out loud, one at a time, and the teacher records whether each one was read correctly.

Twenty of the 40 are real words. The other twenty are pseudo words, which are made up and have no meaning at all. On the sheet, each pseudo word is printed beside a small picture of an alien, so children understand at a glance that this one is not supposed to be a real word.

Year 2 pupils also take it if they did not take it in Year 1, or if they took it and did not meet the standard. The full administration guidance sits on the gov.uk phonics screening check pages.

Why half the words are made up

This is the part parents most often find strange, and it is the whole design of the check. A real word can be recognised from memory. It can be guessed from the shape of the letters, from the picture beside it, from the sentence around it. A made-up word can be none of those things.

The alien words are the point: they cannot be recognised or guessed, so they test decoding and nothing else. A child who has memorised a hundred words will stall on them. A child who can genuinely sound out will read them as easily as the real ones.

The alien words are not a trick. They are the only part of the check that memory cannot fake.

This also explains why a child can seem to be reading well at home and still find the check hard. Guessing from the picture, or from the first letter plus the shape of the sentence, gets a child a long way through an early book and no distance at all through a list of nonsense words. Decodable books exist precisely to close off that habit before it sets, which is covered in more detail in what decodable books actually are.

The threshold, and why it is not a fixed number

A threshold mark is published each year in June, at which point a child is described as having met the expected standard. It has been 32 out of 40 for many years, which is why that figure is quoted so often, but it is set annually rather than fixed in advance. Treat 32 as indicative, not as a rule carved into the system.

Headteachers must report your child's score to you by the end of the summer term. You will get a number. You will not get a ranking, and the score is not a grade for your child.

Step 1: Change nothing in January

The most effective preparation is the ordinary reading your child is already doing. Schools teach towards the check all year without calling it that, because the check tests exactly what phonics teaching covers.

Starting a special programme months early tends to add anxiety without adding skill. If your child reads their school book most nights and their decoding is on track, you are already doing the preparation.

Step 2: Find out which sounds your child has been taught

This is worth five minutes of your time. Different schools use different programmes, and knowing which one yours runs tells you what your child is expected to know by June. If you are unsure, which phonics scheme does my school use walks through how to work it out from the book that comes home.

Once you know, you can match practice to it. Practising a spelling your child has not met yet is not preparation. It is just a new thing to get wrong.

Step 3: Practise sounding out, not memorising

Ask your child to read the word by sounds, out loud, then say the whole word. That is exactly what the check asks for. If they read a word instantly and correctly, brilliant, move on. If they stall, give them the sounds rather than the word: s-t-o-p hands them the win, whereas saying "stop" does the job for them.

How you say the sounds matters more than parents expect. Say each sound cleanly with no uh on the end, so mmm rather than muh. Sounds like b, d, g, k, p and t are bouncy: short and crisp. Sounds like m, s, f, l, n, r, v and z are stretchy and can be held. A word said as muh-a-tuh is very hard to blend into mat.

Tricky words are the exception. Words like said, the and one cannot be sounded out with the sounds your child has been taught, so trying is not practice. Tell them the word, keep the story moving, and come back to it another day if it keeps stopping them.

Step 4: Wait five seconds before you help

Count to five in your head. Most children who are going to get there get there at about four. If you jump in at two, you teach them that a pause produces an adult, and that habit costs far more than any individual word.

If five seconds pass and nothing happens, give the first sound. Then the next. Let them assemble it. The win has to be theirs or it does not do anything.

Step 5: Try a few alien words, lightly

You can make them up in ten seconds: jound, vus, splan, terg. Write four on a scrap of paper, tell your child they are alien words and are not meant to mean anything, and ask them to read them. Most children find this genuinely funny, which is the tone you want.

Keep it to a minute and do it two or three times in the run-up, not nightly. The purpose is familiarity with the idea, not drilling. A child who has never seen a nonsense word before can be thrown by the concept rather than by the reading.

Step 6: Keep sessions short and stop early

Ten minutes is plenty, and less on a bad day is better than a fight. Stop while your child still wants more. Reading practice that ends on a good note is what gets you the next evening.

Keep the other track going too. Read aloud to them from books far harder than anything they can decode. That builds vocabulary, comprehension and appetite, and it is not in competition with phonics practice.

What happens after the check

The school marks it, and you get the score by the end of the summer term. If your child met the standard, nothing changes: phonics teaching carries on, because there is more of the code to cover in Year 2.

If your child did not meet the standard, they are considered for a retake the following June, with support in between. That gap is the important bit. It is a year of teaching, not a year of waiting for a second attempt.

A score below the threshold means some specific sounds have not stuck yet. It is a piece of information about teaching, not a verdict on your child, and it is not a diagnosis of anything.

Ask the teacher a concrete question: which sounds did they miss, and what would help at home. That answer is far more useful than the number. If you are separately worried about the reading, say what you see. "He stops on more than about one word in ten in his school book" gives a teacher something to work with. Leave the causes to the school, who can assess properly.

Where to go next

For the books that suit this stage, see phonics books for Year 1. If you want to understand why the school book looks so easy, what decodable books actually are explains the fit between a book and a particular child.

Lindo Phonics is not connected to the Department for Education or to any phonics publisher and is not endorsed by them. We match the published progression so a story only uses sounds your child has already been taught.