Twinkl Phonics Levels Explained

Twinkl Phonics runs from Level 1 to Level 6, and the level numbers line up almost exactly with the older Letters and Sounds phases. Level 2 is Phase 2, Level 3 is Phase 3, and so on. If your school talks in levels and a friend's school talks in phases, you are almost certainly describing the same point in the same progression under two different names.

The six levels

Two of the six teach no new sounds, which is the fact that surprises parents most.

Level 1 has no letters in it

Parents regularly assume something has gone wrong when the first Twinkl Phonics work involves no reading at all.

Level 1 is entirely oral: hearing rhyme, spotting the first sound in a word, clapping syllables, and above all oral blending, where an adult says "c-a-t" and the child hears cat. That last skill is the foundation everything else sits on. A child who cannot blend sounds they hear will not blend them on a page either, however many letters they can name.

It is also the easiest level to support at home, because it needs nothing. "Pass me the c-u-p." "Time to put your c-oa-t on." No book, no flashcards, no sitting still.

Level 4 is the one that catches people out

Level 4 introduces no new sounds whatsoever. Everything in it is about consonants bunched together: words like stamp, crunch, splash and drift.

Your child has known every individual sound in stamp for months. What is new is holding four or five of them in the right order while their mouth runs them together, and that is a genuinely separate skill. This is the level where a child who was flying often appears to stall, and because nothing new is being introduced it looks inexplicable from the outside.

Nothing has gone wrong at Level 4. Every scheme has this moment; most of them call it Phase 4.

Level 5 is the biggest, and the hardest

Levels 1 to 4 mostly run one way: see the spelling, say the sound. Level 5 breaks that.

From here, one sound can be written several ways. The /ai/ sound turns up as ai in rain, ay in day and a-e in make. Worse, one spelling can say several sounds: ow is one thing in cow and another in snow.

That means a new skill. A child now has to try a spelling, notice whether it produced a real word, and try the other if it did not. Reading stops being decoding and becomes decoding plus checking. Children who found Reception effortless quite often find Level 5 genuinely hard, and that is the expected shape rather than a warning sign.

One consequence you will see at home: your child reads a word wrongly, pauses, and corrects themselves without being told. That looks like a mistake. It is the new skill working, and it is worth praising rather than correcting.

The books, and the online ones

Twinkl publishes its own decodable readers matched to the levels, in print and digitally. If your school uses the digital library, the books your child sees are allocated at their level rather than chosen freely, so the selection is deliberate.

The practical implication is that if the online books look consistently wrong for your child, that is worth mentioning, because somebody set that level.

The book that comes home is meant to be easy. By the time it reaches your house your child has usually already worked on those sounds in school, so reading it fluently is the intended outcome rather than a sign it is pitched too low. The thing genuinely worth flagging is the reverse: a book containing spellings your child has not been taught, which quietly teaches guessing.

How a level is decided, and how often it changes

By assessment, not by age and not by which class your child is in. Children are checked on the sounds they can read and how quickly they blend, then grouped with others at the same point. Most schools reassess every half term.

Two things follow, and both surprise parents. Groups are often cross-class and sometimes cross-year, so your child may do phonics with a teacher who is not their class teacher. And movement is expected in both directions: a child can jump a level after one assessment and then sit on the next one for half a term while fluency catches up with accuracy. Holding is not stalling. Reading a level correctly is only half of it; reading it at a comfortable speed is the other half, and that is what the extra weeks are for.

If you want to know where your child actually is, the useful question is not "what level" but "which sounds are secure and which are we working on". A level number is a summary. The sound list is the thing you can practise.

Tricky words

Alongside the sounds, each level brings a few common words that break the rules taught so far. The, said, was, one, they, come.

They are learned by sight until the relevant spelling turns up later. There is nothing useful to sound out in said, and asking a child to try produces frustration and no learning. Tell them the word and carry on.

Most of them stop being tricky eventually. 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.

How Twinkl compares to the other schemes

Twinkl Phonics is one of the validated programmes, and of all of them it is the easiest to translate. Because the levels map onto the phases almost one to one, most phase-based advice you find online applies to your child with the numbers swapped.

That is not true of every scheme. Read Write Inc uses Sets and Sounds-Write uses Initial and Extended Code, and neither converts cleanly. If you are not sure which yours is, the tells are quick to spot.

One caution on buying books. A level number is a good guide and a poor guarantee, because publishers place a handful of spellings in slightly different places. The only reliable check is to open a middle page and ask whether your child could work out every content word from what they have actually been taught. That check beats the label every time, because the label describes the book and the check describes the fit. Decodable is a relationship, not a property.

Three things that look like problems and are not

They read a word right on one page and wrong on the next. Expected from Level 5 onwards, because a spelling can say more than one sound. Getting it right once is not proof it is secure, and the gap between first success and consistency is where most of Year 1 lives.

They still sound out words they obviously know. Often habit rather than need. Try "read it in your head first, then say it out loud". Many children are simply waiting to be told they are allowed to stop.

They read worse when you are watching. Extremely common and not a trick. Reading aloud to a parent adds pressure and takes attention away from decoding. Sit alongside rather than opposite, and look at the book rather than at their face; most of us have no idea what our expression is doing at word four.

Ten minutes at home

• Say sounds, not letter names. "sss", not "ess", and never "suh".
• Wait five seconds before helping. Most children get there at four.
• Give the sounds, not the word. "s-t-a-m-p" hands them the win.
• Cover the picture on the first read. If the level is right they will not need it.
• Read it twice. The second read is where fluency appears.
• Keep reading aloud to them from books far beyond their level. That is where vocabulary comes from.

Your school will have an overview showing which level each group is working at this term. It is usually a single page, most schools publish it without mentioning that they have, and it answers more questions than any amount of searching. Once you have it, you can pick up any book in the house and know within seconds whether it is fair to hand your child tonight.

Lindo Phonics is not connected to Twinkl and is not endorsed by them. We match the published progression so a story only uses sounds your child has already been taught.