How to Find Out Which Phonics Scheme Your School Uses

The fastest way to find out which phonics scheme your school uses is to look at the reading book already in your child's bag. Every scheme labels its books, and each one labels them differently. Failing that, the school website almost always says, usually under English, Curriculum or Phonics. Asking the teacher works too, but you often do not need to.

It is worth knowing, because almost every other decision follows from it. Which books are fair to give your child, what the level names mean, and whether the advice you read online applies to you at all.

Five ways to find out, fastest first

1. Look at the reading book. The back cover or inside front page carries the scheme name and the level. Ten seconds, and you probably have one in the house right now.
2. Check the school website. Look under English, Curriculum, Phonics or Early Reading. Most primaries publish a phonics page, often with a term-by-term progression document attached.
3. Check the newsletter or class blog. Schools mention the scheme constantly in the first half of Reception, usually alongside sound mats and workshop invitations.
4. Ask at the door. "Which phonics programme do you use, and where is my child in it?" is a thirty second question and teachers are used to it.
5. Ask the office. If you cannot catch the teacher, the office will know or will find out. The school has a single scheme; it is not a per-class decision.

How to recognise the scheme from the book itself

This is the one worth learning, because it works without asking anybody. Each scheme has a tell.

The two that get confused most often are Little Wandle and plain Letters and Sounds, because they share the phase numbers. The giveaway is the term label. Little Wandle pins each phase to a specific half term, so you see "Reception Autumn 2" written next to "Phase 2". If you only ever see a bare phase number, you are probably looking at something built on the older framework.

The eight schemes, and what each calls its levels

Two of those, Read Write Inc and Sounds-Write, do not use phase numbers at all. If your school talks in Sets or in Initial and Extended Code, phase-based advice you find online will not map onto your child cleanly, and trying to force it usually causes more confusion than it solves.

What if the school does not seem to use one?

In an English primary school it will be using something. Since 2021 schools have been expected to follow a complete systematic synthetic phonics programme, and the Department for Education validated a list of them. What varies is how loudly the school talks about it.

If you genuinely cannot find a name, two things are usually going on. Either the school uses a programme with a low profile among parents, or it has built its own approach on the older Letters and Sounds framework, which some schools with strong results continued to do. In both cases the useful question is not the brand name. It is: which sounds has my child been taught so far, and which are they working on now? That answer is what you actually need, and it works regardless of what the programme is called.

The scheme name tells you which vocabulary to use. The sound list tells you what to do on a Tuesday evening.

Why it matters when you are choosing books

Because a book is only decodable in relation to a particular child. A book labelled Phase 3 by one publisher can contain a spelling your school teaches in Phase 4, and a Read Write Inc Green book is not interchangeable with a Bug Club Red one even though they sit at roughly the same point.

Knowing the scheme lets you do three things:

• Buy or borrow the right level rather than guessing from the cover.
• Read school communications properly. "She has moved to Blue" means something specific once you know the ladder.
• Ignore the wrong advice. Half of what parents read online is written about a different scheme.

What if you move school, or the school changes scheme?

Both happen more often than you would think, and both produce the same worry: has my child lost ground?

Usually not, and the reason is that the schemes are more alike than their names suggest. All of them teach the same alphabetic code in roughly the same order, because the code itself does not change. They differ in how they carve it up, what they call the pieces, and the order of a handful of sounds near the edges.

What a child carries between schemes is the thing that matters: the sounds they know and the ability to blend them. Those transfer intact. What does not transfer is the vocabulary. A child who was "on Purple" arrives somewhere that has never heard of Purple, and gets reassessed onto whatever the new school calls that point. That reassessment is not a demotion even when the new label sounds lower.

Two things genuinely are worth flagging to the new school:

• Any sound that was taught unusually early or late in the old scheme, since that is where real gaps hide.
• Whether your child was in a support group. Continuity of extra help matters much more than continuity of level names.

If the school itself changed programme, expect a few weeks of mixed vocabulary while everyone adjusts, and expect the reading books to change appearance. Children mostly do not notice. Parents do, because the books stop looking familiar.

What to ask, and what not to bother asking

Worth asking:

• Which programme do you use?
• Which sounds is my child secure on, and which are being worked on now?
• Is the book coming home meant to be easy, or should they be stretching?
• Is there a progression document I can see?

Less useful:

• "What level is she on compared to the rest of the class?" Teachers will not answer it, and the number would not help you if they did.
• "Is he behind?" Ask about specific sounds instead. It gets you something you can act on rather than a label.

A worked example of why the name alone is not enough

Say you find out your school uses Bug Club Phonics and your daughter is on Red 2. You go to the library, find a book labelled Phase 3, and bring it home. Red 2 is Phase 3, so this should be fine.

It might not be. Publishers place a handful of sounds in slightly different places, and "Phase 3" from one publisher can include a spelling your school has scheduled for the following half term. One untaught spelling in a book is enough to put your child back to guessing.

The fix takes fifteen seconds and does not require you to know anything about phonics. Open the book somewhere in the middle, not the first page, and read a few lines asking one question of each word: could she work this out from sounds she has actually been taught? If the answer is yes for every content word, the book is fair. A few taught exception words like said and the do not count against it.

That check beats the label every time, because the label describes the book and the check describes the fit.

One thing to do this week

Find the progression document. Almost every school publishes one, usually a single page showing which sounds are taught in which half term. It is the most useful piece of paper in the whole business, and most parents never see it because nobody mentions it exists.

Once you have it, you can look at any book in the house and know in about fifteen seconds whether it is fair to hand your child tonight. That is the whole point of knowing the scheme.

If your child is in Year 1, it is worth finding that document sooner rather than later, because Year 1 is where the sounds start having several possible spellings and guessing which ones have been covered stops working.