: How Can We Effectively Implement Phonics? “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go”

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” This famous Dr Seuss quote adorns the walls of libraries and classrooms all over the United Kingdom for good reason; reading is arguably the most important skill we can teach our pupils.

The role of phonics is key in quickly developing pupils’ word recognition and spelling, supporting them to become able readers. Phonics involves developing a child’s phonemic awareness, which is their ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes, and to teach them the relationship between phonemes and the graphemes that represent them. There is extensive evidence to support the use of a phonics programme with pupils in Key Stage 1.

Although the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) doesn’t recommend a particular phonics programme, it does outline some key factors to consider:

• Ensure all staff are adequately trained and have sufficient linguistic knowledge. We do this through initial phonics training with our selected programme, ongoing training in phase meetings and regular phonics drop ins.
• Lessons should engage pupils and make them feel successful. Our selected program has a variety of lessons that teach the same objective, meaning that our children don’t find phonics monotonous but look forward to their lessons each day.
• Carefully consider any adaptations to the programme as they may reduce its impact. The program we use at Front Lawn provides plans, resources and even scripts that ensure its efficacy. We regularly film ourselves teaching to ensure we’re teaching phonics exactly as intended which ensures it makes maximum impact.
• Check if learning can be accelerated or extra support is needed to focus teaching.
• A responsive approach to grouping pupils is likely to help focus pupil’s effort and improve teaching efficiency. Children are assessed half termly, but can be moved to another, more appropriate, group at any time if needed. We also split into groups across the key stage to ensure children making accelerated progress are continually challenged and those needing support with initial sounds still have access to that.

Many programmes highlight the benefits of team teaching (teachers and teaching assistants working together) in phonics sessions. The opportunities this provides to deploy staff effectively in whole class lessons, small group, and one-to-one targeted support should be carefully considered at the planning stage. Whilst many teaching assistants have undertaken full training to teach phonics, interestingly, qualified teachers tend to get better results when delivering phonics lessons. This indicates that pedagogical awareness is a key component for successful teaching of early reading and should be carefully considered when organising the staffing of groups.

Although phonics improves the accuracy of a child’s reading, it’s important to remember that it doesn’t necessarily improve their comprehension. It’s essential that children are also explicitly taught comprehension, the development of vocabulary and spelling.

For further information on how phonics can improve literacy outcomes in Key Stage 1, click here for the full EEF guidance report.