Preparing for the Phonics Screening Check

All Little Wandle schools who are on-track in Year 1 have already taught all the GPCs in the Phonics Screening Check (PSC). The planning for Year 1 Summer 1 is all review. It has been designed to prepare all Year 1 children for the PSC.

Up to now all assessments you have been using assess children’s progress against the programme and our progression, not the PSC. Indeed, by Spring 1 all Phase 5 GPCs in the Phonics Screening Check have been taught. So, children who are on-track with our progression are beyond the alphabetic knowledge needed for the PSC. This means that your data is not evidence of progress to the PSC, rather it is evidence of children’s progress to fluent reading and complete understanding of Phase 5.

Consider using the Year 1 Summer 1 assessment as a PSC health check. Use your heatmap to identify any GPCs or word types that need extra practice. Our assessment tracker website can now show multiple data entries at each assessment point (more on which below) so you can upload your Summer 1 assessments twice and see the impact of your teaching.

Use our new Year 1 Summer post-Phonics Screening Check assessment to work out any gaps from Spring 1 and 2 so that you teach these GPCs and word types before you start teaching the Summer 2 planning.

More tips

👣 Use the Summer 1 assessment to assess children’s progress towards the Phonics Screening Check. This assessment is the only Little Wandle assessment that matches the PSC. All other assessments assess children’s progress against what they have been taught.

👣 Read our ‘Phonics Screening Check’ blog.

👣 Teach the Year 1 Summer 1 planning with all Year 1 children. It reviews all Phase 5 GPCs and all other word types found in the PSC. It also practises Alien words.

👣 Run PSC booster sessions every day for the whole class. A quick 10-minute recap of the lesson (see the PSC blog for more detail about how to do this).

👣 Ensure any child that needs Daily Keep-up gets one-to-one teaching every day.