What content has changed for the new school year (2023/4)?

For the school year 2023/4 we've made a few changes to the core programme and have added two brand new programmes. In the blog below we explain what we've changed and why.

As with all published programmes, we are constantly reviewing and refining our planning and resources to make sure they are clear, consistent and easy to use. We listen carefully to our members and make improvements where we can. Nothing in our core pedagogy or programme progression has changed – any changes are designed to make our planning and guidance more user friendly, and to ensure that all our classroom resources are accessible for children with different needs.

The advice in our Weekly Wandle emails (which you can subscribe to here) and in all our webinar sessions running up to the summer holidays was to wait until after August 29th to download your documents. This was aimed at ensuring you were using the latest versions. However, if you missed these messages and had already printed out your planning, please don’t worry. You can continue using the original weekly grids and lesson templates if you wish – it will not affect children’s learning or your school’s fidelity to the Little Wandle programme. You can switch to the updated versions when you’re ready.

There is one exception: we strongly recommend that you download and use the updated assessment materials and the Year 1 Autumn 1 week 2 weekly grid – see answers below for more information. 

Yes, we have changed some of the words included in the assessments as we wanted to support children whose communication method is not verbal by providing an image for each word. We changed some of the words as it was not possible to find an easily identifiable image for all of the original assessment words, for example ‘thing’, ‘went’ and ‘speeches’ in Reception and ‘out’, ‘these’ and ‘special’ in Year 1.

The assessments assess the same GPCs as before. The ‘Word’ parts of the assessments are about children applying their knowledge of GPCs; they are not about recognition of specific words.

There is just one word in the updated assessments that does not have an accompanying image: ‘should’ in the Placement assessment for Phase 5. None of the words with the grapheme ‘oul’ (would, could, should) lent themselves to a matching image.

You will need to download new versions of the Reception, Year 1, Placement and Rapid Catch-up assessments* so that they are compatible with the updated Assessments tracker. Alternatively, you can use the assessment slides available on the website for all of these assessments.

*Note that images were provided for the SEND programme assessments in 2022, so no changes have been made to these.

We have simplified some of the formation phrases in response to member feedback and to make them all consistent. We hope that the new phrases will be easy to use and remember but it’s no problem if you prefer to use the original phrases and introduce the new ones at an appropriate time for your school. We understand that you may wish to maintain consistency for children who are already familiar with the original phrases.

No, all the key mantras such as ‘Copy me’, ‘Two/three letters, one sound’ and ‘It’s Shuffle time!’ are unchanged and remain a key part of the pedagogy. One of the reasons for updating the lesson templates was to show when and how the mantras should be used.

We recommend that you review the changes and decide if this is necessary for your school. The main changes to the weekly grids are in the notes at the bottom of each page. These include:

• A reminder that you should review all tricky words that children need to practise in addition to the tricky words in the grid.
• References to the new image resources for What’s in the box?, Blend from the box and Sort the words – all published earlier in 2022/2023.
• A few tiny tweaks for editorial reasons.

We have not changed the progression or the main content of weekly grids: all the GPCs, teacher-led blending words and independent reading words are the same. We have, however, made a few small changes to the ‘Practise and apply’ section of the planning for Y1 Autumn 2 week 2 – detailed below. We do recommend that you use this updated grid straight away. The relevant weekly spellings and sentence cards have been updated to match.

Y1 Au2 wk 2: Spelling words

The above changes were made to ensure children practise spelling words ending in –s and –es and to include a compound word.

Y1 Au2 wk 2: Sentence

The above change was made in response to member feedback about the usage of ‘fishes’.

All new members of staff will need to complete the initial Little Wandle training, and this has not changed. For practitioners who completed the training over a year ago, we have developed some new refresher training modules. There are six short modules of just a few minutes each (an hour in total). We recommend all staff complete the refresher training as soon as possible in the Autumn term to keep your practice up to date. You can find the Refresher modules in the Ongoing CPD area of the website.

We are excited about our new content for Foundations and our new Fluency and Spelling programmes for Year 2+. We hope all members will embrace and enjoy teaching them.  However, these are all optional programmes and you do not need to teach them in order to show fidelity to the programme. Please take your time to explore the new content and plan when you will use it. Go to the Foundations, Fluency and Spelling pages in Programme content and resources to watch a short introductory video for each programme, and use the guidance documents and grids to help you plan teaching.

9. Where can I see a full list of changes? 

You can find a full list of what’s changed on the new Reception, Year 1 and Rapid Catch-up landing pages.