Year 1 Phonics Screening Check
The Year 1 Phonics Screening Check assesses a student's ability to blend sounds together to read a word. The short screener tells teachers how their students are progressing in phonics.
About the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check
The Year 1 Phonics Screening Check is a short one-to-one assessment that tells teachers how students are progressing in phonics. The screener assesses how students blend sounds together to read a word.
The screener takes 5–7 minutes and is is administered by classroom teachers with each student individually.
Student responses are mapped to the NSW K-10 English Syllabus outcomes and indicators from the National Literacy Learning Progression.
The Year 1 Phonics Screening Check complements existing assessment practices to identify students' progress in developing foundational literacy skills.
Assessment window
The assessment is conducted for all NSW public school Year 1 students in Term 3 Weeks 4 to 6 each year.
Support for schools (staff only)
NSW public school staff can access more information at Year 1 Phonics Screening Check (staff only) . This includes access to professional learning, support resources and materials.
Information for families and carers
The Year 1 Phonics Screening Check is a short statewide assessment that tells teachers how your child is progressing in phonics. This screening check observes how your child can read English words with different letter combinations. Your child will sit with a teacher and will be asked to read 40 words aloud. These words include 20 real words and 20 nonsense words. The purpose of the nonsense words is to see if the student can use their knowledge of blending to read a word rather than their memory of having seen that word before. The test normally takes 5-7 minutes. If your child is struggling the teacher will stop the check. The check is carefully designed not to be stressful for your child.
What is phonics?
Phonics is the relationship between letters and sounds and is vital in learning to read. Some children struggle with learning to read, so it is important that these children are identified quickly. This way, teachers can plan for any specific support they may need.
Phonic knowledge and skills are essential for learning to read and write in English. Beginning readers need to learn how to blend sounds together in words quickly and fluently, so as not to disrupt the flow of reading and their comprehension of the text
The following video provides a brief overview of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check.
Narrator:
The Phonics Screening Check is an opportunity for students to demonstrate what they know and can do when reading.
It can support teachers to plan for students' learning by providing them with information to target their teaching.
The Phonics Screening Check is a short online assessment that individually assesses a student’s phonic knowledge and skills.
The check assesses how students blend sounds together to read a word.
Simone Austin, Brewarrina Central School
I was quite surprised with some of the results in the assessment. I had some students who already knew all the individual sounds but in the assessment, I found that they couldn’t blend them together.
In the check I observed the way that students were articulating their sounds and quite often if students, if they weren’t sure of the sound, they might mumble it, and then which impacted the full reading of the word.
I also noticed a lot of students were able to self-correct on the word which I was not aware that they were doing in the classroom so that was really great in the check for me to see that. And it was also good to see the students be able to break up the sounds and then put them back together.
I found the check very easy to administer. It was a lot quicker than I imagined it to be and the students seemed really at easy when doing it.
The check is really going to impact on my teaching as it has given me some insight into certain vowel digraphs that a lot of my students didn’t know that I thought they had learnt from prior phonics lessons but unfortunately weren’t able to blend them together during the assessment.
Frpm the information I gathered from the check, I’m now going to take it into my classroom and see the gaps that I found in the check with the students sounds whether those are the same gaps in their writing.
And some of the things I saw students were capable of, I can now build on those within my classroom.
[End of transcript]
- Year 1 Phonics Screening Check - Letter to families and carers - English (PDF 1078KB) | translated letters
If you have any questions relating to the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check, please speak to your school.