S8 E1 - What to Do After You Get Your Phonics Screening Check Results

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Welcome Back

Hi there, it's Jocelyn here with a new episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded here in Pataway Burnie on the lands of the Palawa people. It's been a little while since we released a new episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. After three years of weekly episodes, I just felt like so much had already been said. But the Structured Literacy Podcast is still here to support you and your team in doing the work of making all your teaching efforts translate into real results for your students and your school.

So we're popping back in today to talk about an issue that many people are currently grappling with. And that is, what do we do when we've completed our term three phonics screening check and the numbers are not what we wanted to see? Let me start by saying that if you have opened a spreadsheet and felt your stomach drop, that is a completely reasonable response. You and your team have worked hard. Nobody runs a phonics program hoping for a mediocre result. So take a moment to feel whatever you feel about this situation, and then come back and let's look at the numbers together, because the numbers are feedback and feedback is a gift. Even if it's a gift we'd rather not have at times.

Screener Not Assessment

Now the phonics screening check is a screener, as the name implies. It is not a phonics assessment that tells you what to teach next. It is a way for you to see how many of your students have reached the minimum level of skill at word level to be able to progress confidently into Year 2 and beyond. There are 40 words in the check, 20 real words and 20 non-words, and the expected level of achievement in Australia is 28 out of 40. The official language is "expected achievement" rather than pass, but everyone I talk to says pass, so I'm going to say pass in this episode too.

Like Checking Blood Pressure

Students are asked to read the words, and then we see whether they can accurately decode them and say what they are. So why do we have to do this? It is for instruction a little bit like a blood pressure check is when we go to the doctor for a check-up. There are indicators that tell us whether things are as they should be. So think of the phonics screening check as a general check-in that helps us work out: is our instructional system adequately supporting our students. It's natural when a test result comes back, not as we wanted, to question the test. I've seen this in Facebook groups online. A teacher shares that their screening check results were not good, and other people say, yes, this is a bad test. But fundamentally, the test is simple, and we really should have an expectation that our students can achieve what they need to achieve in the test.

One of the schools we work with, I was with them just last week, found that out of all the Year 1s, only one student didn't reach that expected benchmark in the phonics screening check. And that student has some significant learning challenges and they are making demonstrated growth. It's not that they couldn't do any of it, they just didn't get to the benchmark, but they have an individual learning plan and they are achieving goals. So it is possible. It's not that our kids can't do this because they come from disadvantaged backgrounds or there's something wrong with the test. When the elements of strong instruction are in place, the vast majority of students pass, and in some cohorts, every one of them does. When they don't, the problem almost always stems from one of two causes. Either the students know the code and the assessment got in the way, or there is something going on in instruction, which is what we're going to dig into today.

It's the Assessment

So the first possibility is that it's the assessment, not the students' code knowledge. Some of the concerns around the test are things like our students who have a diagnosis of autism really struggle with nonsense words, and that's why they weren't able to pass. Another is that our students who have English as an additional language really struggle with the test because they also struggle with non-words. Now, these two things are true. However, there is a difference between assessment capability and not knowing the content.

So let's take the non-words first, because that's the part of the check that people tend to push back on the most. Nonsense words are an incredibly valuable assessment tool. They tell us: does this student have the capability to tackle an unknown word? If there's a word that we've never seen before, it's going to initially look a bit like a nonsense word because I haven't read it before and I have to approach it by sounding out. So the nonsense word needs to be in there. These words have a set assessment purpose, we aren't teaching them. But some students really do get stuck on the idea of a word that isn't a word, and there's a really simple way around that. You just tell them that these are the names of the aliens, and we want to try and figure out what those aliens' names are. That's it. And they say, oh, ok, no worries, and then they proceed.

For our students who have English as an additional language, it's very common to have phonemes, particularly vowel phonemes, that are in English but not in the home language or the other way around. So accent can be different for a student who has English as an additional language. But accent is not a determiner of whether a child reads a word correctly or not. The phonics screening check is not a test of whether the child can say the words exactly in the way that a teacher does or in the exact same way that a speaker of standard Australian English does. The scoring guide is really clear that a response is correct if it is a plausible decoding of the graphemes on the page in the child's own accent. So if a child reads the word pen with a vowel that sits somewhere between e and e, that is really a correct response. By term three, you know your students well enough to know whether that's just how they say the phoneme <e>, because they will be doing it in all other words with that sound. So the question to ask about this first possibility is, do these students know the code, and did the format of the check stop them from showing it? If the answer is yes, there's a way to figure that out. Some simple work with nonsense words, demonstrating how to approach them, can happen, and then you retest the students. If they can now read the words correctly, you have your answer. But if you do that check-in on assessment capability and you lift that capability and the results still do not improve, that gives you a clear indication that it's time to have a look at instruction and see what it is about the system of instruction you have at school that isn't working.

So let's dig in a bit to what could go wrong with our phonics instruction if our students are not passing the phonics screening check. I'm going to share three of the points that I raised in a very early episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast, all the way back in season two, called Why Isn't My Tier One Instruction Working? We'll link to it in the show notes, or you can search for it in your app. Now use what I'm about to share with you as a bit of a checklist to point you in the right direction about what may not be hitting the mark for your students.

The Three Rs

The first reason could be that teachers don't really understand why each section of the lesson and each part of the instruction matters. I often talk about three Rs for consistent, robust practice, that is, routines, resources, and responses. The programs we use should have clear guidelines around all three of these: what to do in a lesson, how to use the resources, and then what we do as we notice that students are or are not having that learning stick for them. This bit is about decision making because we have to decide when to slow down, when to speed up, when to hold here for a little bit and just consolidate. Teachers have to make those decisions. And if teachers don't really understand the what, the why, and the how of instruction in a way that helps them to make decisions, then they're going to just go from lesson one to lesson two to lesson 60 without really looking up and noticing what has worked and what hasn't, and then making adjustments in pacing and support for students.

When we don't understand the reasoning behind things, it's likely we're going to respond to situations with practices that can get in the way of student progress. So if we don't really understand that we don't read words as global shapes, that we actually have to unpack them phoneme by phoneme and learn them in a particular way, it might be tempting just to give students some sight word cards in the homework pack because we've noticed that their reading of irregular high-frequency words isn't quite there. It might be tempting to point to the picture when a child struggles with the word. I observed this in a school recently, and the school had said, yes, we have a systematic synthetic phonics program and our instruction is all evidence-based. And then I watched a support staff member point to the picture when the student was stuck on the word. So we have to make sure that every member of our team is trained to understand the why and what to do if something isn't working.

Similarly, if we don't really understand that spelling is a pathway to strong reading, we might feel when we're running out of time that it's ok to let the spelling or encoding part of the lessons drop. We might also be running that part of the lesson without the students really doing the heavy lifting, they might be spending a lot of time copying rather than thinking for themselves. And so what we're doing in all of these things is little bit by little bit compromising the integrity of the instruction, not through negligence, not through any unwillingness to get on the bus and do the work that needs doing, but simply because we don't have the knowledge and the experience to know that all those little details make a big difference.

When it comes to resources, it's not just about having them, it's about how we use them. There's a big difference between having a partner practice sheet, one between two, where each student is pointing for the other, with each student having to do the heavy lifting and getting immediate feedback, and having that partner practice sheet on the screen in the classroom where the class is divided in half and the apples speak now and then the fish speak next. Because most of the students in that scenario are probably coasting, just allowing the loudest kids to do all the work, or that reading is just going too quickly for them. So there are big differences that happen in how we use resources. And again, it's not because people don't care, it's just that they haven't had the time and opportunity to build the knowledge about why each section of the letter matters and how to respond when we've seen that something isn't sticking.

Doing Vs Learning

The second reason that instruction might not be hitting the mark for your students is something I've spoken about so many times on the Structured Literacy Podcast and the Leading Learning Podcast that I think I might have it engraved in my headstone. There is a difference between doing and learning. Students can be doing the lessons to learn the complex code, following along, doing as they've been asked, but whether they are learning from that is a completely different story. One of the reasons we are increasingly seeing this happen, this shift to doing rather than learning, is because we are not targeted in the instruction. We're not pitching the lesson at the point of need of the students. In the push for whole class teaching, we have seen that students are sitting in every lesson for whom that lesson is not appropriate, either because they already know everything that's about to happen, or because they have so many gaps in their code knowledge and they are so far behind that those gaps create hurdles for their learning that simply cannot be overcome with encouraging messages, extra practice, and a little bit of adjustment within the lessons.

So if you have students who are consistently not making progress and they're showing up in your phonics screening check, showing up in your DIBELS, and showing up in your other data as having many gaps and not making progress or being very far behind, I really want to encourage you to be open to the idea that perhaps the one size fits all, despite the best intentions and all of the efforts of our teams, is just not getting the job done. The schools that we work with and the schools we hear from who are absolutely nailing phonics, whose data is impressive on both accuracy and rate, are providing Tier 1 core instruction that is targeted to the needs of the students.

Genuine Worries

There are a whole lot of issues around this that I fully acknowledge. We have worries about this, and I don't mean we in our team, I mean out in schools. There are understandable genuine worries. What if we're not exposing the students to the "grade level" (in air quotes) content? Aren't we denying them the opportunity to show what they can do? And there are a few things we need to push back on in that thinking and language. The first one is that exposure doesn't lead to learning. Exposure gets you the illusion of instruction. It doesn't get you encoding into memory and consolidation for the long term. Exposure means that content sits in the sensory memory for the briefest of seconds and then disappears. So when we understand cognition and we understand information processing, that argument doesn't even make sense. And let's be really clear, I am not suggesting that a whole literacy block should be targeted and grouped. Not at all. This is the power of "and." Top of the rope work and writing in the text-based units is whole class with everybody in together, and we teachers providing the adjustments that we need to to make sure everyone can participate and learn with great appropriate content. There is no question that this is the way to do that work. The "and" here is that when we're talking the bottom of the rope, when we're talking the nuts and bolts of anything, and this applies to maths as well with building critical foundations of number knowledge, when we're doing this work, it needs to be targeted because each bit needs to be built to mastery before we add on more. Whole class for top of the rope, targeted for the bottom, both in the same literacy block in the same day.

Mixed Messages

I want to acknowledge right now the very difficult position that schools are in when they get mixed messages. Schools and school leaders really do want to follow the system's guidance on any issue. Because they're on the bus, they're good team players, they want to work within their system and do all of the right things. But we also know that so many teachers and leaders are looking up and seeing that the data shows that the approach isn't working. Leaders and teachers are working harder than ever, and the results are just not coming through. So if you've been doing the exposure bit, if you've been providing additional reps on what you're delivering Tier 1 in your 1.5 group or your Tier 2 intervention or whatever you call it in your school, and after three terms, these students still are not moving and growing, then what has unfortunately become conventional wisdom just isn't working. Use data as your proof point. If that approach was working, you would have the proof in the data. If the data's not moving, then it's just not working and something needs to change.

Make Decisions Based On Context

Alongside being targeted, the other piece of this is the responsiveness. Remember the three Rs: routines, resourcing, and responses. What systems do we have in our school that enable teachers to build the capability to make decisions based on what they see in front of them? What are the messages we're giving? Are we saying to our teachers, and if you're a classroom teacher, is this what you're hearing? Don't mess with the pacing guide by term three, week four, you should be up to this, but then at the same time, adjust to the needs of your students. Because you actually can't do both of those things. We're getting ourselves caught between a rock and a hard place on the messaging and the thinking around this issue. We can either respond to the needs of our students or we can tightly follow the pacing guide, but we cannot do both. Now, we do need to have what I call "at least points," because we don't want it to be Year 4 before we hit split digraphs, but we need our system of instruction to be built on a bedrock of responsiveness.

Not a Whole School Approach

The third reason that perhaps Tier 1 instruction isn't hitting the mark, and perhaps the reason that you haven't achieved what you wanted to in the phonics screening check, is that on the surface you have a whole school approach, but when it comes down to it, you don't really. Teachers may have been trained together, they may have been provided with the same resources, but what's happening on the ground varies from classroom to classroom across resourcing, routines and responses. None of us wants to turn our teachers into robots who could be replaced by a video that you press play on. And as a classroom teacher, you don't want that to be your future.

So we do need to know what the critical points of consistency are and what those not negotiables have to be for us to get results for everyone. Because it's not enough to say, "Oh, we have fewer students now falling through the cracks." We want to have no students falling through the cracks. That's the big, hairy, audacious goal. We also, and here's that power of "and" again, we also have to acknowledge that there are times when teachers need to use judgement. And usually that relates to how quickly we're moving on in the progression and how much support we're providing so that the student is working with a desirable level of difficulty. Those are the bits that really do need us teachers to know what to do in that space.

So the answer to this is not just about handing down a set of engagement norms or instructional techniques and saying, there you go, everybody do that, and every problem will be solved. We actually need to be equipped as teachers with the knowledge to be able to make decisions about which technique to apply at which time. And that is a long-term process. It takes four to five years to really have a school improvement journey pay off big time. And that's if we don't have massive staff turnover.

So the hard question to ask is: do we really have a real whole school approach, or do we only have a whole school approach on the surface?

What To Do: Score Sheets

So let's get really practical. Here is what I would do in the weeks after the check, roughly in this order, if your results aren't what you want to see. Firstly, look at the score sheets. The check gives you far more than a number out of 40. It tells you which words each child missed, and that is where the useful information is. So before you audit any practice, sit down with the sheets and look for patterns. Are the misses clustered in the second section where the more complex code sits, where it's the digraphs at the adjacent consonants and the split digraphs? Or are they spread right through, including the simplest words in section one? Are they only in the non-words or with the real words? And how far below 28 are we talking? A child who scored 26 and a child who scored nine are in two completely different positions. And if we try and treat them as if we're solving the same problem, we're going to come up with an answer that will not get us where we want to go. So sort your students into rough groups. Those who just missed, those who missed the non-words, and those who are a long way from the mark.

Who To Do: Teach Non-Words

Second, for the students who know the code but struggled with the format, and this will be usually seen in the group that missed just the non-words. As I mentioned earlier, do a little bit of work on that assessment capability. We're not using the words that are in the test. Use different words. Teach them what a non-word is and how to tackle one, whether you're using the alien names or however else you want to explain that. And this doesn't need to take a long time, this is five minutes as part of your daily routine for a week. Then go back and retest those students. If the students have then reached the benchmark, you have your answer. The issue wasn't that they didn't know the code, it was that they needed practice in the question format. And while you're there, check your administration. Make sure that everybody marking the check knows that accent is not an error.

Who To Do: Assessment to Teach

Third, for the students who are still below the mark after that, and for everyone that is a long way off in that group, use a diagnostic phonics assessment that actually tells you what to teach. The screening check can't do that job, and it was never designed to. A diagnostic that takes the child through the code in the order you teach it will show you exactly where the gaps are. And those gaps are the indicators for your intervention plan for the next term. Now we have just launched an Intervention section inside the Resource Room that contains a simple assessment and take and teach resources to fill the gaps in early reading skill and knowledge. But I'm going to bet that if you have a phonics program, you already have a simple phonics assessment included with that program. So just use that as the assessment, and if you're a Resource Room member, know that you literally have a thing you download and then you are away to give you and your students the practice that they need.

What To Do: Audit

Fourth, and this is the one that matters most if your numbers are wide off the mark, right across the cohort. Audit your system of instruction against the three R's: routines, resources, and responses. Go through each one and ask, what does our program say should happen here? What does the evidence say should happen here? And what is actually happening in each classroom? Be really brave and really vulnerable in looking at the reality of your situation. Look at the encode and decode balance. Look at who is doing the heavy lifting in partner practice and in the encoding component. Look at where students are being taught at their point of need or sitting through lessons that are too easy or too hard for them. Because I guarantee you that teachers already know exactly who those students are.To help you in this, we're going to put a link in the show notes to a little tool that we've made that outlines the elements of strong instruction so that you don't have to tackle this all on your own.

What To Do: With Not To

Fifth, do this with your team and not to them. If you look up and say, yeah, actually, I think there are bits that have dropped off, there are bits where there's just too much inconsistency, then we need to bring everybody together, but not with a punitive tick-a-box approach where we're going to be watching you and monitoring you and looking for compliance. This work of improvement really needs to be collaborative, it needs to involve respectful professional dialogue and collaborative problem solving, because the journey needs to be done with people. Just as we, as teachers, want students' learning to not be something done to them, but something done in partnership with them, human to human, we also need that from our leaders. We need to have our voice heard. We need to have a critical friend at times say, ok, I see how that's your thinking, what I want to share with you is this little extra bit of information that I think will help to expand your understanding of where this is sitting. And we need to be open to that. Out of that conversation should come two lists: the non-negotiables that every classroom needs to hold tight, and the places where teachers are expected and supported to use judgement, which usually means in the pacing and how much support is being given.

What To Do: Pacing Information

And the final bit here is sort out the messaging on pacing. Decide as a leadership team whether you are asking students to follow the pacing guide or to respond to the students in front of them. And then say what you want clearly, because a team that is being told both will do the one that is least likely to get them into trouble. And if you're a classroom teacher getting these mixed signals, maybe you and your colleagues can feel a little brave and say, We feel like we're getting mixed messages here, can we have some more detail? And can we talk about what this looks like? So that we can set the anchor points that we all can't afford to miss and then build responsiveness in everywhere else?

Wrapping Up

Let's wrap up. So if your phonics screening check results are not what you wanted them to be, doesn't mean that you and your colleagues are bad teachers. It doesn't mean that you have the wrong program. But in saying that, we do need to be prepared to look at the instructional elements in our program and see: is this stacking up with both the science of learning and the science of reading? We have to look at the scary numbers and recognise them and accept them for what they are, which is feedback, not personal judgement. Our entire profession is pretty new to this space. And our entire profession is working on the same problems and encountering the same roadblocks. It's not because we don't care about students, and it's not because we think we know everything and there's nothing else to learn. It's because that learning is hard. It's hard for the students and it's hard for the teachers. Guess what? It's hard for leadership as well. One single person cannot make this change on their own. It is only in working together that we're going to get where we want to go, which is universal learning and success for every child.
And if I can leave you with three things, it's these. The check is a blood pressure reading, so use it that way. It tells you whether to look closer, and the score sheets tell you what direction to look in. Separate the students who were struggling with the assessment format from those who are struggling with the code because they need different things from you. And if the patterns you're seeing are seen across classrooms, the answer lies in the system of instruction, in the routines, the resources, and the responses, and in whether every classroom is really doing what the whole school agreed to.

And if you're thinking, well, yes, Jocelyn, that all makes sense, but I don't know where to start. How do we bring our team onto the same page? How do I, as a leader, help teachers really come to understand the system of instruction that we need to use? Then you might think about joining us for Foundations for Literacy Success in 2027. We are currently taking expressions of interest for this 12-month literacy improvement partnership that includes every member of your team, including classroom assistants, utilising existing meeting times. We walk alongside you, not to tell you that everything you're doing is wrong, because it's not true. You're not doing everything wrong, you do have students who have achieved well in the check. We walk alongside you to help you find where the gaps are between what we want to happen and what is actually happening, because we know how important it is to have a cheerleader and a guide and to have a thought partner when you're doing this work.

And what we're hearing from the schools we're partnering with is so heartening. This is what one of this year's leaders told us.

The impact has been really clear. Teachers are talking more about teaching, making deliberate adjustments to their practice, and feeling more confident in the decisions they make. With a sustained focus, the learning is going deeper and shaping instruction across the school. And importantly, we're already seeing encouraging improvements in student outcomes from those who've embraced the work. The combination of coaching, responsive support, and a strong partnership has made a genuine difference.

Everyone Wants the Best

Every school wants the best for students. Every teacher, every one of our teaching partners, every leader, every student, every parent wants to wake up in the morning feeling confident that they're going to do a good job today and that there's going to be a good outcome at the end of the day. When you feel like you're working incredibly hard and the data isn't responding, we understand how disheartening that can be. So if a partnership with us inside Foundations for Literacy Success sounds like something that might be useful for you, there's a link in the show notes to download the information and submit an expression of interest. Or just go to JocelynSeamerEducation.com and click on the Work With Us tab.

But even if Foundations isn't for you, I hope that today's episode has given you some clarity on some of the reasons that perhaps your system of instruction may not quite be where it needs to be yet. In the show notes of this episode, we're linking through to that phonics audit tool, the season two episode on Tier 1 instruction, and some other episodes that can help you unpack all of this a little further, including what the research actually has to say about grouping for phonics instruction. Alright, everyone, it's been a long one from me, so we're going to finish off now. I'm so happy to be back with you again, and I hope to see you in a future episode, which won't be too far away. Until next time, happy teaching. Bye.

Show Notes:

Foundations for Literacy Success

S2 E8 - Why isn't my Tier 1 Instruction working?

S7 E5 - What Does the Research Actually Say About Grouping Students for Phonics?

S3 Ep15 - Four Points to Consider When Pacing Phonics Instruction

Phonics Program Evaluation Tool