Phonics

Intent

‘If a child memorises 10 words, the child can only read 10 words. But if a child learns 10 sounds, the child will be able to read 350 three-sound words, 4320 four-sound words and 21650 five-sound words.’
Martin Kozloff

At Bader Primary, we value language development and understand that it is every child’s right to have access to a high-quality education that meets their needs. We believe this is achievable through a combination of strong, high quality, discrete phonics teaching, combined with a whole language approach that promotes a ‘Reading for Pleasure’ culture.

Reading is a cornerstone of our curriculum. It is one of our fundamental beliefs that every child is capable of being ‘a reader’. Our intent is for children at Bader to develop into fluent, articulate readers who have an appreciation and love of reading.  We do this by firstly equipping our early readers with the skills and knowledge they require to effectively decode and segment words and advance through our well-planned curriculum.

High quality phonics instruction plays an integral part of developing the word decoding skills required by children to develop higher level, whole language and comprehension skills.

Implementation

At Bader Primary School, we have adopted the Little Wandle – Letters & Sounds Revised approach to the teaching of systematic synthetic phonics.

We follow the Little Wandle approach with a high degree of fidelity. We ascribe to the ‘Simple View of Reading’ promoted by Little Wandle and have structured our curriculum to enable children to develop both their language comprehension processes and word recognition processes.

Phonics teaching begins in Nursery with Phase One. Phase One phonics concentrates on developing children’s speaking and listening skills and lays the foundations for the phonic work which starts in Phase 2. The emphasis during Phase 1 is to get children attuned to the sounds around them and ready to begin developing oral blending and segmenting skills.

You can see our long term phonics overview for Nursery here:

Nursery Phonics Long Term Overview

Phonics teaching at Bader continues into Reception. During Reception, phonics teaching progression has been organised so that children are initially taught more simple GPC (grapheme phoneme correspondences) building to more complex GPCs. All the graphemes taught are practised in words, sentences, and later on, in fully decodable books. Children review and revise GPCs and words, daily, weekly and across terms and years, in order to move this knowledge into their long term memory.

You can see our long term phonics overview for Reception here:

Reception Phonics Long Term Overview

Phonics teaching at Bader continues into Year One. As children continue to build their confidence and competence, they continue to make progress with their phonics ability. As with Reception, Little Wandle’s progression the progression of teaching and learning has been organised so that children are taught from the simple to more complex GPCs, as well as taking into account the frequency of their occurrence in the most commonly encountered words. Furthermore, all the graphemes taught are practised in words, sentences, and later on, in fully decodable books. Children review and revise GPCs and words, daily, weekly and across terms and years, in order to move this knowledge into their long term memory.

You can see our long term phonics overview for Year One here:

Year One Phonics Long Term Overview

Formal phonics teaching (for most children) culminates in Year Two. At Bader we follow the Little Wandle ‘Bridge to Spelling’ programme. The Little Wandle ‘Bridge to Spelling’ programme begins with a five-week review of Phase 5. The Bridge to spelling teaches children how to ‘think about spelling’. Over five weeks, the children will complete the alphabetic code and learn the underpinning concepts of spelling. Once this learning is secure, children are ready to move on to the Year 2 Spelling units. The Spelling units follow the familiar structure of Little Wandle phonics lessons, supporting children to make links to their phonics learning. Little Wandle Spelling teaches children to consider etymology, morphology and grammar when spelling new words. The programme provides full coverage of National Curriculum spelling requirements.

You can see our long term phonics overview for Year Two here:

Year Two Phonics Long Term Overview

In addition:

• Assessments are carried out every half term, ensuring all children are suitably challenged
• We ensure that we make phonics an engaging lesson for children, by using high quality Little Wandle resources.
• Our phonics lead has dedicated release time to monitor the quality of teaching and learning in phonics to ensure children make the best progress possible.
• Parents and carers are guided throughout their child’s phonics journey through videos and home learning activities to develop a love of reading at home.
• Children at risk of falling behind are quickly identified and supported through additional keep up sessions
• Reading is intertwined with phonics with a bespoke teaching sequence in each year group

Impact

At Bader Primary, we use a rigorous assessment procedures to ensure children’s progress is closely monitored.  Our skilled practitioners analyse termly assessment data to ensure children are taught the appropriate next steps.

Our outcomes for children sitting the Year One phonics check for the last three academic years are as follows:

2024/2025 – 70% of Year One children met the expected standard.
2023/2024 – 77% of Year One children met the expected standard.
2022/2023 – 60% of Year One children met the expected standard.

In addition to this, the impact of phonics teaching at Bader can be seen through:

• Standards in attainment in reading at the end of and between Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2.
• Children being able to access high quality texts both in the classroom and for use at home
• A culture that ‘loves reading’ underpinned by core phonics knowledge
• Children’s continued ability to apply phonics in their learning across the curriculum.
• The cross-curricular opportunities that are made to support and extend children’s knowledge and understanding of the world.
• Exciting and enjoyable experiences both in and out of school or virtually, which are memorable and inspire children in their work and wider lives underpinned by their foundational phonics knowledge.

Progression documents

At Bader Primary School we follow all national curriculum expectations for the teaching of early reading and phonics. In Nursery, we have developed a bespoke phonic programme which takes into consideration our children’s starting points. This programme focuses on Phase 1 phonics and progressively builds upon prior learning giving children a strong start in Reception.

In Reception and Y1, we use the ‘Little Wandle’ scheme of systematic synthetic phonics to achieve this. In Y2, we use the Little Wandle ‘Bridge to spelling’ approach to enable children to build upon their strong phonic outcomes whilst ensuring children review previously taught concepts.