The PSC (Phonics Screening Check) is as much a test of phonemic awareness skills and conceptual understanding as it is of code knowledge.  This blog will explore why it is so important that these skills are practised to automaticity and what you can do to ensure that students’ have mastered these skills by the time of the Phonics Screening Check.

What we know:  

What is clear from 12 years of the Phonics Screening Check (PSC), is that much of it is assessing students’ skills with adjacent consonants. In the 2023 screening for example, of the 36 single syllable words, 20 contained adjacent consonants (at CVC, VCC, CVCC, CCVC, CCVCC, CCCVC level). It is vitally important therefore, that students have practised their skills of segmenting and blending to automaticity.

The first year of school – the importance of automaticity:

With this need for automaticity of phonemic awareness skills in mind, it cannot be emphasised enough that preparing students for the PSC is a team effort that starts in the first year of school. It is the Reception/Foundation/Kindergarten teachers who will be primarily responsible for ensuring that students’ skills when working with adjacent consonants are practised to a level that enables success in the PSC the following year. At least 19 or 20 of the words in the PSC are Initial/Basic Code words, most of which contain adjacent consonants. Of course, students should still be given plenty of opportunities to practise and perfect their skills with these word structures as they move into the second year of school.

It’s important to remember that the skills of segmenting and blending are both important for reading. Before a child can read three-sound words, they need to be able to segment them and then blend, putting the sounds together to produce the word. Students also need to have a clear understanding that if they say the sounds, they can hear the word. Not having this understanding is sometimes the issue with those students who are struggling to blend.

Why is mastery of the skills in the first year of school so important? If students have not mastered segmenting and blending with adjacent consonants when working with Initial/basic code, they will certainly struggle when the code becomes more complex.  For example, when presented with a word such as ‘strain’ in Unit 1 of the Extended/Advanced Code, students who have not practised their skills to automaticity will need to focus all of their cognitive attention on segmenting and then blending /s/, /t/, /r/, rather than on the spelling of /ae/ – which is where their focus should be at this level.

Word building lessons develop phonemic awareness skills: 

Our Sounds-Write word building lessons enable the phonemic awareness skills of segmenting and blending to be practised as part of a practical, kinaesthetic activity. Students move sound cards onto lines, saying the sounds aloud, blending them into a word before reading and writing the word. This is done slowly as part of a worked example, which all the time reinforces the reversible nature of the alphabet code. Students can only benefit from lots of concrete practice and it is through practice that they come to understand how the code is structured conceptually

CVC words are the bedrock upon which we build children’s conceptual knowledge and skills. When we teach children to build, read and write CVC words, they are building strong foundations of conceptual understanding and phonemic awareness skills. They learn that letters are spellings that represent sounds and that we go from left to right across the page. They learn that we can say the sounds and then blend them to read the word. And that we can hear a word and then say the sounds segmented as we write it.

Students who find segmenting and blending difficult will need lots and lots of opportunities to practise this skill. Teachers can scaffold the process for them using the range of techniques we teach on the Sounds-Write course. Initially, word choice is key. Practice should begin with simple, CVC words that use continuants (sounds that are easy to stretch or hang on to), as this gives the student plenty of opportunity to hear and identify the word. Tell the student that if they say the sounds accurately, they should be able to hear what the word is and encourage them to ‘listen for the word’.  It is also important to make sure that the words that are chosen use previously taught sound spelling correspondences that the students have encountered many times before, and that the words are within the students’ spoken vocabulary as this makes it easier for the word to be retrieved and recognised.  

If the student is still finding it difficult to blend, use the scripted error corrections to support blending which you were taught on your Sounds-Write training. 

Make sure that in whole class sessions, these children are being given lots of opportunities to practise their blending by calling on them to ‘say the sounds and read the word’ after they have heard it modelled two or three times by other students in the class.

Importance of early intervention: 

It’s vitally important that you identify students who are struggling to blend early, and that you intervene as soon as possible.  Using your formative assessment and the Sounds-Write progress checks, it should be evident within the first few units of the Initial Code which students are at risk of falling behind because they are finding blending difficult. Any student who cannot independently segment and blend by Unit 4 of the Initial Code is at risk of not passing the PSC. As soon as you identify those students, set up some ‘keep-up’ interventions to work on blending, using the strategies outlined below. Don’t wait until nearer the time to worry about the PSC – act now!

If further scaffolding is needed, try:

• Giving the students objects or pictures and a choice of two different words:

Say “This word is ‘map’ or ‘mug’.  Say the sounds and listen for the word.’

Start each possibility with the same letter, otherwise they’ll be able to guess without reading the whole word.  In this example, the choices are limited to two words.  As they improve, you can widen the choice to 3 or 4 words and include words that start with non-continuants.  You can also increase the challenge by having just one sound that’s different – cat and cot, for example.

• Some students struggle to hear the word when they are decoding,  but find it easier if someone else says the sounds, while they are looking at the spellings. So, the teacher should say: “I’ll say the sounds and you listen for the word,” whilst pointing at each spelling. After this, make sure you ask the student to ‘say the sounds and read (or listen for) the word’.
• If none of the above have worked, it’s probably that the student needs some very clear modelling. 

Teacher: “This word is ‘man’. Say the sounds and listen for the word ‘man’’. 

or

“I’m going to say the sounds in a word: /m/ /a/ /n/.  I can hear the word ‘man’ Did you hear ‘man’?  Let me say the sounds again: /m/ /a/ /n/. Did you hear ‘man’ this time?  Now you have a go.”

This modelling is sometimes necessary for students who either don’t understand ‘the game’ or what they’re being asked to do, or those with fairly severe phonological difficulties. Once they’re experiencing some success with this, move back through these scaffolding techniques and bombard them with as much practice as can be squeezed in.  

Once students who have struggled can blend three-sound words successfully, they will need to be monitored constantly through Units 8, 9 and 10 as they start to apply their skills to words with adjacent consonants.

Wherever possible, get parents involved in practising the same activities at home with the student. Model the activities for the parents first and send some carefully selected words for them to work on at home (use the same words that the student has been working on in their keep-up intervention in school).