Phonics checks

Amelia Handscomb-Laing is joined by structured literacy experts Emma Nahna and Innes Jephson to discuss the importance of phonics, what the phonics checks are, how to carry them out and how to use the results to inform teaching and learning.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Tēnā koutou katoa, nau mai harae mai,
And welcome to this Education Gazette Tukutuku kōrero podcast.
In this podcast, we will be talking about the phonics checks
that are now available for schools to use.

I'm Amelia Hanscomb-Lang.
I'm an advisor here at the Ministry of Education,
and this past year I have been working on the development

(00:20):
of the phonics checks.

Today we have structured literacy experts Innes Jephson

and Emma Nahna with us to talk all about the phonics checks,

how to carry them out, and how to use the results

to inform teaching and learning.

Let's dive in. Emma, it's great to have you with us today.

Would you please introduce yourself for our listeners?


(00:41):
Thanks, Amelia. It's, uh, a real pleasure to be
with you this afternoon, talking about

our new phonics check.

My background is in speech language therapy, uh,

and over the past decade I have been working with schools

and teachers, uh, ECE, up to secondary also with adults,
um, in the areas of language and literacy.

(01:02):
I love sharing, learning. I've had the real privilege in the
past year of, uh, working with the Ministry of Education,
developing our new English area curriculum,
and also got to be part of developing this phonics check.

I've got a real vested interest in this
because I'm also a mom of three primary school age children.

Awesome. Great to have you with us.

(01:24):

And Innes, can you please introduce

yourself for our listeners?

Sure. Kia ora. My name's, uh,
obviously I'm Innes Jephson.

My background is in primary school teaching
and school leadership.
Um, and I've been doing that most of my adult life.
I've also was very lucky just over a decade ago to spend,
uh, study under Alison Arrow

(01:44):
and Bill Tunmer, um, as part of my post-grad study.

So this is, start this, uh, the phonics check is something
that I'm really, really passionate about,

and I'm an advisor here at the Ministry of Education.

Awesome. Well, so good to have both of you with us today.

So we are here to talk about the phonics checks.

These are short assessments

(02:05):
that are done twice in children's first year of school

to measure their phonics knowledge and skills.

These have been introduced this year

with children doing a phonics check
after they've been at school for 20 weeks or six months.

And again, after being at school for 40 weeks, which is
around one year, everything that you need
to know about the phonics checks is on Tāhūrangi.

(02:26):

You can type in phonics checks to the search field,

and it will bring up the phonics checks pages.

So before we dive into the phonics checks themselves,

I would like to talk a little bit about what phonics is

and why it's important.

So, Emma, what are, what, what is phonics?

Right. So phonics is an approach to teaching children, um,

(02:50):

how our written code works.

Um, it's a, it is one essential component

of a structured literacy approach.

It's one of many essential components.

Um, and our comprehensive approach will weave together both

teaching children to identify
or read words as well
as building their language comprehension so

(03:12):
that they can understand what they read.

And the flip side of that is also being able

to record spoken words into writing.

So to spell, uh, words and to compose language into writing.

Um, phonics knowledge is what children need to know
to be able to crack that code,

(03:33):

to lift written words off the page, um, to know

what sounds that letters and groups of letters

or graphemes represent,

and to be able to identify new
words as they come across them.

And also to be able to spell words.
So take a spoken word, um,

and be able to represent the speech sounds of the word
or phonemes in letters.

(03:54):

So effective teaching of reading and writing

or literacy involves explicit

and systematic synthetic phonics instruction.

Okay, Emma. So what I hear there is that, uh,

we are teaching children that code.
We are not expecting them to be able
to discover the patterns and crack the code by themselves.


(04:15):
That's right. And in English,
we have a particularly complicated code.

So it's even more important that we

make sure we give children the tools
that they need to crack it

And, Innes, what is the phonics check?

Okay. So the phonics checks a quite short assessment that,

um, indicates to teachers how children are progressing,

(04:35):
with their phonics and their ability to decode.

Um, it's, you know, it should take
around less than 10 minutes if there's a mix of, um,

pseudo words and real words.

Um, and that's basically what the check is.

So the phonics check has real words and pseudo words.

What are pseudo words and why would we use them?

(04:56):

This is a really good question to ask Amelia,
because I think this causes a lot of people, um,
to feel a little bit concerned about the assessment.

So I'd like to take this chance

to explain this a little bit more and how, how useful

and powerful pseudo words are

to help us in checking in on

children's literacy development.

So, a pseudo word is, um, a word that we've made up

(05:19):

that follows the rules and patterns of English spelling.

So you wouldn't have a word for example, XLOP,

because XL is not a combination
that you would find in the English writing system.

So all of the words could be real words

in terms of our spelling rules.

Um, as children become readers

(05:40):
and spellers, they begin to learn how to crack that code
of our writing and spelling system,

and they develop what's called the alphabetic principle,
which I'll just take a moment to explain.

Is they become consciously aware that letters

or graphemes are symbols

that represent speech sounds or phonemes.

So they letters are symbols that represent the sounds

(06:02):

and spoken words, and they can use their growing knowledge
of the alphabetic code

or their phonics knowledge to, um, decode

or read words and to encode words or spell words.
So take a spoken word, divide it into its speech sounds,

and then record graphemes for that.


(06:22):
So this check is looking at reading.

Um, we use the pseudo words,

and it's not all of the words, it's just half the words.
In the test, we use pseudo words

because it gives us a really pure measure

of children's growing knowledge of the alphabetic code

and their ability to apply that knowledge, um, to decode
or read words.


(06:43):
If we use only real words, there's a really good chance

with our little ones being so clever that they, they do learn
to recognise instantly a a lot of words as soon
as they look at them as a whole unit.

Um, and if we only do that,

we risk not noticing if there is an underlying difficulty

(07:05):

with phonemic awareness

or acquiring that knowledge of the alphabetic code.

So this is the only way that we can be sure, be certain
that children are cracking the code,

But we do have some real words in our phonics check.

So why would we have those as well?

Another good question.


(07:25):
Uh, so particularly towards the end of that first year
of learning, uh, when children start school, um, initially

if they're new to learning how to read
and spell, they will be learning lots
of single letter consonants and vowels
and reading words of increasing lengths.
So words with just a vowel consonant, like at
and a CVC word consonant, vowel consonant like mop.

(07:47):

Um, and there's a very reliable correlation between letters

and sounds in that first, um, period of learning to read.

Towards the end of that first year,

children will be starting to read words

and text, which contain spelling patterns, which have more
of a variable connection to the speech sounds,
and there might be multiple ways

(08:09):
that you could pronounce them.

So for example, um, the grapheme OW

or the spelling pattern, OW, you could pronounce that as

O as in bow, tie a bow or ow as in cow.

So why do we do the phonics checks twice?

Why do we do it 20 weeks and 40 weeks?

(08:30):

Well, doing the first check at 20 weeks really gives

teachers that an early indication of

how children are progressing with their phonics knowledge
and ability to decode.

And it does also give us the opportunity to then recognize
that and respond to that with,

especially if a child is needing more support,

(08:52):

they might need, it might only be a little bit of support,

or they might need more intensive support.

And then at 40 weeks we've got that opportunity to see
that they are learning that more complex code that, uh,

Emma spoke about.

Um, and, and being, uh,

and still making that good, really good progress.

Or do they need some help with some of those more complex,

(09:13):

um, spelling patterns.

I could go down a rabbit hole with some examples on
that one, but consonant digraphs, like, ch and sh

quite often for children can be a little bit tricky.

So recognizing that those are,

that they need may need support with some of those.

Yeah. So right, that check at 40 weeks really gives us,

(09:33):

um, really rich information.

Okay. So checking at 40 weeks gives us that point of

progress from their, from their earlier check.

And it's also seeing how they're going
with those more complex grapheme types.

It is also that at 40 weeks,
this child's phonics knowledge is predictive

(09:54):
of their later reading achievement, isn't it?

So it's actually a really useful piece of information for us

to know how we, uh,

as a whole system are supporting early literacy.

And then of course, we had the opportunity to, uh,

test out our phonics check

with a representative sample of schools.

Last year we had a sample that included

(10:17):
around 76 schools, uh, 150 teachers

and 2,250 students across, across the country.

And that gave us some really interesting information.

Um, it enabled us to ensure that our check was valid

and reliable for assessing New Zealand students.

And it also gave us the opportunity

(10:38):

to get feedback from teachers and kaiako

to support implementation. From the trial, we were able
to see how difficult each item was.

So we used this data to organize the words by difficulty

and, um, put them in ascending order.

That was really important

(10:58):
because we are instructing our teachers to stop the check
after a marking five incorrect answers.

So we wanted to make sure that children were getting, um,

every opportunity to demonstrate their phonic skills

and knowledge and not miss out on perhaps easier items if
they were placed later in the sequence.


(11:18):
We found that the, uh, little friendly alien illustrations

that indicated whether the words are pseudo
or made up, we found
that those were distracting for some students.

So we have replaced these with blue dots.

We also received feedback from some schools
that they thought that the check was on the difficult side

for those children, especially at 20 weeks.

(11:40):

And, um, I was wondering, Innis, how would you respond
to concerns about the difficulty level of the phonics check?

About the phonics check is it really closely aligns
with our curriculum expectations.

And we do know that, uh, that we have New Zealand research
that shows that children are able, able to do this.

(12:02):

Um, they're able to read these types of words, um, and blend

and blend them together at six months.

We also know that teaching children to blend

and read words, uh, from a, as soon as they've got enough
of the alphabetic code to be able to do that,

and it's, they don't need a lot to be able
to start reading a VC
or a CVC word that we are teaching them that those blending,

(12:25):

uh, skills from early on.
So we do know children can do this.

Emma, how does that reflect your experience in schools?

I, I definitely, um, have experienced
that when schools are new to structured literacy,

they will find it's, it's not uncommon.

They will find that many of their learners in

(12:46):
that first year of school and, and certainly beyond,

but many of their children won't be able
to demonstrate these skills at 20

and 40 weeks of, of school.

But as they begin
to use structural literacy approaches effectively over time,

more and more of their five year olds will be able
to attain, um, these skills.

(13:09):

More and more of their children will become
proficient with these skills.

And this will help, this tool is gonna help schools

to measure their progress towards that at 20 weeks.

If children are able to decode between nine

and 12 of the 40 words, um, they're showing
that they are on track to


(13:29):
building up their phonics knowledge
and skills to be able to decode and read words.

And so it's not a lot of words,

although the list looks long, we're not expecting children

at 20 weeks to make it all the way through.

Mm-hmm. But it is gonna give us an, an idea
of whether they are, um, getting on,
getting on the road to reading.

Mm-hmm. So our phonics checks change every term.

(13:51):

We have a new one that's available now, um, to schools.

All the information you need is on Tāhūrangi.

There are three things that you need to be familiar with,
as a teacher, uh,
before you're good to go with the phonics checks.

So these are the, uh, phonics checks handbook

that is a PDF that tells you everything that you need

(14:12):
to know about carrying out

and responding to the phonics checks.

You have the assessment materials,
that's your student materials in your marking sheet.

And we also have an online module which steps you
through in detail the whole process

of implementing phonics checks in your classroom.


(14:33):
So, Innes, let's talk a little bit
about carrying out these checks.

How would you approach, if you are,

you were a teacher in a classroom doing this check,

how would you get ready to administer the phonics checks?

One of the things we got really good information back from

the trial was that around the importance

of a quiet space to do the check.

(14:53):

Mm. So being able to have that quiet space.

We know that children did much better on the check

when they had a quiet space. Do you
Think that's 'cause the teachers could hear them?

I'm not sure whether they could hear them better

or there was less distraction and interruption for them.

Um, there could be a multitude of factors, um,

but we know that that's a really important space, uh,

(15:14):

important thing for them to have that quiet space.
Mm-hmm. Um, making sure you've got everything ready to go.

I know that seems, um, seems quite an easy thing
to think about, but having those, all those,

all the things you need there, um,

so that you're ready to go.

It's nicely laid out. When I was
was teaching in the classroom.

I had folders with labels.


(15:34):
I was similar to Emma, I'm that kind of geek
that everything was lined up
and everything had its place, so mm-hmm.

Color Coded, labeled, all of that.

Oh, all of that. All of that.

Um, so one of the things that's around setting the child up

for the check, um,

there are some really clear instructions in,

in the handbook, um,

(15:54):

and actually a script there that you can follow, um,

which talks about, um, setting the kid up,

the child up for success.

So, you know, introducing the, the task to them.

Um, there's modeling of how to complete the task.

So for example, um, there's practice words and you can show

(16:15):

and go through them, like show them the word
and you can say, I'm going to read this word.

And what we want them to the teachers
to do is actually model how they would do that.

So, for example, if the word is it, they might go, it, it.

So you get, you can go both ways so that you're modeling,

um, segmenting, um, and then modeling, blending the word

(16:35):
and reading the word together.

So that's a really important thing.
So, and also telling the bit, some
of the words are gonna be pseudo, not,
we don't use the word pseudo words in the, um, instruction.
We call them made up words when talking to children. Um,

We, and there's a little bit about the, uh, the narrative
of them being, um, words that aliens have, have, um,

(16:56):

made up or would, would speak, haven't we?
Yes. And that's, yeah,

All of us were a little bit sad when we found out
that the aliens were, uh, wildly distracting for children

as they did the assessment.

But, um, because they're super cute, uh,

but they still play an important role
because it helps children

to understand why they're being asked to read words,

(17:17):
which are not real words.

Mm-hmm. So yes, we tell them these are words
which aliens might say.

Yeah. It gives them that narrative, um, some kind
of narrative context for these words to exist in.

Otherwise, if the words don't mean anything, why have them?

And of course, we don't teach using pseudo words as well.
Mm-hmm. So it may not be something
that they have come across when they get
to the phonics check.

(17:38):

Um, so, you know, hearing them for that,

because it could be something new

or, uh, different for them.

Mm-hmm. Yes.
We really wanna get a measure of

children's growing knowledge

and skills, um, of phonics and decoding.

Um, and we don't want difficulty understanding the

(17:58):
instructions or knowing how
to do the assessment impacting on

children showing us what they know and can do.

Yeah. So give them as much support as you, so give them
as much support as you need to, um,

before they start so that they understand the task.

Yeah. And if, uh, if you had a child that was, um, not

yet fluently blending, um, how would you set them up

(18:21):

to do the phonics check and
how would you, how would you mark the check?

Obviously blend blending is a really important

part of marking an answer,
answer is correct.

Yeah. I would still give them the opportunity.

I would say, Hey, let's have a go.

I would support them to certainly be able to do
that segmenting aspect of it.

I would then note that they're not yet blending,

(18:42):
and that's something that for me as the teacher.

I need to then, as we talked about earlier,

do something about, but I'm also not, I'm noticing what, uh,

grapheme and phoneme correspondences
or letter sound correspondences they've got,
what have they got from the alphabetic code
that they do know, so that we are also looking at, you know,

celebrating what they can do.

(19:03):

Mm-hmm. And then recognizing, hey, these are some things
that I either I need to teach them these,

these correspondences,

or I need to focus more on blending and my teaching.

And I think we'll chat a bit more about that in the,

in as we keep going. Mm-hmm.

And what would be some of the common errors
that you might encounter when children, uh,

reading the words in the phonics check?

(19:24):

So they may mix up this order of the letters

or the sounds as they try to blend the word.

That can sometimes be,
or they can substitute

for a different sound when they're, when they're reading it.

Um, or there might be just some, uh, correspondences
that aren't locked in yet as well,

so they might get stuck on some of those as well. Mm-hmm.

(19:44):

And actually, we found that
that was a really common common error.

And from our trial, we found that BD

reversal was incredibly common.

And so we've actually, uh, avoided early on having some
of those items with the Bs and Ds.

Uh, and we've pushed those a little bit further up the order

of the words, haven't we?

That was fascinating. I think we all knew that BD reversal

(20:06):
and, and some other letters is, isn't a very typical, uh,

and common part of, um, developing

alphabetic code knowledge at this early stage.

But all of us were blown away by how big an impact
that really did have, and how many, what proportion
of children did have that reversal.

Mm. Um, and it was really muddying, um, the,

(20:29):

the information that we were getting.

So yes, as you said, we now avoid them early on. Yeah.

But of course, we still do want to know, we,

we do obviously have B'S and D's in, in our words
because we do want teachers to be able to identify if
that's an area of difficulty for a child,

and give them that opportunity to have a lot more

Practice, just not as many one, one other area
that you might see, um, more so in the 40 week check is, uh,

(20:54):

when you get to the consonant digraph

or vowel digraph words, uh, you might have children who are reading,

for example, you might get a word like, LOSH,

and you might hear a child attempt to sound out each

individual letter without recognising

that two letters are representing one sound.

So they might sound that out as oh, oh, sh, hi

(21:18):
LOSS instead of LOSH.

And, and that gives us information about, okay,

so we are getting those single letter sound correspondences
going, but in the phonics continuum we can see that

as the digraphs come in, this is the point

of this child's need.

And it's not uncommon for children to get,

sometimes get stuck on those, those consonant digraphs

(21:38):

because they are having to learn that those,
there's two letters, one sound.
That's right. And vowels

Vowels. So children's
pronunciation will differ depending on,

on their accent or their speech patterns.

And I'm thinking about my daughter who was,
when she was young, she pronounced her G's as D's.

So she would say

that DIRL when she was pointing to that girl.

(22:02):

Uh, so what do teachers need
to consider when they're marking the check, uh, in terms
of speech patterns and pronunciation?

Absolutely. So we are doing our phonics check

to look at children's phonics knowledge
and dec decoding skills, not their speech production.

(22:22):

So this is one of the important reasons

that it's the children's classroom teacher

who knows them well, that's giving this assessment, um,
because they will know what's normal for that child,

and they will be able to decide whether that error is to do
with the child's dialect of English or accent

or their speech or, or, uh, articulation patterns.

(22:44):
Thank you. Mm-hmm. Um,

or whether it genuinely is

that a child's attached the incorrect phoneme

to a, to a grapheme.
So whether that's a decoding problem,

so an example might be, as you said, if

a child comes across a word that begins with a G sound, so
for example, a word like Gib, GIB,

(23:04):

and they pronounced that dib dib,

you would've known that your daughter had recognised that
that was a G and she was saying Gib,

but it came out of her mouth as dib.

So you would not mark that incorrect.

You would mark that as correct given the child's speech,
typical speech production.

(23:24):

But if you were unsure,

how could you check which one was which?

Great question. So what you want to do is ask a child
to produce some really familiar words with
that speech sound in them.

So for that example, I would say at the end of the check,

I would've noticed that error during the check.
And I'd say, Hey, I wonder if you can just copy me
and, um, say some words for me.

(23:45):

Can you please say the word girl?

And they'd say dirl and you'd say, can you say the word good?

And if they say dood, you think, okay,

that is a speech pattern.

Um, I know.

But if they can imitate those words correctly,
it's more likely that it was a decoding problem.

When you are marking the phonics check, you can use either

(24:07):

the Excel form to record results,

or you can use a printable PDF.

So we have, we have a choice of both, um,

because we know that teachers have their own preferences.

But Emma, why would you use the Excel form?

So many reasons. Uh, number one, it color codes
and what teacher doesn't love a bit of color coding.

(24:28):

Um, so the Excel form's wonderful.

If you, uh, put the results in,

you can do that as you are listening to the child,

or you can record on paper and then enter it in.

Uh, it's gonna do some automatic magical analysis

for you, and it's going to help you look at,

(24:49):
within our phonics, um, continuum, it's going
to help you see whereabouts on the phonics
continuum a child is up to.
So what sort of grapheme phoneme correspondences

and what sort of word structures

of increasing complexity where they're up to.

And it's gonna help you identify

what their next learning steps will be.

Uh, because it, um, analyzes where the errors started

(25:11):

to occur, it will also give you, um, a,

an instant tally of the child score.
So you don't need to go
and count up all of the correct and incorrect.

Um, so you get that instant sort of visual report.

You get the instant score tally,
and it will really help you with managing, um, student data.

So for multiple children in a class,

(25:31):

The score that the child gets in the phonics check
indicates how they are progressing in relation
to curriculum expectations.

So our achievement levels are need support

progressing towards curriculum expectation, proficient

or exceeding curriculum expectation.


(25:52):
If a teacher has a student that a phonics check identifies
as needing support

or is still progressing towards expectation,

how should they respond?

I think it's really important that they look at
where those, as, as Emma just talked about,
where those things that they are finding tricky are

the spreadsheet obviously helps you do that really easily.

(26:13):

And then that you are intensifying the teaching
that you are providing to that child.

It might be more frequently throughout a day you do small,

uh, doses of explicitly teaching those sounds

or explicitly teaching, uh, segmenting, blending, if
that happens to be the, uh, whether

where the child's finding a little bit tricky

(26:33):

and that you're giving them multiple opportunities.

We say increasing the dosage, the frequency, so
that they're actually then getting
that opportunity to lock those in.
They might need a little bit more time to get those, um,

those patterns locked into their me into their memory

and being able to access them, um, proficiently.

They need a bit more practice,

They need more opportunities to practice

(26:55):

and practice recalling that sound and pattern

and being able to, opportunities to read, um, and blend

and put that into words.

Um, I've had children in the past

where we've had other matching games that they go away
and practice and support, particularly
with consonant digraphs, they, um, got a bit stuck.

So we had lots of opportunities throughout the day

(27:16):
where they were having that opportunity
to read those graphemes, um, practice reading them,

practice decoding, and, and practice blending those
sounds together to make those words.
So it was lots of different ways of doing it as well
as really good explicit teaching.

Mm-hmm. Um, I think that was the really, that's a real key,

but we, as soon as we've noticed that, um, if it's come out
of the phonics check at 20 weeks

(27:36):
that we are doing something about it right there, we know

that the earlier that we, uh, provide
that additional support, the child is much more likely

to, to have success as a reader

and potentially a writer, um, in their later, as later

as they progress through school and onto their adult life.

So again, getting in really, really quickly, as soon

(27:57):
as we've noticed that and giving those children multiple,

it doesn't have to be a whole 15 minute lesson every,

you know, throughout the day, it could be short, sharp,
little, um, couple of minutes.

Uh, could be an activity where they're practicing, uh, read,

decoding, uh, words with, with that consonant digraph

that happens to be the, the where they're getting stuck.

(28:18):

It's not, it's not like a longer lesson not saying that,

and they don't, and they would have this lesson, you know,
these extra lessons aren't instead of their normal, uh,
classroom teaching that's additional.

Um, and like I say, it's not,

it's not like a whole 15 minute lesson five times a day.

That's right. So you, you're talking there about,

you know, everybody in our class will receive

(28:41):
that really high quality universal teaching that is
that really effective teaching
of alphabetic code knowledge and skills.

And then some children will need opportunities
to practice that on top.
So that's our targeted teaching.

So they receive that universal teaching plus more,

and then some children will need even more than that.

And you started to talk about how we can intensify teaching

(29:01):

to accelerate learning.

So we can reduce the group size,

we can increase the frequency of teaching,

we can increase the duration of teaching, um,

and we can increase the expertise

of the person working with them.

And we wanna provide opportunities for children to have, um,

supported or guided practice,

(29:22):

and then moving into that more independent practice so
that we can transfer those skills into permanent learning
or permanent long-term memory

When we provide that additional support early on those

gaps close Mm.

Much more quickly than they do at a
later point in the pathway.

Mm. And I think it's also really important just to note

(29:43):
that, you know, obviously there'll be a level which is need
support and, and that child needs intensive support

to accelerate their progress.

But even those students who are still progressing towards

or on their way, but they're not quite at expectation,

it's really important that they receive support to, to keep
that gap small and to close it, rather than waiting for that

(30:05):

to, to consolidate or expand over over time.

Yeah. Not just thinking, oh,
they just need a bit more time to develop that.
That may be true for a very small number of children,

but the research is really indicating that no matter

what children come to school with

or what kinds of disadvantage they may be experiencing, that

around 95% of our children do have the capacity

(30:28):

to be able to, um, become proficient readers and writers.

And we need to believe that and,

and work to towards that with every fiber of, um,

who we are as educators.

It's not dependent on your postcode, um,

does not determine your potential to learn to read.

So I would really implore our colleagues to think

(30:48):
of this first year as being very much

risk prevention teaching.

We are, we are noticing, um, any child who who needs
that additional support

and we are putting it in place as soon as possible, um,

to look after the wellbeing of all of our children and,
and give them the best chance of their learning

and, uh, life outcomes.

(31:10):

The phonics check supports data informed teaching,

and the ministry supports whole school data informed

practice by providing regular school level reports

based on phonics check data.

So when schools upload their phonics checks results

to the ministry secure data portal, they'll receive a report

(31:32):

that provides a summary

of their students' progress and achievement.

It provides demographic analysis

and it will also provide, uh, national achievement norms.

Now, if you were in a school, Emma

or Innes, why would you want to go to the effort of,

of getting one of these school level phonics check reports?

(31:55):

It would give me a really good picture of where my school

or the children in my school are, are at
with their phonics and decoding knowledge.

I could then use that to look at,

is there something, is this going well?

Are we, have we got effective teaching going on in place?

Or I could start thinking, hang on, is there something here
that we might need to look at

and start looking at it what we're doing in our school, um,

(32:17):

to make things better for all of our learners?

So there's, there's kind of a twofold thing I can look at.

Am I, is my school roughly around where other, you know,

the national averages are?

Or is there something that we need
to maybe look at what we're doing?

Or are we, are we going really, really well

and we can confidently go, Hey, look, we know
that our kids are on, are on track

(32:39):

and we've got a really effective teaching
and learning going on in our classrooms,
and our kids are making good progress.

You know, we need do need.
There'll be lots of schools out there
that are already gonna be having really good success.

This gives them a picture
that actually against our curriculum and our

and norms that actually in New Zealand, yes, we are making,

our school is making that progress.

(32:59):

We've got something to hang it on.

I think we've, schools have probably been doing a little
bit of guessing for a little while in regards to this
because we haven't had that picture, um, nationally,

we haven't had those norms, particularly for this type
of assessment, which really ties in nicely
with structured literacy approaches.

Just wanna build on what you said there,
and I said it's, it's a really exciting tool I think now

(33:22):
for school leaders and,

and school teams as a whole to look at their own system.

So there are, I think there might be, can we just address
to concern that schools might be worried that their

data might be used to share or compare schools?

Um, you need to know that the school level reports.

I just wanna encourage you to upload your data

(33:42):

and make use of these regular reports
that you will be able to receive.

Um, the information is not identifiable, it is not going
to be shared, and it's for the purposes.

Um, the purpose of it is for schools
to reflect on their own progress.

Um, and it will be really exciting for you building
that collective efficacy as you're all working so hard to,

(34:02):

um, shift and improve your practice.

Use these, this data as feedback on teaching in your school

and, and use it as a, an indicator of the progress
that you are making, um,

as you improve students' learning over time.

And so you'll really celebrate, uh, seeing the,

(34:23):
that proportion of your learners who are meeting
that expectation increase over the next few years.

What you are looking for is that your universal teaching,

so your core classroom approach, um, to teaching children

to read in this case is

enabling at least 80% of your learners to meet

(34:45):
that curriculum expectation.
That's when you will know that your universal teaching, um,

is highly effective.

That reduces the number of children who are gonna need that,

um, increased intensity of teaching so that, um, targeted

and tailored teaching.

So you'll have smaller numbers of children needing
that extra support, and you'll have the resources then

(35:05):
to be able to, to provide that.

So just adding on to what you said, Emma, you know,

that 40 week data is gonna give us really good, um,

information when we look at the 20 and 40 week data

and looking at how well we are doing to close those gaps,

um, for those children that may have needed more support.

Um, and, and so with,

we are really going into their second year at school knowing

(35:27):
that they're on track and,

and all of, as, all
of those children are having that opportunity.

So we've, we've got those two time points
that are really gonna help us to be able to recognise

as a school, previously a school leader going actually

what we are doing to support those kids that needed more

actually is also working as well.

So that's, that's really, really will be really exciting
as a school leader when you get to see some of that data

(35:48):

and particularly when we start looking over, um,

over the next few years as well.

That's all we have time for today, Emma and Innes.
Thank you so much for joining us today

and sharing your experience

and expertise on all things phonics and the phonics checks.

I've really enjoyed our conversation.

It was great to be able to be here and have a chat.

(36:11):

Um, and it's always great to have Emma in the room

and have a bit chatting with her too.

So

Mahi, thanks so much to you both.

Uh, I hope that's really helpful to our colleagues, uh,

as you have a try and,

and, um, try out our new phonics check

and we all hope it will help you support your learners.

The phonics checks are now available for schools to use.

(36:33):

All the information you need is on Tāhārangi.

This includes everything you need to carry out the checks,
including how to make the checks inclusive

and accessible for learners.

If you need support, you can also email us at [e-mail]

We hope you enjoyed this Education Gazette
Tukutuku kōrero podcast on the phonics check.