England: Improvements in Y1 phonics screening check and Key Stage 1 assessments

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/s ... 1_2016.pdf

Phonics screening check and Key stage 1 assessments in England, 2016

1. Phonics results (Tables 1 and 7)

81% of pupils met the expected standard of phonic decoding at the end of year 1. An increase of 23 percentage points since the introduction of the assessment in 2012. The proportion of year 1 pupils achieving the phonics standard has increased year on year since 2012.

The percentage of pupils meeting the expected standard by the end of year 2 has risen to 91% in 2016 continuing the steady increase from the 85% of pupils achieving the standard when the year 2 assessment was introduced in 2013.

Table A shows the proportion of pupils meeting the phonics standard by the end of year 2, comparing that with the proportion of pupils in their year group who had met the standard while in year 1.

School level figures are not published for phonics, but 1138 schools have at least 95% of the pupils achieving the phonics standard in year 1 in 2016 compared with 753 schools in 2015 and 611 in 2014.

[Debbie_Hepplewhite]

Year One Phonics Screening Check and national curriculum assessment results at Key Stage 1 for 2018:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publicati ... gland-2018

2.1 National phonics attainment

Table 1 shows the proportion of pupils who met the phonics standard by the end of year 2, compared to the proportion of pupils in their year group who met the standard while in year 1.

82% of pupils met the expected standard in the phonics screening check at the end of year 1, an increase of 25 percentage points since the introduction of the check in 2012. The proportion of pupils who met the expected standard in phonics in year 1 has increased year-on-year from 58% in 2012 to 82% in 2018. If applied to the 2018 cohort size, this increase would equate to an additional 163,000 pupils meeting the expected standard. This is calculated as follows: if the same proportion of pupils met the expected standard in 2018 as in 2012, 384,994 pupils would have met the standard. The difference between this figure and the number of pupils who met the standard in 2018 (548,151) is 163,000, rounded to the nearest thousand.

1,268 schools had at least 95% of pupils achieving the phonics standard in year 1 in 2018, more than in 2017 (1,076). These figures exclude schools with fewer than 11 pupils.

The percentage of pupils who met the expected standard in phonics by the end of year 2 was 92% in 2018, the same proportion as in 2017.