Journal of Research in Reading

To become literate in a language such as English, it is necessary to crack the alphabetic code – that is, to understand that certain phonemes (sounds) in speech are represented by graphemes (letters) in writing (Byrne, 1998; Byrne & Fielding‐Barnsley, 1989). Phonics instruction involves teaching this alphabetic principle and applying it to reading and spelling (Ehri et al., 2001). There is good evidence to support the efficacy of teaching phonics as a means of teaching reading (McArthur et al., 2012; National Reading Panel, 2000; Torgerson, Brooks & Hall, 2006). However, it is important to acknowledge that phonics instruction is more effective when delivered in the context of a broader literacy curriculum, rather than in isolation (Camilli, Vargas & Yurecko, 2003; Stuebing, Barth, Cirino, Francis & Fletcher, 2008). These research findings are reflected in the current practice of most schools in England, following the Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading (Rose, 2006). Amongst the review's key recommendations was that phonics should be taught as the primary approach to learning to read and write and that such teaching should be embedded within a broad language and literacy curriculum (p. 70).

An additional recommendation following the Rose Review was that teachers assess children's phonic skills throughout the first 3 years of formal education (ages 4–7 years). Where implemented, this is typically achieved by teachers tracking children's progress through a series of developmental ‘phonic phases’, which are outlined in the teaching handbook Letters and Sounds (Department for Education and Skills, 2007). The phases move from demonstrating attention to sounds in the environment (Phase 1) to confident and fluent use of grapheme–phoneme correspondences for reading and spelling unfamiliar words (Phase 6). Moreover, although there are concerns about the ability of teachers to judge the reading skills of their pupils (see Madelaine & Wheldall, 2010, for a review), a number of UK studies have shown that teachers well versed in phonic strategies and monitoring procedures can provide reliable estimates of children's reading abilities as measured by objective tests (Snowling, Duff, Petrou, Schiffeldrin & Bailey, 2011; Snowling, Hulme, Bailey, Stothard & Lindsay, 2011; Snowling et al., 2009).

Despite the focus of government policy on the implementation of systematic phonics in recent years, the proportion of pupils leaving primary school with the expected level in English had stalled at around 80% (Department for Education, 2010). In response to this, in 2012, the UK coalition government introduced a statutory check on early reading progress – the phonics screening check. The stated purpose of the check is, ‘To confirm whether individual pupils have learnt phonic decoding to an appropriate standard’. Consequently, ‘Pupils who have not reached this standard at the end of Year 1 should receive support from their school to ensure they can improve their phonic decoding skills’ (Department for Education, 2012a). Thus, the check forms part of an aim to identify and help struggling readers early in their literacy development (Department for Education, 2010).

The phonics screening check was administered in all maintained schools in England for the first time in June 2012. The check comprises 40 items – 20 real words and 20 pseudowords. All items are phonically regular, ranging from items with three letters in a consonant–vowel–consonant format (e.g., the pseudoword pib) to two‐syllable words containing consonant clusters and vowel digraphs (e.g., the word portrait). To ‘meet the standard’, children had to read at least 32 of the items correctly without support or prompting. Figures show that 58% of pupils met this standard in 2012, and 69% in 2013 (Department for Education, 2012b, 2013b). Children's scores are reported to their parents/guardians and to the Department for Education; and each school's results can be used as evidence within school inspections.

The phonics screening check has been met with a significant amount of controversy. Educators have questioned its necessity, voicing concerns about whether the check will add any valuable information to what teachers already know about their pupils' progress (e.g., National Union of Teachers, 2012). There have also been objections to the statutory nature of the check, with concerns about the resource implications of mandatory testing and the negative consequences when such tests become ‘high‐stakes’ (e.g., Association of Teachers and Lecturers, 2011; Brooks, 2010). Indeed, a survey of nearly 3000 teachers – conducted after the administration of the check but before its results – reported that 87% of respondents did not agree with the statutory implementation of the check and thought that it should be discontinued (ATL/NAHT/NUT, 2012).

In this paper, we ask two critical questions about the phonics screening check: First, is the check valid (i.e., does it function as a useful measure of decoding skills); and second, is the check sensitive (i.e., can it identify children who are showing early signs of being at risk of a reading difficulty)? We also consider whether, given our findings, it is necessary. Answering the first question is relatively straightforward: We can investigate how well scores on the check correlate with reading skills measured by objective tests. The second is more difficult because there is no ‘gold standard’ for the identification of reading difficulty, and any cut‐off between ‘impaired’ and ‘normal’ reading is arbitrary. The recently published American Psychiatric Association diagnostic manual (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) suggests low achievement is indicated by a score of at least 1.5 standard deviations (SDs) below average, translating to a standard score of 78 (p. 69). However, most agencies would contend that this is much below the desirable level of literacy for the UK population. We propose that an attainment level of 1 SD below the age norm (a standard score of 85) would be sufficient to place a child ‘at risk’ of significant underachievement, and hence, we use this as a cut‐off against which to determine the sensitivity of the check.

To answer the preceding questions, we analysed attainment data from eight primary schools in York, selected to be representative of their particular local authority; these data included phonics screening check results and teacher assessments of children's phonic phase attainments. A subsample of children from these schools was seen on an individual basis to obtain psychometric data from tests of reading and associated skills, which were then related to the teacher's assessments.

Method

Results

The attainments of the full sample and subsample on measures of language, literacy and maths are summarised in Table 1. As a group, the subsample's performance on all standardised reading measures was above the population mean of 100 but within the average range. The distribution of the scores on the phonics screening check from our full sample is shown in Figure 1. This shows that the data are not normally distributed. Notably, although there was a long tail in the distribution, some 19% of the sample scored between 30 and 33, with a sudden jump in frequency for those attaining scores of 32–33 compared with 30–31 on the test. With respect to teacher judgements of phonic skill, the number of children distributed across each phase was as follows: Phase 1 = 2, Phase 2 = 15, Phase 3 = 28, Phase 4 = 88, Phase 5 = 111 and Phase 6 = 47.

Discussion

In June 2012, the UK government introduced a new statutory assessment to assess the phonic decoding skills of Year 1 pupils. The aims of this phonics screening check are to ascertain whether pupils' phonic skills are at an appropriate standard, to identify children who may be struggling in this area and ultimately to raise literacy standards. We obtained the results of the phonics screening check from a sample of Year 1 pupils in one local authority, together with teacher assessments of phonic phases and psychometric test data. In light of the various criticisms levelled at the phonics screening check, we assessed whether the check was valid and sensitive; we also considered its necessity.

The validity of an instrument refers to whether it measures what it claims to measure. Our analyses show that the phonics screening check is a highly valid measure of children's phonic skills. The check showed convergent validity by correlating strongly with other measures of phonic skills (e.g., teacher judgements of phonic ability and psychometric tests of nonword reading and spelling) and with broader measures of reading (e.g., single‐word reading accuracy, prose reading accuracy and comprehension). It also demonstrated discriminant validity, by showing weaker correlations with more distal skills (e.g., vocabulary and maths).

Furthermore, the phonics screening check seemed to be sensitive with respect to identifying children at risk of reading difficulties. We compared the check's ability to identify struggling readers (those who scored <32) with identification rates based on preexisting standardised tests of reading accuracy and fluency (for which we defined risk of a reading difficulty as a standard score of <85 – 1 SD below the age‐expected mean). It is worth noting that caution should be applied when interpreting these analyses, which have involved dichotomising continuous data and identifying a group of putative poor readers when dyslexia is essentially a dimensional disorder (Pennington, 2006; Rose, 2009). Note also that categorisation according to the standardised reading tests only identified a small number of at‐risk readers (n = 16, 10%), potentially limiting the extent to which our findings can be generalised, and that sensitivity and specificity rates are intrinsically linked to where the cut‐point between ‘typical’ and ‘at‐risk’ reading is drawn. Nevertheless, the phonics screening check classified most of the same children as at‐risk readers as the reading measures had done, resulting in a high sensitivity of 88%. The check also had an acceptable specificity of 82%. This lower figure demonstrates that the check slightly overestimated the prevalence of at‐risk readers; however, this might be considered a good property for a screening instrument, given that it is preferable to overidentify the children who might need additional help in order to catch all those who certainly do.

Taken together, these observations lead us to conclude that the phonics screening check is a valid instrument for measuring word‐level reading ability and sensitive in identifying young children at risk of a reading difficulty – although this needs to be verified by follow‐up data. However, it is important to note that analysis of the distribution of scores on the phonics screening check raises some doubts about its integrity. Notably, there was a sudden spike in the frequency of scores at 32 – the threshold for meeting the standard. This trend is accentuated in the national data obtained in both 2012 and 2013 (Department for Education, 2012b, 2013b). Reasons suggested for this unusual distribution include the release of the score for meeting the standard prior to the test administration and subsequent marking up of scores that fell on the borderline of meeting the standard (e.g., Bishop, 2012; Standards & Testing Agency, 2012; Townley & Gotts, 2013). If this interpretation is correct, it questions the objectivity of the instrument and the utility of the national data for tracking standards over time (Bishop, 2013). It is noteworthy that the threshold for meeting the standard in 2014 will not be released until after the check has been administered (Standards & Testing Agency, 2013, p. 17).

A survey of nearly 3,000 teachers (ATL/NAHT/NUT, 2012) found that 91% thought the phonics screening check failed to tell them anything they did not know already about children's reading abilities. To the contrary, the Department of Education (2013a) maintains that schools with good reading assessment systems benefited from the phonics screening check because it helped to identify children whose difficulties with phonics were hidden by strong sight word reading skills. This argument implies that teacher assessments of phonic skills may not be well correlated with objective assessments of sight word reading. However, our results showed that well‐trained teachers were as good at judging children's reading skills as was the phonics screening check in so far as both tended to correlate to the same extent with standardised reading measures – notably with tests of sight word reading and prose reading accuracy. There was one significant difference in favour of the phonics screening check, such that it correlated more highly with a standardised test of nonword reading. This might be a reflection of the fact that both these tasks are highly focused on the reading aloud of fully decodable items. In contrast, the phonic phases correlated more strongly with reading comprehension, which suggests that, although the assessment entirely focuses on phonic skills, the phonic phase judgements are also capturing broader aspects of literacy.

Furthermore, teachers' judgements showed at least as good sensitivity in terms of identifying children who were defined operationally from standardised reading measures as at risk of reading difficulties (94% sensitivity of phonic phases, compared with 88% sensitivity of the phonics screening check). However, the phonics screening check was less likely to overestimate the prevalence of at‐risk readers (82% specificity of the phonics screening check compared with a 67% specificity of the phonic phases). Care must be taken when interpreting this apparent tendency of teachers to overidentify risk of reading difficulties. First, we chose to define risk as not yet attaining the phonic phase expected by the end of Year 1 (i.e., not attaining phase 5). Because teacher judgements were recorded in May 2012, it is possible that more children would have been judged to have reached Phase 5 by the end of that summer term (July 2012). Second, this cut‐off point had been imposed on the data at the point of analysis; sensitivity of teacher judgements may well have been higher had teachers been asked explicitly to state which pupils they considered to be at risk.

On balance, given the strong stability of reading once the system is set up (Lervåg & Hulme, 2009), we concur that a rigorous assessment of phonic skill is important for early identification of children at risk of reading difficulties. However, we argue that when teachers are well educated about the cognitive mechanisms involved in reading, and they have training in the teaching and assessment of phonics, their judgements are sufficient for this purpose, and a mandatory phonics screening check is not necessary. Although a likely counter‐argument is that well‐monitored phonics teaching is not systematically implemented on a national level, we believe that the use of resources to better equip teachers to conduct ongoing phonic assessments would be more cost‐effective, not least because this would place them in the best position to intervene before reading difficulties set in.

There are some additional limitations to acknowledge. First, the sample size for our study was relatively small for the validation of a national screening measure. Second, the focus on a local authority in which teachers have been well educated in order to implement the phonics strategy and in which pupils were highly attaining may have introduced bias. Third, as teacher judgements of children's phonic phases influence the level at which they are taught, an underestimate of phonic ability could constrain children's phonic development and in turn their performance on the check. It might be for this reason that teacher judgements and performance on the phonic check correlate well. The risk of this is reduced, however, where teachers have been well trained in phonic assessment and teaching, as in this study. These limitations aside, our main point is to emphasize what can be achieved by teachers who are properly trained and empowered to implement systematic phonics in their classrooms as well as to accurately and consistently monitor their pupil's progress.

Conclusion

We have shown that the new phonics screening check is a valid measure of phonic skills and is sensitive to identifying children at risk of reading difficulties. Its slight tendency to overestimate the prevalence of at‐risk readers (as compared with standardised tests of reading accuracy and fluency) is arguably a favourable property for a screening instrument. We agree that early rigorous assessment of phonic skills is important for the timely identification of word reading difficulties. However, combining our observations about the integrity of the national phonics screening check data with our findings that teachers perform reliable and sensitive assessments of phonics progression, we argue in favour of using resources to continue to train and support teachers in the knowledge, assessment and teaching of early literacy skills.