In 2025, 80% of Year 1 pupils in England reached or exceeded the 32 out of 40 words read correctly (or ‘plausibly’ for the 20 pseudo-words) in the statutory Y1 Phonics Screening Check. The check is designed to confirm whether pupils have learned phonics decoding to an appropriate standard by the age of six.
These are the results of 20 Flying High Trust schools in England that have adopted ‘No Nonsense Phonics‘ as their preferred phonics programme:
school A – 100%
school B – 100%
school C – 100%
school D – 96.4%
school E – 96%
school F – 95.6%
school G – 94.5%
school H – 93.5%
school I – 93.3%
school J – 91.7%
school K – 88.9%
school L – 88.5%
school M – 87.5%
school N – 86.7%
school O – 86.2%
school P – 85.2%
school Q – 84.6%
school R – 84.4%
school S – 83.3%
school T – 82.6%
Congratulations to the staff and children at all these schools – thank you for all your hard work – and no doubt there has been some good collaboration with parents and carers in the home, too (one of the features of my work is to ensure good information regularly going back and forth into the ‘home’ via the bookbag routine).
Flying High Trust Literacy Advisor, Carl Pattison, is instrumental in supporting the adoption of ‘No Nonsense Phonics’ in these schools for which I’m very appreciative. Carl has written previous posts for my literacy blog which describe the 2024 Y1 Phonics Screening Check results and the ‘Surprises‘ teachers have found on adopting ‘No Nonsense Phonics’ in their schools.
Transparent information and FREE training videos are on this page for the ‘No Nonsense Phonics’ programme.
There is a fantastic range of additional FREE resources to support ‘No Nonsense Phonics’ and that can also be used with the ‘Phonics International’ programme.
February 2025: What did Deputy Headteacher, Bethany Dixon have to say about the adoption of ‘No Nonsense Phonics‘ at two schools in the Flying High Trust?
January 2025: What did Reading Leader, Emily Kenny have to say about trialling ‘No Nonsense Phonics’ and ‘Phonics and Talk Time‘ (for nursery) in a Flying High Trust school?
PS: We have now created some new hard-copy resources for the ‘Phonics and Talk Time‘ series – and a new page to learn about the rationale and how teachers can provide ‘alphabet letters linked to phonics’ both ‘systematically’ and ‘incidentally’ as required using our FREE ‘Teeny Reading Seeds‘ resources and our ‘Phonics and Talk Time‘ free and ‘to buy’ resources. THIS is our homepage for our nursery resources including a PowerPoint featuring the two ‘Phonics and Talk Time’ books.