Home › Guides › Primary

The Year 1 Phonics Screening Check: What Your Child Reads, the Pass Mark and What Happens If They Miss It

The phonics screening check is a short one-to-one reading check that every Year 1 child in a state-funded school in England takes in June. Your child reads 40 words aloud to a teacher they know, 20 real and 20 made up, and scores a mark out of 40. In 2026 the mark needed to meet the expected standard was 31, one lower than the 32 used every year before. This page explains how the check works, why it includes nonsense words, what the national results look like and what happens in Year 2 if your child does not reach the standard.

How the check works

The check is run by a teacher, usually your child's own class teacher or someone else they know, in a quiet room with no other children present. It takes around five to ten minutes. Before it starts there is a short practice sheet so the child understands what to do. The teacher then shows the words a few at a time and records, for each of the 40, whether your child read it correctly.

The words are split into two sections of 20. The first section uses simpler word structures and the most common letter-sound correspondences; the second has longer words and trickier spellings. There is no time limit on each word and children are allowed to sound a word out before blending it, which is exactly what they are taught to do in class.

Schools cannot see the words in advance. The Standards and Testing Agency sends the materials in sealed packs, and the check has to be given during the set week. In 2026 that was Monday 8 June to Friday 12 June. A child who was absent could take it up to Friday 19 June.

Why half the words are nonsense

Twenty of the 40 words are pseudo-words: strings of letters that follow English spelling rules but are not real words. On the check sheet each one sits next to a small picture of an alien, and children are told these are the names of alien creatures. That framing matters, because it stops a child from trying to "correct" the word into a real one they already know.

The point is to test decoding on its own. A child who has seen "chip" many times might recognise it by sight, but they can only read a made-up word by turning the letters into sounds and blending them. That is the skill phonics teaching builds and the one the check sets out to measure. For a pseudo-word, any pronunciation that fits the letters is marked correct, so a word containing "ow" can be read with the sound in "cow" or the sound in "snow".

The pass mark: 32 for years, 31 in 2026

Each child gets one mark per correctly read word, for a total out of 40. The threshold for meeting the expected standard is set after the check has been taken, because the words change every year and one set can be slightly harder than another. The Department for Education's own statistics note that the threshold was 32 in every year up to and including 2025.

For 2026 it came down. The Department published the 2026 check materials on 22 June 2026 with the line: "The 2026 phonics screening check threshold mark is 31." In practice this means the 2026 words were judged a little harder than usual, not that the standard was lowered.

Source: Department for Education, Phonics screening check attainment, 2024/25 release. No check was held in 2020 or 2021.

What the national results tell you

Four in five children meet the standard in Year 1, and by the end of Year 2 the figure is 89%. So a child who falls short at six is in a large group, and most of that group catches up within a year.

The gaps are worth knowing about. In 2025, 67% of disadvantaged pupils met the standard in Year 1, down from 68% in 2024. London was the strongest region at 82%, with the North East and North West lowest at 78%. The published breakdowns also show a clear month-of-birth effect: summer-born children, who can be almost a year younger than their classmates, pass at lower rates. If your child was born in July or August and misses the mark, their age is part of the picture. Our page on summer-born school admissions covers the wider question.

School-level results are not published. The Department releases national and local authority figures but no league table, so there is no way to compare schools on phonics.

What you will be told

By the end of the summer term the headteacher must tell you your child's mark and whether it met the standard. Most schools put this in the end-of-year report. If your child did not take the check, the school must say why.

A headteacher can decide a child should not take it at all. The arrangements list the situations: a child who has shown no understanding of letter-sound correspondences, a child who has recently arrived in the country and cannot yet read letters and sounds in English, a child who communicates using sign language or a communication board, and a child who is non-verbal or selectively mute. The headteacher has to tell parents about that decision too. If your child has special educational needs and you are unsure how the check applies, our SEND support page sets out what the school should already be doing.

If your child does not meet the standard

Nothing formal happens straight away, and there is no retake in Year 1. The school should give extra phonics support during Year 2, often in small groups, and your child takes the check again in the June of Year 2. Children who were not checked in Year 1 take it in Year 2 as well.

A child who misses the standard in Year 2 does not take it a third time. The school is expected to keep supporting their reading, and the result feeds into its own planning rather than any national consequence for the child.

Questions worth asking the class teacher:

• Which sounds or spelling patterns did my child find hardest?
• Was it the real words or the alien words that caused the trouble?
• What extra phonics support will they get in Year 2, and how often?
• Which reading books match the sounds they are learning now?

Helping at home without drilling

Schools teach phonics through a validated programme, and they will usually tell you which one. Following its order of sounds at home works better than buying a separate scheme that introduces sounds in a different sequence. Useful habits:

• Read the decodable book the school sends home, even if it looks easy. Reading it fluently is the point.
• When your child is stuck on a word, ask them to say each sound and then blend, rather than giving them the word.
• Make up silly words together from letter cards and read them aloud. It is the same skill the alien words test.
• Keep reading stories to them at a level above what they can read alone, so reading stays about meaning and not just sounds.

Past check papers are published on GOV.UK and some parents use them for familiarity. A single run-through so the format is not a surprise is plenty; repeated practice on old papers adds little because the words change every year.

The phonics check is the first of several statutory checks in primary school. The Year 4 multiplication tables check comes next, then the Year 6 SATs, explained in SATs results explained. For more on the primary years see the Schools Insight homepage.