Phonics
At The Willows Catholic Primary School, we use Red Rose Letters and Sounds, developed by Lancashire Professional Development Service, to teach systematic synthetic phonics.
Phonics is central to our teaching of early reading. We want every child to develop the knowledge, skills and confidence needed to become a fluent reader and successful writer.
Intent
Our intent is for every child to become a confident and fluent reader as quickly as possible.
Through high-quality, systematic phonics teaching, children learn to recognise the relationship between sounds and letters, blend sounds to read words and segment words accurately for spelling.
We aim to give children a strong start to reading from Reception onwards. We want pupils to develop secure phonic knowledge which they can apply independently when reading and writing.
Alongside learning to decode, we foster a love of books, stories and reading so that children become enthusiastic readers who choose to read for both pleasure and purpose.
Implementation
We follow the Red Rose Letters and Sounds programme, which provides a clear and carefully sequenced progression through phonics.
Children receive regular, structured phonics teaching. Sessions follow the Red Rose approach of:
Revisit and Review → Teach → Practise → Apply
Children progressively learn the grapheme-phoneme correspondences needed for reading and spelling. They are taught to blend sounds to read words and segment spoken words into sounds for spelling. Tricky words and high-frequency words are introduced systematically alongside this learning.
Phonics begins in Reception and follows the Red Rose progression through Phases 1–5. Teaching builds on what children already know so that new learning becomes increasingly secure and automatic.
Children are given frequent opportunities to apply their phonics knowledge when reading words, sentences and books and when writing independently.
In the early stages of reading, children read fully decodable books which are closely matched to the phonics they have been taught. This enables them to practise the sounds and words they know and develop increasing accuracy, confidence and fluency.
Assessment forms an important part of our approach. Teachers regularly check children's knowledge and identify any gaps quickly. Pupils who are at risk of falling behind receive additional targeted teaching so that they can keep up with the programme wherever possible.
Staff receive training and support to ensure that phonics is taught accurately and consistently across the school. We also work with parents and carers to help them understand how phonics is taught and how they can support reading at home.
Impact
The impact of our phonics curriculum is seen in children who increasingly:
- recognise grapheme-phoneme correspondences quickly and accurately
- blend sounds independently to read unfamiliar words
- segment words accurately when spelling
- read decodable texts with increasing accuracy, fluency and confidence
- apply their phonics knowledge independently in their writing
- keep up with the expected Red Rose progression
- develop the foundations needed to become fluent, confident readers.
We use ongoing assessment, children's reading and writing and the statutory Year 1 Phonics Screening Check to evaluate the effectiveness of our teaching.
Where assessment identifies gaps, teaching is adapted and additional support is provided promptly. Our aim is that children leave Key Stage 1 with secure phonic knowledge and increasingly fluent reading, enabling them to concentrate less on decoding and more on understanding, enjoying and responding to what they read.
Ultimately, we want every child at The Willows to see themselves as a reader and to have the skills, confidence and enthusiasm needed for a lifetime of reading.
