Five minutes a day. We track the 82 sounds in the check and show you exactly which ones your child finds hard — then adapt each session around them.
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A statutory Year-1 assessment in England. Monday 8 to Friday 12 June 2026. A teacher sits one-to-one with your child and asks them to read 40 words aloud — half real, half made-up "alien" words that test pure decoding.
Pass mark is 32 out of 40, unchanged since 2012. Children who don't pass in Year 1 retake in Year 2 — and the school is required to provide extra support either way. Read the full guide
Fifteen words, five minutes. The session adapts to your child's weak graphemes from yesterday — gentle, brief, every day.
Forty words, just like the real thing. Use any past paper from 2012 to 2025, or generate a fresh one. Pass mark shown.
A heatmap of every grapheme-phoneme correspondence your child has met. Strong sounds in green. Weak ones in red. No guessing.
Tap any sound — split digraph 'a-e', trigraph 'igh', the lot — and drill it with a focused 10-word set.
You don't need to drill for hours. You need a steady habit and a clear map of weaknesses.
The check covers every GPC taught from Reception through to Year 1. The hard ones — split digraphs, trigraphs, ambiguous vowel digraphs — are concentrated in Section 2.
After a handful of sessions, the heatmap fills in. Strong sounds turn green, weak ones glow red, untested ones stay neutral. You see at a glance where to spend the next ten minutes.
Tap any weak tile in the app to drill it with a focused 10-word set.
Twelve years of past papers, all digitised. Run any of them as a faithful mock check.
The Phonics Screening Check runs from Monday 8 June to Friday 12 June 2026 in every state-funded primary school in England. Children absent during that week have until Friday 19 June 2026 to sit it.
32 out of 40 — unchanged since 2012. The DfE technically resets the threshold each year, but in practice it hasn't moved.
They retake in Year 2 in June 2027. There's no further retake — the school has the same intervention plan either way.
Yes. About half of the 40 words are pseudo-words. The DfE marks them with an alien icon to help children understand they aren't real.
No — and on purpose. The real check is silent decoding by your child. You read nothing. Audio prompts would teach the wrong skill: memorising sound clips instead of decoding the letters.
No. We use the publicly published framework and past papers. The Phonics Screening Check is a DfE assessment.
Anything with a browser. Best on a tablet held in portrait. You can 'Add to Home Screen' on iPad for an app-like experience.
Yes. Your email, your child's first name, and their practice results — that's it. UK/EU servers, never sold, never shared. Email support@phonicscheck.co.uk to delete any time. Full detail in our Privacy Policy.
Unlimited use through 31 August 2026 — all sessions, all mocks, the full diagnostic.
If the app doesn't work for you, email and we'll refund. No questions.