How to prepare for the Phonics Screening Check

Practise for 5 minutes daily for 6–7 weeks before the 2026 check (Monday 8 June 2026). Focus the daily session on the specific graphemes your child finds tricky. Run a mock check every 1–2 weeks. Avoid pressure in the final week — sleep matters more than drill.

That’s the short version. The longer version, below, walks you through exactly what to do each week. The instinct when you see a test on the horizon is to drill harder, longer, more often. Don’t. The single biggest mistake parents make is doing too much, too generally — half-hour sessions where the child grinds through unrelated worksheets and ends the week resentful. Five focused minutes a day, every day, on the specific sounds your child gets wrong, beats an hour a week of general phonics work. Every time.

Week 7: a diagnostic mock

Take a past paper — the 2024 paper is a good representative starting point. Don’t tell your child it’s a “test”; just say “let’s read these words together”. Note which ones they get wrong. You’re not looking at the score. You’re looking at the pattern: which graphemes recurred in the wrong answers? Split digraphs? Long vowels? Specific clusters? That pattern is your week-by-week target list.

Weeks 6 & 5: rebuild the foundations

Most of Section 1 is Phase 2-4 phonics: single letters, simple consonant digraphs (sh, ch, th, ng), simple vowel digraphs (ai, ee, oa, oo). If your child is shaky here, fix this first — Section 2 will fall apart on top of weak Section 1 foundations. Daily five-minute sessions in our app, weighted toward whichever GPCs the diagnostic flagged, will do the work.

Week 4: split digraphs

Where most children stumble. The split digraph (a-e in “cake”, o-e in “bone”, u-e in “cube”) is counter-intuitive: two letters acting together with another letter between them. A whole week on these, with both pseudo-words and real words mixed, is well spent. Use the targeted practice tab in the app and tap each split digraph in turn.

Week 3: trigraphs and clusters

Trigraphs (igh, ear, air) and complex consonant clusters (str-, scr-, -mp, -nd, -nk) populate a lot of Section 2. They look intimidating on the page; with practice, they’re decoded almost as quickly as single sounds.

Week 2: a second mock and stamina

Run another past paper — the 2023 or 2025 paper. Compare per-GPC scores against three weeks ago. You should see specific graphemes moving from red to amber to green. Some days, run two short sessions instead of one. Always brief; never long. Your child should feel like the app is “easy” by now, even if the words aren’t.

Week 1: a fresh mock and reassurance

Take a generated mock check — words your child has not seen. This is the closest simulation to the real check. Then ease off. Confidence on test day matters more than another five percentage points. Remember: the pass mark is 32 out of 40, unchanged since 2012, and around 80% of Year 1 children meet that standard each year.

Test week: less is more

The 2026 check sits Monday 8 June to Friday 12 June 2026 — your child’s school will pick a day inside that window. One short session two days before the check, then nothing. The day of the check: normal breakfast, normal morning. Don’t tell your child it’s “the test”. Their teacher will frame it as a friendly reading session. Match that energy.

What not to do

• Don’t read words aloud first. The whole point is decoding from print. If you read the word, you’ve taught your child to memorise sounds, not to decode.
• Don’t drill for hours. Five minutes daily beats an hour weekly. The brain needs spacing, not volume.
• Don’t skip the alien words. Pseudo-words are half the check. Children who haven’t practised them get spooked on the day.
• Don’t show flash cards of the past papers. Memorising past words is the opposite of what the test measures.

What if my child is already strong?

Even children whose teachers are confident they’ll pass benefit from short, regular practice on alien words specifically. The reason is psychological: roughly half the words on test day will be pseudo-words, and a child who has only ever practised real words can freeze when the alien icon first appears. Five minutes a day for the run-up of pseudo-word reading takes that surprise out of the equation. If your child cruises the daily sessions, that’s the signal — not to drill harder, but to keep the routine going so test day feels like another normal Tuesday.

Ready to start the seven-week plan? Open the app for a free 5-minute session — no signup, no email.