Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what methodology her Department plans to use to measure the effectiveness of the phonics screening test.

The phonics screening check was introduced in 2012, when 58 per cent of Year 1 pupils met the expected standard. By 2016, this had risen to 81 per cent.

Of those pupils meeting the phonics standard in year 1 in 2015, almost 9 in 10 (89 per cent) went on to reach the expected standard in reading at the end of Key Stage 1. There are now 147,000 more six-year-olds on track to become excellent readers since the introduction of the check.

In June 2015, the Department published the report of the evaluation of the phonics screening check conducted by the National Foundation for Educational Research, which covered the three annual administrations of the check between 2012 and 2014. Its key finding was that the check has had a positive impact on pupils’ attainment in phonics. The evaluation report is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/phonics-screening-check-evaluation-final-report.