A child usually moves from Tier 2 to Tier 3 for reading when regular progress checks show little growth after a fair trial of well-delivered Tier 2. Screening decides who gets extra help. A goal and frequent monitoring decide whether it's working. When the line stays flat, the support gets more intense, and that more intense support is what Tier 3 is. A child whose needs are already clear from a diagnostic doesn't have to struggle through Tier 2 first.
The three tiers, briefly
AERO's at-a-glance guide to a multi-tiered system of supports sets out the shape: evidence-based teaching for everyone at Tier 1, "targeted small-group support, provided in addition to Tier 1" at Tier 2, and "highly individualised support, with increased intensity, frequency and duration" at Tier 3, also on top of Tier 1. In AERO's words, Tier 2 and 3 "supplement rather than replace core teaching". How that sits inside a Prep or Year 1 phonics block is in the reading groups article; this one stays on the decisions between tiers.
Decision one: who gets flagged at screening
Entry to Tier 2 starts with the school's screening schedule, not one teacher's hunch. AERO's tiered interventions practice guide is blunt about it: "It's not recommended that classroom teachers conduct their own screening independently of the whole-school approach to MTSS." The US What Works Clearinghouse guide gives Tier 2 to students "who score below the benchmark score on universal screening", and rates that recommendation on strong evidence.
In Year 1 the Phonics Check is one of those screens. In NSW Government schools, 64% of Year 1 students reached the expected level in 2025, up from 60% in 2024, and South Australia rechecks Year 2 students who need it "to monitor their progress and response to targeted support". Finding what's missing is the diagnostic's job.
An accuracy-only check also passes the child who reads every word correctly and slowly. That child needs a fluency routine.
Decision two: what "not responding" looks like in the data
Not responding is a pattern on a graph. It needs a goal, a short skill probe given often, and a rule for reading it.
AERO's guide to choosing and modifying reading interventions (written for Years 7 to 9, though the rhythm transfers) suggests curriculum-based measures fortnightly at Tier 2 and weekly at Tier 3. It keeps standardised tests to two or three times a year, because more often they "may be insensitive to small improvements". It also advises against staff building their own monitoring tools.
The National Center on Intensive Intervention publishes a widely used decision rule. Once at least three weeks of teaching have passed and six data points are in, look at the four most recent:
| The four most recent points | What NCII suggests |
|---|---|
| All above the goal line | Raise the goal |
| All below the goal line | Consider adapting the intervention |
| A mix | Keep teaching and keep collecting |
Graph accuracy and speed separately. Accuracy climbing while rate stays flat tells you something different from flat on both.
How long a Tier 2 trial runs
There's no fixed number of weeks, and AERO doesn't give one. Its secondary guide says the call to continue, change or fade an intervention should rest on "the student's progress towards a learning goal or benchmark rather than a predetermined time frame". The US guide gives Tier 3 to students who show minimal progress "after reasonable time in tier 2".
With NCII's four-point rule, six probes a fortnight apart take about ten weeks to collect; weekly, about five. That's the pace of the data, not a waiting period. If a child worries you, probe more often, and don't hold back support they clearly need.
Before you read a flat line as non-response, count the sessions and check the delivery.
The tiers aren't a strict ladder either. AERO's secondary guide also says a student should get the tier that matches their needs, which a good diagnostic can identify, and doesn't have to struggle at Tier 2 before getting Tier 3. Its example is secondary students with years of gaps. A Prep to Year 2 child has had far less time to build gaps that size, so in the early years response over time is usually what tells you.
What Tier 3 actually changes
AERO's practice guide defines Tier 3 by intensity. Interventions are "further intensified by increasing the frequency and/or length of each session, duration of the intervention, and/or lowering group size".
The taxonomy of intervention intensity from Fuchs, Fuchs and Malone (2017) adds the parts that get forgotten:
- Dosage is the number of opportunities the child has to respond and get feedback from the teacher. By that measure, ten minutes where the child reads forty words aloud is a bigger dose than twenty minutes spent mostly listening.
- Alignment means the session targets the skill the child is stuck on.
- Comprehensiveness is how many explicit teaching principles the session uses, such as modelling, guided practice, immediate correction and cumulative review.
- Individualisation is the ongoing use of monitoring and diagnostic data to adjust the teaching.
Time alone doesn't do it. In Wanzek and Vaughn's 2008 study, Year 1-aged US children who had responded poorly to a term of small-group intervention got a single or a double daily dose, in groups of five. Their responses to the two doses "were similar over time". The authors suggest the extra time might have worked if it came with smaller groups, of two or three children.
Individualising means aiming at the stall point. One child still can't blend a CVC word, which is Foundation content in the Australian Curriculum (AC9EFLY12). Another blends CVC words easily and falls over digraphs, which is Year 1 (AC9E1LY11). Both are "Tier 3 readers", and they need different lessons. NCII calls the loop data-based individualisation: teach, monitor, run a diagnostic when the line stays flat, adapt, monitor again.
Smaller doesn't have to mean one-to-one. In a small randomised trial of 49 at-risk Year 1-aged children, groups of three made gains comparable to one-to-one. Handy when the timetable can't fund one adult per child.
The few who still don't move
Some children get faithful Tier 2, then Tier 3, and still progress slowly. The research expects them. Wanzek and Vaughn, citing Torgesen, note estimates that 2% to 6% of students "continue to struggle with reading, even when generally effective reading interventions are implemented".
That persistence is evidence in its own right. The 2025 Delphi consensus on dyslexia, from a 71-member international panel, lists "persistence of difficulties despite intervention" as a major risk factor. For young children it describes this exact path: screening, teaching, progress monitoring, then "further assessment when response to intervention is poor". The Dyslexia-SPELD Foundation describes the spelling and decoding difficulties of dyslexia as ones that "do not progress as expected with the provision of well-intentioned and targeted intervention". Grattan points the same way: more intensive one-on-one support, and potentially further testing.
So refer these children for a full assessment and keep the intensive teaching running while you wait. Your graphs are what the assessor will want. The adjustments don't have to wait for the report either: NCCD guidance says "a diagnosis is not required to include a student".
When leadership wants Tier 3 kept in class
Tier 3 is defined by intensity, not by a room. None of AERO's tier definitions name a place, and its article on primary schools says primary teachers' long time with the same class "can create opportunities to integrate intervention directly into classroom routines".
What it can't do is replace the class lesson. A child taken to a side table during the whole-class code lesson has swapped Tier 1 for Tier 3, the one trade the model rules out. In a Prep to Year 2 room, in-class Tier 3 can look like this:
- One to three children with a trained adult during the practice part of the block, daily, after the class lesson.
- A second short daily session that doesn't cut into the code lesson, such as first thing in the morning.
- The same weekly probe, so every change is still checked against data.
If the noise of the room is costing the child attention, that's an intensity problem (the taxonomy counts behavioural support as a dimension), and that's the case to take back to leadership.
What goes in the handover note
The tier label is its least useful line. The next teacher needs the goal, the graph, the dose the child actually received, the stall point, and what was changed and when. With those, nobody starts the trial again from scratch.
Keeping that record is the slow part. Phonicspal's Classroom tools let you record the sounds each student needs to revisit, group students who share a gap, and plan cumulative review from the class record.
Tier definitions and monitoring guidance are published by AERO; decision rules by the National Center on Intensive Intervention; Phonics Check figures by the NSW and South Australian education departments.
