Start with the result, because it is a good one.
In the 2025 Victorian pilot, 59.1% of Year 1 students were at or above the expected level on the Year 1 Phonics Check. Nearly six in ten, in the first year Victorian schools ran it. Teachers reported an average of 6.5 minutes per child, and 94% of government schools took it up while it was still optional.
That is the number to hold onto when the papers come back.
The numbers, plainly
| 2025 pilot | |
|---|---|
| Year 1 students who participated | 84.9% |
| At or above the expected level | 59.1% |
| Expected level | 28 out of 40 |
| Government schools taking part | 94% |
| Average time per student | 6.5 minutes |
The 2025 check was optional. From 2026 it is mandatory in Victorian government schools, and it runs in weeks 4 to 6 of Term 3 (3 to 21 August in 2026). New South Wales and South Australia run their own Year 1 checks in Term 3 too, and every other state and territory has agreed to introduce one.
The department says it will use the 2025 results as the benchmark to monitor progress over time, so 2026 is the first year the comparison means anything.
What the score does not tell you
A score out of 40 answers one question well: who needs help. Sort the marked papers at 28 and you have your list in about ninety seconds.
What it does not tell you is what to teach. Two students can both score 22 and need completely different lessons. One is guessing at vowel digraphs. The other reads every vowel sound correctly and falls apart on adjacent consonants. Same number, different lesson.
The answer is sitting in the papers already. You just have to read them by sound instead of by score.
From papers to a reteach list, in five steps
- Two piles. 28 and over, under 28. Do not overthink the borderline ones yet.
- In the under pile, write down the words each child missed. Not the count, the actual words.
- Look for the sounds those words share. Work grapheme by grapheme, not word by word. A child who misses chair, shout and thin has one problem, not three.
- Pick the earliest three or four. Earliest in your sequence, not the most obviously broken. If some misses are on sounds you haven't taught yet, sort those into their own pile first.
- Teach those, small group, ten minutes a day. Then re-check just those sounds in a fortnight.
Step 3 is where the value is, and step 4 is where most of us get it wrong.
Why sounds cluster
Forty words is not forty problems. The check is built on a difficulty ladder that runs roughly from CVC words, through adjacent consonants, consonant digraphs, split digraphs, vowel digraphs and trigraphs, out to r-controlled vowels and multisyllabic words.
Because the items climb that ladder, a student's misses tend to bunch at the point where their knowledge runs out. Read the papers by sound and you usually find three or four graphemes doing most of the damage, showing up again and again across different words.
That bunching point has a name worth knowing, and the official guide to analysing results uses it: the earliest point of need. It is the first place in the sequence where a student is missing something, and it is almost always a better teaching target than whatever looked worst on the page.
Reteach in sequence order, not severity order
The instinct is to attack the biggest gap. Resist it.
If a child misses both ai and igh, and your sequence teaches ai first, start with ai, even if igh looked worse. That is the earliest point of need, and it pays off sooner: the earlier sound turns up in more of the words the child is already reading. Don't expect it to fix igh as well. Each grapheme still needs teaching. What you are choosing is the order.
Two more rules of thumb:
- Frequency beats severity. A sound that turns up constantly in the books your class is reading earns its slot ahead of a rarer one, even when the rarer one scored worse.
- One miss is not a signal. A word has several sounds in it, so any one of them could be the culprit. Wait for a grapheme to be missed in two or more different words before you build a lesson around it.
The re-check is small
Do not re-run all 40 words in a fortnight. It takes another 6.5 minutes per child, it retests plenty the child already knows, and the same word list becomes a memory test the second time through.
Re-check the three or four sounds you taught. A handful of words each, real and non-words, two minutes per child. You are checking whether the teaching landed, and that is a much narrower question than the one the official check asks.
Victoria also offers an optional reassessment for Year 2 students who did not reach 28 out of 40 last year, which is worth knowing about if you have picked up a class carrying last year's results.
The students above 28
They are not finished, they are just not urgent.
Read their papers the same way. A student on 34 usually has one or two graphemes wobbling, often r-controlled vowels or a trigraph near the top of the ladder. Those are quick wins that never make it into a reteach group because the score looked fine. Note them, fold them into whole-class review, and move on.
One group in here does need a plan, though: the child who got every word right and took an age over each one. The check has no box for how long a word took, so effortful reading passes it. That is a fluency problem rather than a phonics gap, and it has its own routine, about six minutes a day.
Planning the reteach lesson
A pen and twenty minutes with the papers will get you the list of sounds. The lesson is the next job. Phonicspal tags every word by grapheme, so a review lesson built on those sounds uses only words your class can decode, matched to whatever sequence your school follows. You can see how the lesson planning works or start free.
The check tells you the score in August. What you do in week 7 is the part that changes the number next year.
Figures above are published by the Victorian Government at vic.gov.au and in the Premier's October 2025 release.
