Year 1 Phonics Check results: which sounds to reteach first
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 of a brand new assessment that no school had run before. Teachers took an average of 6.5 minutes per child, and 94% of government schools opted in when they did not have to.
That is the number to hold onto this fortnight.
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 this year it is mandatory for every Year 1 student in a Victorian government school, and it runs in weeks 4 to 6 of Term 3, which is 3 to 21 August. New South Wales and South Australia run their own Year 1 checks in the same part of the year.
Those pilot figures are the baseline the department will measure against, 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 Monday.
The answer is sitting in the papers already. You just have to read them by sound instead of by score.
Monday, 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.
- 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: 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, teach ai first, even if igh was worse. Later graphemes sit on earlier ones. Fixing something at the front of the sequence often clears several things behind it at no extra cost, because the child was not failing at igh so much as failing at "vowel teams do a job".
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.
Where this fits
None of the above needs a product. It needs a pen, twenty minutes with the papers, and a willingness to read them by sound.
If reading them by sound is the part that eats your evening, that is the bit we build. Phonicspal tags every word by grapheme, so missed sounds group themselves, the students who share a gap land in the same group, and the next lesson comes out 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.
Phonicspal is not affiliated with the Australian Government Department of Education or any state education department. Figures above are published by the Victorian Government at vic.gov.au.