WISE Academies - Christine Robson: Mind the Phonics Gap KS1: NECA Literacy Conference

Описание: This video is a presentation by Christine Robson, titled "Mind the Phonics Gap: Identifying and tackling barriers to phonic progression in key stage one". She is the Head of Town End Academy in Sunderland, part of the WISE Academies MAT and has been in education for a quarter of a century, previously serving as a literacy coordinator.
This presentation aims to accurately diagnose barriers to acquiring phonics and then plan and deliver targeted support, which can influence quality first teaching as well as interventions.

Christine Robson's Context and Initial Findings
The presenter discussed her experience at a previous school in Sunderland, which needed input on pre-literacy skills in the early years. At that school:
There were 46 Pupil Premium children.
The Good Level of Development (GLD) was only 50% pre-COVID.
The Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) teaching was graded as outstanding.
A rigorous phonics scheme had been well-embedded for the previous three years.
The prediction for achieving the Year One Phonics Screening Check was only 50%.
The cohort had high Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) needs, including a nurture provision.
Launchpad was already operating in the early years with nursery and reception children.
When these children entered Year 1, solutions were needed to improve age-related expectations, with a particular focus on phonics acquisition. Christine used a case study of a child who, despite rigorous phonics teaching, was unable to retain phonic knowledge or apply it in blending sounds. This was the situation for 50% of the cohort of 22 children.

Diagnosing Barriers
The potential barriers were narrowed down to two main Launchpad strands
-Auditory Discrimination: Progresses from copying two instruments from a choice of six, up to discriminating initial phonemes within a word.
-Auditory Memory: Examples include being able to repeat one or two phonemes, and further up, holding a sentence.
-Auditory Sequential Memory: Starts with following a simple three-word instruction and moves up to holding five, six, or seven words in order.
-Visual Strands:
-Visual Memory: The ability to retain a picture or an image.
-Visual Sequential Memory: The ability to hold a visual pattern in the correct sequence.
A diagnostic tool was used, which involved colour pens to test visual and auditory memory. The assessment takes no more than seven minutes.
-Visual Memory: Assess by having the child hold up different coloured pens, without verbal instructions, and pick up the same ones. The difficulty is increased from two pens to three, and then four.
-Visual Sequential Memory: Assessed by placing pens in a sequence on a grid (like a phoneme frame) from left to right, and having the child imitate the sequence.
-Auditory Memory: Assess by naming the colours (e.g., "blue, green, purple") and having the child gather them in any order.
-Auditory Sequential Memory: Assessed by having the child retrieve the colors in the exact order they were named.
-Oral Blending: Assessed by giving a robot voice (sound-by-sound) pronunciation of a three-, four-, or five-letter word to see if the child can blend it.

This recording also covers sections linked to:
-Diagnostic Findings and Actions (2019 Cohort): Intervention and teaching, Logistics of interventions
Parent sharing events, Monitoring & adapting interventions, Next steps: Sentence-Level work, Auditory sentence activities, Snap or Trap - Say a sentence, Visual sentence activities, Match me / Find me.

What the actions taken included:
-Devising a bespoke intervention pitched toward the children's specific needs,
-Weaving the strategies through whole-class teaching, not just as an external add-on.
-Training staff, allowing them to take part in the diagnostic process to gain a deeper understanding.
-Implementing rigorous assessment and monitoring to ensure impact, with weekly meetings initially.
-Explaining to children the skill they are developing (e.g., visual or auditory memory)
-Interventions and Teaching Strategies

The MPACT on outcomes for the 2019 Cohort

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