In Year 1 and Year 2, phonics is everywhere. It’s daily, it’s systematic, it’s joyful. There are sound mats on the tables, grapheme cards on the walls, and whole-class lessons that build sound by sound, week by week. It’s one of the most carefully structured things we do in primary education.

Then, in June of Year 1, children sit the phonics screening check. It’s a one-to-one assessment where a teacher records whether each child can read 40 words correctly, and those who read 32 or more are said to have met the expected standard.

Nationally, 80% of pupils met that standard in Year 1 in 2025, and 89% had met it by the end of Year 2. https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/phonics-screening-check-attainment/2024-25

Those are genuinely good numbers, and they reflect a huge amount of skilled teaching. But flip them over. Roughly one in ten children leaves Key Stage 1 without secure phonic decoding. For some groups it’s far more: only 52% of pupils on SEN support and 20% of those with an EHCP met the standard in Year 1.

So what happens to them next?

Why does phonics stop?

Mostly, it doesn’t stop because anyone decides it should. It just stops being the centre of the timetable.

By Year 3, the curriculum has moved from learning to read to reading to learn. The focus shifts to fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, writing stamina and the wider curriculum. Many KS2 teachers have never been trained to teach phonics, because they’ve never needed to. And the systems built so beautifully around Reception and KS1 simply aren’t built into the rest of the school.

It’s a bit like swimming lessons that stop once most of the class can swim a width. Brilliant for the children who can. But the ones still clinging to the side don’t magically learn to swim because the lesson has moved on to diving.

What does it actually look like for the children who don’t pass?

Usually it’s an intervention: a small group, often TA-led, a few times a week, frequently delivered while the rest of the class is in another lesson.

The people delivering it are often doing an incredible job with very little time, training or resource. But look at it from the child’s side:

• They’re taken out of the room, often missing the same subject every week.
• The materials were designed for five-year-olds, which starts to sting by Year 4, 5 or 6.
• They know exactly why they’re going. So does everyone else.
• The intervention often isn’t connected to what’s happening back in class, so the gap never quite closes.

And the teacher?

Meanwhile, the class teacher is managing a room where around 80% of children have met the benchmark and need stretching, challenging and moving on, and a smaller group who need something completely different. Two very different jobs, one adult, one timetable.

So of course the answer becomes “intervention”. It’s the most practical option available. But practical and effective aren’t always the same thing.

Is this where the isolation of reading intervention begins?

I think it often is.

Not because anyone intends it, but because the structure that surrounds early reading gets taken away just as some children still need it most. What starts as a small gap in Year 2 becomes a label by Year 6, and a quiet, well-hidden struggle by Year 9. By secondary school, those same young people have become very good at hiding the fact that they can’t decode, and very tired of being handed books meant for much younger children.

That’s the gap I care about most: the young people who didn’t get there first time, who deserve systematic phonics that respects their age and their dignity, and who deserve not to feel like the only one who’s still learning.

So I’d love to hear from you:

• If you teach in KS2 or secondary, what does support look like in your setting for learners who didn’t pass the check?
• Does phonics continue beyond Year 2 where you are, and who delivers it?
• How do you balance extending the majority while not leaving the minority on the platform?