The role of mastery in levelling the phonics playing field

In my role overseeing five primary academies in Yorkshire and the Humber, I believe that getting every child reading is the single most important thing primary schools do.

That’s not always a straightforward job. When you’re teaching phonics to children from a low-socioeconomic status area, a high proportion are pupils with SEND or who are otherwise disadvantaged. Children typically arrive with language skills well below their peers nationally, and both parental engagement and their confidence to support their child’s learning tends to be low.

To that, we also need to add the impact of the pandemic, which saw many of the children we are currently teaching miss crucial early experiences and the opportunity to build their stamina to concentrate for long periods. Our response to that has been to increase our ambitions for our children, and to develop sophisticated strategies for enabling them to succeed.

For these reasons, we have been using a mastery approach for years and recently transitioned to a programme called Rocket Phonics. We find that mastery enables us to keep pupils on track, to quickly identify where they’re getting stuck and decide on the level of intervention required to bring them back in line with their peers.

Our approach is to ensure children ‘keep up, not catch up’, and we have a three-step intervention process for those who struggle.

Up-skilled staff

We all know what pupils are learning on a week-by-week and lesson-by lesson basis, so we can spot issues immediately and intervene ‘in the moment’. With phonics, our most important resource is adults. Our staff are skilled in providing additional modelling, scaffolding and support for individual learners, and in creating smaller groups within the classroom. This is crucial in ensuring every minute of learning is maximised.

One step ahead

Our second layer of intervention involves a very good understanding of the barriers to learning which are typical of a lag in attainment in phonics. We build in extra opportunities for all children to practice throughout the day, through short bursts of rehearsing letter-sound correspondence and blending, rhyming and – of course – reading. In addition, we keep a sharp focus on children at risk of underachieving.

For them, our ‘one step ahead’ interventions means that, rather than being introduced to new sounds within the whole-class session, they could be introduced to them the previous week, before their peers. The impact is significant; instead of lagging behind their peers, they are ahead. This  changes their perception of themselves as successful learners, and feeds into a virtuous cycle of achievement.

Self-image matters

Everything else we do will be familiar to teachers across the sector. In the main, this relies on the more conventional ‘intervention’ of working with some children out of the class to give them additional support at another point in the day. Because our staff are all skilled in delivery and fully aware of our curriculum progression, every child gets support with the specific part of the programme they need help with.

Closing gaps early when they do appear is so important and feeds into each child’s sense of self-efficacy. As we sadly know as teachers, some children learn to feel a sense of inadequacy in comparison with their peers as early as year two. This is devastating for a seven-year-old; our approach is designed to prevent that from happening.

And it’s working: In a recent impact study, our Trust had stronger outcomes for pupils in reception and year one than the control schools. More than that, I am confident from our internal processes that our phonics screening test results will be the highest they have ever been across the partnership, and I am even more excited about the impact on reading results in the coming year or two.

That means that the 2,000 children I oversee in my role will be reading and writing confidently, competently and joyfully – a massive step for our disadvantaged communities.