Phonics
'"Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out."
Robert Collier
Intent
At Bramingham, we are committed to ensuring every child becomes a fluent, confident reader and writer. We recognise that phonics is the cornerstone of early literacy and a crucial foundation for future learning. Through engaging, pacey and interactive lessons, children develop the skills of decoding for reading and segmenting for spelling. These skills are taught explicitly and practised consistently and repeatedly to ensure knowledge becomes secure and automatic. By prioritising strong phonemic awareness and maintaining high expectations for all, we enable children to read with increasing fluency and confidence, freeing them to focus on meaning, comprehension and a lifelong love of reading.
Implementation
Since September 2022, Essential Letters and Sounds has been our chosen Phonics programme. The aim of the programme is 'Getting all children to read well, quickly' through systematic synthetic phonics approach designed to ensure that all children learn to read well and make speedy progress. ELS is delivered through high-quality, whole-class daily teaching, beginning from the start of Reception. Lessons follow a carefully sequenced progression and a consistent structure, enabling children to build their knowledge of the alphabetic code step by step. The programme is founded on the principles of repetition, reinforcement and consistency, ensuring that learning is revisited regularly and becomes secure over time. The use of consistent routines, resources and language across the school reduces cognitive load and allows children to focus on acquiring and applying new phonics knowledge.
Every ELS lesson follows a predictable routine so that children know what to expect and can concentrate fully on learning. New sounds are explicitly taught and modelled before children are given opportunities to practise reading and writing using the new grapheme-phoneme correspondences. Children learn to decode by identifying sounds and blending them together for reading, and to encode by segmenting words into sounds for spelling. Through the ELS "Me then You" approach, teachers provide clear modelling before children apply their learning independently. Lessons are lively, interactive and fast-paced, with regular opportunities for review and retrieval, helping children develop fluency, confidence and automaticity in both reading and spelling.
At Bramingham, we embrace the Essential Letters and Sounds principle of "Keep Up, Not Catch Up", ensuring that no child falls behind in their phonics learning. Carefully planned assessment opportunities enable teachers to identify misconceptions and gaps in knowledge quickly, allowing targeted support to be put in place at the earliest opportunity. Children requiring additional practice receive timely intervention that is closely matched to the learning taking place in the classroom, helping them to secure new sounds, words and skills before moving on. This responsive approach ensures that pupils remain confident, successful and fully included in whole-class learning, keeping pace with their peers and developing the strong foundations needed for fluent reading and writing.
