Around 1 in 4 children struggle with reading long before the Phonics Screening Check in Year 1. By the time difficulties appear in school, confidence may already be falling and reading can start to feel frustrating. Our team are Level 7 specialists in Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD), Special Educational Needs (SEN), and Speech, Language and Communication Needs (SLCN). We focus on the underlying speech sound processing and phonemic awareness skills that allow children to more easily connect speech and print. We offer free guidance and paid support for parents, teachers, and tutors who want children to pass the Phonics Screening Check with ease. The goal is not just passing the PSC. It is helping children use phonics as a stepping stone to self-teaching and reading for pleasure. We want every child to have fun, and feel understood as an individual.
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When children discover the joy of reading early, books become something they choose and share with others, rather than something they avoid. That confidence carries into the classroom, helping them learn across all subjects and develop a lifelong love of reading.
The Phonics Screening Check (PSC) is designed to assess whether children can decode words by connecting graphemes (letters or letter groups) with phonemes (speech sounds). Synthetic phonics programmes explicitly teach around 100 grapheme–phoneme correspondences so that children can begin decoding simple words.
For many children this works as intended. Once they understand how speech sounds connect to print, they begin recognising patterns across words and move into the self-teaching phase of reading. Their brains naturally apply statistical learning, allowing them to navigate the much larger code of written English.
However, not all children start from the same place.
Some children struggle with phonemic awareness and speech sound processing. When this happens, phonics instruction can become confusing or frustrating rather than a helpful starting point. Instead of kick-starting self-teaching, the child may struggle to decode even simple words, and confidence quickly drops.
This is why the Phonics Screening Check matters.
Passing the PSC is achievable once the brain understands how speech sounds map to letters. But if a child has underlying difficulties processing those sounds, simply repeating phonics instruction often does not solve the problem.
The good news is that these difficulties can be identified and addressed early.
Our approach focuses on screening for phonemic awareness and speech sound processing blocks and helping children overcome them quickly. Once those barriers are removed, phonics becomes far easier to understand and children can use it as it was intended: as a stepping stone to independent reading.
When children begin mapping speech sounds and print accurately, they start recognising patterns across words, applying statistical learning, and teaching themselves new spellings. This is the stage where reading begins to accelerate and confidence grows.
Children as young as three will use with the Monster Spelling Piano app to learn the Core (Phonics) Code!
