Somewhere in Term 3, your Year 1 child sat down beside their teacher and read a list of words out loud. Now a result has come home, or it came up at a parent-teacher chat, and you're holding a number and wondering what to make of it. Is 24 bad? Is 36 good? Does it mean anything about how your child will go with reading?
This article is about reading that number sensibly. It's a useful piece of information. It's also a small one, and we'd like to help you keep it in proportion.
What the check actually is
The Year 1 Phonics Check is a free tool from the Australian Government's Literacy Hub. Your child sits one-to-one with a teacher they know and reads up to 40 words aloud. Half are real words and half are made-up ones, and the whole thing normally takes five to seven minutes. There's no time limit, and if a child is finding it hard the teacher simply stops (Literacy Hub, n.d.-a).
From Term 3 2025, every Year 1 student in a Queensland state school sits it, a change the Queensland Government announced on 17 July 2025 (Queensland Government, 2025). Plenty of non-state schools use the same check by choice, so you may have a result either way.
Why half the words are made up
Why ask a six-year-old to read "vop" or "strim"? Because a made-up word can't be read from memory. A child who has seen "dog" five hundred times might recognise it the way they recognise a logo, without needing to work through the sounds at all. A word they've never met forces the real skill into the open: look at the spellings, say the sounds, blend them into a word. As the Literacy Hub puts it, children "cannot read the pseudo words by using their memory or vocabulary; they have to use their decoding skills" (Literacy Hub, n.d.-a). The teacher tells the child these are pretend words, so nobody is being tricked.
The number everyone asks about: 28
The Literacy Hub groups scores into bands. A score of 28 to 40 is described as fluent decoding, 20 to 27 as developing, and 0 to 19 as a child who is finding decoding hard at this point (Literacy Hub, n.d.-b). The figure of 28 out of 40 is the expected-achievement marker used across Australian states, and it reflects what the Australian Curriculum expects a child to have been taught by partway through Year 1.
Twenty-eight isn't a pass mark and 27 isn't a fail. A child on 26 has shown you which sounds and spelling patterns are solid and which are still settling, and that's the useful bit, far more than the total.
What the check measures, and what it doesn't
This is the part we most want parents to hear. The check measures decoding: turning spellings into sounds and sounds into words. That's what it's designed to measure.
It doesn't measure whether your child understands what they read, the size of their vocabulary, how well they follow a story, how clever they are, or whether they love books. Reading researchers have long described reading comprehension as the product of two separate things, decoding and language comprehension (Hoover & Gough, 1990). The check looks at one of them. We've written about this framework in more detail in The Simple View of Reading.
A score of 38 tells you decoding went well on the words in the check; it doesn't tell you comprehension is going well, and it's one part of the school's wider picture of your child's reading. A score of 21 tells you decoding is still building. On its own it can't tell you about your child's thinking, their language or how they'll go from here.
What a lower score does and doesn't tell you
A lower score is a snapshot from one morning in one term. For a lot of children it genuinely means "not yet". Some started school with less exposure to print, some are nearly a year younger than their classmates, some had a rotten night's sleep.
What it does tell you is which sounds and patterns need more teaching, which is exactly what it was designed for. Castles, Rastle and Nation (2018) describe systematic phonics as the most reliable route into word reading in English; the check shows a teacher where each child is on that road.
Please don't give your child a label from one check. Nor should anyone else.
Where speech sounds and phonological awareness come in
Decoding sits on top of two earlier skills. The first is phonological awareness: hearing that "ship" starts with /sh/, or that "cat" can be pulled apart into three sounds. The second is knowing how those sounds are written down. Our article on what phonological awareness is explains the first; our piece on phonics and early reading explains the second.
Children who are still working on their speech sounds sometimes find the pulling-apart step harder, and research has consistently shown links between speech sound development, phonological awareness and early literacy (Gillon, 2018). We say "links" deliberately. We don't assume one thing is causing another for any individual child, and we'd ask you not to either. Working out what is actually going on for a particular six-year-old is what a proper assessment is for. We've written more on this in speech sounds and learning.
When "not yet" is worth a closer look
Most children with a score under 28 will get there with good classroom teaching and a bit of extra practice. A closer look is worth considering when a lower score sits alongside one or more of these:
- Speech sound errors that are still around at six, especially if they affect lots of words or make your child hard to understand outside the family
- A history of late talking, even if the words came eventually
- A family history of reading or spelling difficulty: a parent, sibling, aunt or grandparent who found it hard
- A hearing history: repeated ear infections, glue ear, grommets, or a child who often says "what?"
On hearing in particular: fluctuating hearing can make the small differences between sounds muddy at exactly the age when a child is learning to hear them. If there's any history there, a hearing test through your GP is a sensible first step whatever the check said.
Snow (2016) makes the case that early reading is core business for speech pathologists because it is built on spoken language. When the check and one of the items above line up, an assessment can look at the speech sounds, phonological awareness and oral language underneath decoding, and give you a fuller picture than one number can.
If you'd like to talk through your child's results, get in touch. Speaking Speech Pathology offers mobile speech pathology across Brisbane's south side and Logan, with visits to your home or sessions by video. Any actual clinical work, whether assessment or therapy, happens in a consultation about your child, not from an article.
Ready for practical strategies? Read our companion article: After the Year 1 Phonics Check: What to Do Next at Home
Alexandra Bouwmeester is a Senior Speech Pathologist (MSPA, CPSP), a certified Sounds-Write practitioner, with over 14 years' experience and a mum of two boys. She offers mobile speech pathology to families across Brisbane's south side and Logan.
This article is general information and not a substitute for individualised speech pathology assessment or therapy. If you have concerns about your child, please speak with a qualified speech pathologist.
References
- Literacy Hub. (n.d.-a). What is the Year 1 Phonics Check? Australian Government. https://www.literacyhub.edu.au/for-families/what-is-the-year-1-phonics-check/
- Literacy Hub. (n.d.-b). Year 1 Phonics Check. Australian Government. https://www.literacyhub.edu.au/plan-teach-and-assess/year-1-phonics-check/
- Queensland Government. (2025, July 17). Back to basics phonics and numeracy check to boost results [Media statement]. https://statements.qld.gov.au/statements/103090
- Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(1), 5–51.
- Hoover, W. A., & Gough, P. B. (1990). The simple view of reading. Reading and Writing, 2(2), 127–160.
- Gillon, G. T. (2018). Phonological awareness: From research to practice (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
- Snow, P. C. (2016). Elizabeth Usher Memorial Lecture: Language is literacy is language. Positioning speech-language pathology in education policy, practice, paradigms and polemics. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 18(3), 216–228.
