The 2012 phonics screening check: all 40 words

The 2012 phonics screening check had 40 words: 20 real and 20 alien. The pass mark (officially the "threshold mark") was 32 out of 40, and 58% of Year 1 children in England met it. Below is every word from the 2012 paper, in the order children read them, with the alien words marked. Print it, sit side by side, and let your child read it the way the teacher will: one word at a time, no rush, and no help from you.

Alien words are made up, so children can't have memorised them. They show whether a child can really sound out a word they've never seen. In the real check each alien word has a picture of an alien next to it so children know it's a "name", not a word they're supposed to recognise. If your child is new to them, read Alien words, explained first.

The 2012 phonics screening check: all 40 words

dashed = alien (made-up) word · solid = real word

2012 phonics screening check, all 40 words · Crown copyright, reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0 · free to print from phonogramfun.com/learn

What the 2012 paper tests

Section 1 starts gently: three-letter words with single sounds, then words with one letter team (like ai and sh), then consonant blends. Section 2 moves on to vowel teams, split vowels and longer words. Here is every letter team in the 2012 paper and the words it appears in (alien words in italics with an asterisk):

Split vowels (a vowel, a consonant, then an e that makes the vowel say its name) appear in yune, flute, shine, stroke. These trip up a lot of children, because they read the first vowel short.

The last four real words are the longest: index, turnip, waiting, portrait. portrait splits into portrait. Children who stall here usually know every sound but lose their place in a long word; covering half the word with a finger and reading it in two parts helps.

Words that came back from earlier papers

None of the 2012 words had appeared in an earlier paper, which is a good reminder that drilling past papers word by word won't help. The patterns repeat; the words mostly don't. Every paper has three-letter blends like str, scr and spl late in Section 2, and its longest words at the very end.

How to use this paper at home

1. Do one section, not both. Twenty words is plenty for one sitting. Do Section 1 one day and Section 2 another.
2. Say nothing while they read. In the real check the teacher can't help, so note which words go wrong instead of correcting on the spot.
3. Look for the pattern in the mistakes. If baim goes wrong, is it the ai? One sound that keeps tripping them up is worth ten minutes a night for a week.
4. Then move to another year. Fresh words test the skill; repeated words test memory. There are 13 papers on the past papers page.

The official 2012 materials are published by the Standards and Testing Agency: 2012 pupils' materials (PDF). This page lists the same 40 words in the same order.

The 2013 paper →

Questions parents ask