Our school has adopted the ALS approach to Phonics. The approach is multi-sensory and caters for all learning styles (visual, auditory and kinaesthetic).

All teachers and teaching assistants at Rolleston who teach phonics have had training by Ann or in house training. Rolleston has a phonics lead who coordinates the training and delivery of the ALS phonics within Rolleston.

Phonics is taught from the beginning of Foundation 1 starting at Phase 1, Phases 1, 2 and 3 are taught in F2, Phases 3, 4 and 5 in Year 1 and Phase 5 in Year 2. It is a phonics programme that supports the phonetic needs of all our learners. This is a systematic and consistent approach which is taught for 20 minutes every day. The children are taught new sounds, key phrases and terminology. These are then used to support reading and writing during guided reading and writing sessions.

Accreditation update (March 2022):

The elements of the programme that the validation panel thought were strong, were:

- Guidance to support the lowest 20%.

- Training provision and the ongoing support of the programme. 

Of the 16 assessment criteria, 13 were met and ALS is being re-submitted for the 31^st March panel to address the three points:

·       Review the order of teaching and pacing of the programme to ensure children do phase 4 by the end of reception – this is now written into the programme.

·       To not teach Phase 4 as consonant clusters/blends and  review the alignment of books to the progression of Phase 4 – these changes have been made.

·       To speak to a book publisher and consider using one source of books – there is now an agreement in place with Pearson publishers for Bug Club.

Phase 2

Phase 2 is the introduction of grapheme phoneme correspondence. Children will continue with oral blending and segmenting. There are 4 letters introduced in the week with a day as a revision session on the fifth day.

Phase 3

Children will be introduced to new graphemes during this phase. Children will continue to practice oral segmenting and blending and will apply their knowledge of blending and segmenting to reading and spelling words and captions.

Phase 4

Phase 4 is the teaching of adjacent consonants.

Phase 5

Alternative spellings

Alternative pronunciations

All children are baseline assessed at the beginning of the academic year. Phonics assessments and formative assessment is used to identify any gaps in children's learning. Some children will receive extra daily intervention support outside of the phonics lessons and if needed in KS2.