FFT Success for All Phonics

FFT’s Success for All Phonics is a second generation phonics programme that draws upon academic research, best practice and school feedback gathered over the last 20 years.

Here’s some of our recent feedback and you can take a look at our case studies at fft.org.uk/phonics/phonics-case-studies/

“It was daunting to change the way we teach phonics, but FFT Success for All Phonics removed a lot of the stress and workload for our staff.

The guides are easy to use, the training is accessible, the reading resources have provided challenge for our children and the Parent Portal has been well accessed to support learning to read at home. For those learners that find it hard to keep up, The Tutoring with the Lightning Squad intervention is fun, engaging and progressive.”

— Lisa Loxton, Deputy Head: The Rissington School.

“We’ve been really impressed! The Shared Readers are a real success; the children are so eager to read them each week! The vocabulary has excited them and improved their reading skills.”

— Isabel Stewart, Foundation Lead: St John the Evangelist School.

Yes. As part of your subscription, you will receive access to 68 fully decodable books online, matched to the Letters and Sounds progression. You can also buy copies in print.

Our Shared Reading books have been especially written for the programme - you do not need to purchase any additional books from publishers to use Success for All Phonics. They include a wide range of genres, engaging characters and familiar contexts that children will be excited to read.

We also provide access to these via a ‘Parent Portal’ and much of this is free to view at parents.fft.org.uk. Subscribed schools also have access to a full digital library of our Shared Readers, along with read-aloud videos of each book to support home reading. To give you a flavour please find a free-to-view link of a Shared Reader being read out loud.

You can use the decodable readers as part of a daily reading lesson that is initially around 15 minutes long for Reception children and rises to 30 minutes when they are ready.  Year 1 session are 30 minutes long.  Daily lesson planning for these sessions is available to use for all of the 68 readers.

How many you need of the print books is up to you, as you have access to all of the materials as part of your subscription.  You can also purchase 15 copies of each book (1,020 books) for £400 or 30 copies of each (2,040 books) for £750.

Yes, we do! To support children, we have a fun daily Alphabet Chant that includes dynamic actions. You can see it at The Alphabet Chant.

Each GPC we teach includes an engaging picture and a mnemonic phrase that help the children link the grapheme to the phoneme that is being presented. You can view these on our Parent Portal at vimeo.com/showcase/9340990.

We also include helpful phrases for teaching letter formation, which you can view at parents.fft.org.uk/phonic-and-writing-phrases/

Your FFT Success for All Phonics subscription includes complimentary access to our comprehensive Reading Assessment Programme – an online platform that assesses children’s phonics skills, decoding, reading fluency and comprehension to ensure that children, teachers and school leaders know exactly which reading skills have been mastered at each stage.

Instantaneously, at the click of a button, schools can assess pupils and view online reports, making it easy to monitor and track children’s reading attainment so that teaching can be targeted to close any gaps. You can find details of this new innovative programme here: fft.org.uk/reading-assessment-programme/

As an evidence-based programme, Success for All Phonics includes all the best practice guidance as outlined in the new Reading Framework. Opportunities for spoken language, exposure to high quality vocabulary, strong routines and high expectations for pupil engagement and our Co-operative Learning approach ensures that children are fully engaged and interact for the whole lesson.

This pedagogy along with our high-quality training and materials and resources ensure children are listening and talking with a partner in every lesson.

If your school has a nursery or you have older children who need additional support, you may wish to use our First Steps to Phonics programme. This Letters & Sounds based programme is specifically designed for children who need to develop Phase 1 skills, and who need to secure initial grapheme-phoneme correspondence for Phase 2 and the early Phase 3 GPCs.  Throughout the programme children are explicitly taught a range of progressive phonics skills such as blending, segmenting, letter recognition and formation through fun, engaging activities that use key resources both digitally and in print.

First Steps to Phonics will be available from September 2022 as a free add-on for existing or new Phonics subscriptions.  Digital materials will be available to download from the Phonics Portal. Schools wishing to purchase additional printed materials will need pay in the region of £50-£100 for a core set of teaching materials. Training for this programme will be available as part of our existing suite of complimentary online sessions.

Year 2 is currently supported by our comprehensive Phonics programme that covers Phase 6 of Letters and Sounds.  We also have a wide range of challenging Shared Readers that go beyond the requirements for the Year 1 Phonics Screening.  Please see our FAQ on Phase 6 / Year 2 Word Recognition, website information on FFT’s Reading Assessment Programme and Tutoring with the Lightning Squad as they all support Y2 children.

To further support Year 2, we are developing a programme that will be designed for children who have successfully completed Phonics. This programme will include a further set of reading materials, lesson plans and supporting resources to teach children the necessary skills in reading comprehension, spelling, vocabulary, grammar and punctuation. The programme will be mapped to the Y2 curriculum requirements and will include fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

This will be launched in 2023 as a free add-on to existing Phonics subscribers. Training will be available as part of our existing suite of complimentary online sessions. Full details of the programme, along with costings for printed materials will be available in September 2022.

Common Exception Words (CEWs) include GPCs that are an exception to what children have been taught. CEWs are introduced systematically in Phonics lessons (starting at Step 13) and in the Shared Readers (from Step 4).

The progression includes all of the usual CEWs from L&S 2007. Children are taught to decode the GPCs they have learnt and to recognise and remember the ‘tricky’ grapheme for reading and spelling. Shared Readers will only contain a small number of newly introduced CEWs directly linked to the Scope and Sequence (view sample).

Phase 6 / Year 2 Word Recognition is supported by the final stages of the Success for All Phonics programme and its application to the reading of parallel decodable texts and real books. They will also be applying the principles of spelling to their own writing at this point.

In this phase, children will have already learned the most common GPCs and a substantial number of alternative spellings for the same sounds. As they near the end of the programme, children will have an opportunity to read a short text extract, identify/compare words containing a variety of the focus GPCs and compare and apply spellings through word games and other activities. Please see the sample materials for further information.

You will notice that our Scope and Sequence (view sample) includes content from the National Curriculum for word reading up to the end of KS1.