Phonics underpins all children's reading and writing skills. The children at Springwood Federation are taught phonics using the Essential Letters and Sounds Programme (ELS) through which they are taught explicitly the correspondences between letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes).  

ELS is a synthetic phonics programme that is validated by the Department for Education. The key principles of the programme are simplicity and consistency.  The ELS phonics programme recognises the importance of talk and promotes a genuine love of reading so that all children are equipped with the skills to decode, encode and comprehend without barrier, no matter of status or starting point. 

When learning to read, children use their knowledge of phonics to blend individual sounds and they are also taught harder to read words which are those which contain unusual grapheme phoneme correspondence (GPC) or ones that have not yet been taught.  In order to spell, children learn to segment words into sounds that they then write. 

The children learning phonics within Springwood Federation also have access to decodable texts in school which complement the scheme. Additionally, all children learning phonics have access to Oxford Owl which is an online provider that provides decodable ebooks that accompany the ELS programme.