Phonics

97% of our students passed the 2025 Phonics Screen

At Ditchling, we follow the Systematic Synthetic Phonics Programme (SSP) Read Write Inc. Read Write Inc. developed by Ruth Miskin, is a whole-school literacy programme for 4-11-year-olds. It is designed to create fluent readers, confident speakers and willing writers.

At Ditchling, we strive to teach children to read effectively and quickly using the Read Write Inc. Phonics programme (RWI) which includes teaching synthetic phonics, sight vocabulary, grapheme-phoneme correspondence as well as decoding and encoding words and accurate letter formation. Children will be able to apply their understanding of graphemes and phonemes to decode a range of words which in turn will allow them to read books that are closely matched to their phonic knowledge. When writing, children will be able to make phonetically plausible attempts to spell unfamiliar words, enabling them to write with an appropriate level of independence for their age. They will also be able to use their phonic knowledge to correctly apply a range of spelling rules to words.