Performance of Australian children on the English Phonics Screening Check following systematic synthetic phonics instruction in the first two years of schooling

Recently, there has been debate surrounding the potential implementation of the Phonics Screening Check (PSC) in Australian primary schools. The present study sought to investigate the child- and task-related factors influencing the PSC performances of Year 1 Australian students, who had received almost two years of systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) instruction. Non-parametric between- and within-group comparisons and correlational analyses were conducted to examine whether performance was influenced by gender, age, school site, real word status and item complexity. Approximately 82% of the students obtained or exceeded the South Australian PSC trial threshold of 28 points out of 40, which suggests the students were, on average, developing adequate word-level decoding skills. The only child- and task-related factors to emerge as statistically significant were age and item complexity.