We are often asked why we carry out TEP. It’s because we need a clear way to assess pupils we don’t already know, so we can advise parents and teachers on what they specifically need. In England, they will usually have been learning to read using synthetic phonics, but this approach can be used anywhere. We also use it in Australia.

We’d start with a TEP session, The Entry Point.

It may be a bright, articulate Year 1 child who is struggling with reading, which is unexpected as she loves books and has been read to since birth.

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The Entry Point is when she is invited to spend one or two sessions with us to figure out what she knows and how her brain tackles the mathematics of word mapping, to find out what’s needed to more effectively self-teach orthographic knowledge and achieve orthographic mapping (the stage of knowing words by sight and reading with fluency and comprehension).
 

We’d ask her to bring in something she thinks she can read, as why she thinks it’s easy tells us a lot. We’d also ask what she’s asked to read at school.
 

There’s a piece of text we would then give her and we’d say she doesn’t need to read it, we will, and then we’ll ask some questions. We’re getting a baseline for oral comprehension. Depending on what we saw in the previous activity, we’d refer to words in the text, pointing to them, and might see how she figures things out if she’s not actually reading the words herself.
 

The starting point is then to check:
 

• Phonemic awareness and phonological working memory
(Eg ask her to write physiotherapist in speech sounds by drawing a line for each phoneme. Check she draws 13 lines. Don’t worry about putting graphemes on the lines, just check speech sound processing)
 

• Give her the core code (basic phonics, tested in the UK Phonics Screening Check). We have a strip showing every grapheme, a visual prompt, and the word, and we see which GPCs she knows, but also listen to how often the pronunciation changes from her school's phonics programme PPC (Phonics Pronunciation Code)

• Check high-frequency words and that she can map the phonemes and graphemes, and if she is doing it bidirectionally

• After seeing the previous results, check fluency of code-level texts, to see how easily she blends within sentences

• We’d then bring comprehension of what she can decode into the session to acertain how far apart oral and reading comprehension are

• We’d then give real words (based on what she’s already shown us, as we can see the gaps by now) and ask her to map them, and see if she is using partial decoding or set for variability. If she can’t get there, we’d add an image clue. Then confirm the word and ask her to identify which letters are the graphemes and their sound value, teaching the GPCs and again checking accent variation

• Then give her text (based on what we’ve seen so far) with a few words we know she can’t easily decode, but she would guess at, to see what she then does with those words (does she recode or just move on after deducing the word)

• Then check encoding, with words based on previous answers. We’re picking apart phonemic awareness and code knowledge, but also the ability to store words (and see whether she knows anything about the brain's word bank)

• We’d then show her the spelling routine and see how many exposures she needs to store the word. Sometimes we do this near the beginning and check again here. We might show the Phonemies, it will depend on her needs.  

By then we’ve got a picture of her entry point.

We can then create the Entry Point Plan. What can she do, what is blocking her brain from self-teaching, and what does she need so that she won’t need tutoring for long. We’ll estimate how many sessions she’ll need with us. We design the most direct route, as we don’t want them to need more than ten 45-minute sessions, max.

Those are recorded and sent to their teachers, with their individual support plan and progress chart, and a code to give them access to word mapping tech on an iPad in class. Schools can reach out and book Word Mapping Mastery training to understand what we did and how they can support that moving foward.

At that point their parents already know what is needed and can support them if the school isn’t interested, but the child knows how to ask for help (the specific things to ask their teacher) and how to use the tech to know words she can’t figure out when reading, and for spelling when writing.

The Entry Point formula is so successful we’re launching a course for parents and professionals soon, where we teach them how to use TEP with their own child or students.

We will run it through Phonics Reform England as an effective way to screen and intevene upstream, with a focus on individual needs.  We are a team who have been working, separately, on upstream screening for a long time but are now coming together to share what we do.

Research is often used to create interventions, but so much is missed as they are designed with a one-size-fits-all model, using standardised testing and pro forma reports, which misses the variation in human learning and the numerous factors that go into this.

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Our TEP training, launching soon, shows you how to identify what a child can do and what’s blocking their progress. Join the newsletter to stay informed about launch dates.