Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many state-funded primary schools whose phonics check results were below the national average have been judged (a) outstanding and (b) good in their most recent Ofsted inspection.

Nationally 74 per cent of year one pupils met the required standard of phonic decoding in the 2013/14 academic year.

Out of 15,658 state-funded primary schools[1] in England, 6,783 had year one phonics checks results that were below the national average. Of these, 780 schools were judged as outstanding and 4,341 were judged as good schools according to their most recent Ofsted inspection [2]^,[3],[4] on overall effectiveness.

[1] Defined as schools with pupils with highest statutory age below 12.

[2] This covers inspection outcomes of September 2005 to August 2014 published at http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/latest-official-statistics-maintained-schools-and-academies-inspections-and-outcomes. The school type of an institution is as of 31 August 2014, which means that schools may have received their rating under a different school type.

[3] The inspections have taken place before the 2013/14 phonics results were available to Ofsted (late October 2014). As the phonics check was only introduced in 2011/12, the inspections may have taken place before any phonics results were available to Ofsted.

[4] There have been changes in the framework on how schools are inspected and ranked. Prior to September 2012, schools graded 3 were judged as ‘satisfactory’. Since 1 September 2012 they are judged as ‘requires improvement’. From 1 January 2012 inspections of maintained schools have taken place under a new framework, in accordance with sections 5 and 8 of the Education Act 2005. This framework was revised on 1 September 2012 and under the revised framework, schools can be judged as outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate.