In Phase Six children need to acquire more word-specific knowledge. They still need to segment words into phonemes to spell them, but they also learn that good spelling involves not only doing this and representing all the phonemes plausibly but also, where necessary, choosing the right grapheme from several possibilities.

In some cases, word-specific spellings (e.g. key/cat/cock/school) simply have to be learned. It is important to devote time in this phase to learning common words with rare or irregular spellings (e.g. they, there, said) as the quantity children write increases and without correction they may practise incorrect spellings that are later difficult to put right.

However, there are spelling conventions or guidelines that generalise across many words and that children should understand. Where there are exceptions these can usually be dealt with as they arise in children’s reading and writing.