The Validated Phonics SSP
for SEND and SEMH Schools

All Aboard Phonics has been absolutely brilliant. The progress that we’ve seen is phenomenal. All classes have made accelerated progress. There are huge numbers of SEND pupils here that are making the kind of progress we would expect to see with 5yo children without SEND picking up phonics for the first time. It’s a pure joy to be in the lessons.
Grey
Pennine View School

Within a few months of All Aboard Phonics implementation, you could be saying the same thing as Grey.

All Aboard Phonics (AAP) is a DfE-validated programme that works particularly well in an SEND and SEMH environments because it gives students both the support that they need and in a format that is appropriate.

Dealing with the SEND Age Range

One of the big challenges you face is the huge age range of students working on their reading. You need to have a DfE validated programme, but most are not suitable for older students.

With the combination of All Aboard Phonics and our Reading Copilot system, you are able to deliver resources that work for every age.

In addition, we have the background in special needs to deliver the help and scaffolding that will build their confidence and fluency. We expect every student to be feeling engaged and steadily more confident.

Visual Scaffolding for Phonics

All Aboard Phonics is the best systematic synthetic phonics package for specials schools because it teaches reading in a visual way. This makes it ideal for neurodivergent learners whose brains need additional visual scaffolding to grasp abstract auditory concepts.

You can see below a sample of how our pictophone images represent individual sounds to help learners crack our highly irregular phonetic language.

It is called “trainertext”. This is the one suitable for KS1 and early KS2:

And this is the one suitable for older students:

Have look at these words with multiple possible sounds for the letter A to see how helpful it can be. Count how many different sounds there are for just this one letter!

The words are in the Greek alphabet, so that you can feel how it is to be struggling to read.

Can you read them? 

The words are gas, was, way, water, later, far, war, lawyer, average, banana.

I love the word banana. It has three sounds for one letter in the same word and none of them are the regular phonetic pronunciation for the letter.

A Self-Paced Curriculum

All Aboard Phonics provides daily lesson plans for the first four years of phonics: 

We lay it out from Phase 1 through to Phase 6. 

These phases can be spread out over multiple years with children of varying ability level. And we have our Reading Copilot resources for your older students, who have already done conventional phonics several times.

This is what is available:

  1. Curriculum manuals for 4 years of phonics instruction, with daily interactive lesson plans that utilise visual, auditory AND kinaesthetic elements
  2. A tailored intervention process that pinpoints the root causes of reading difficulty for your learners
  3. Durable printed flashcards and other resources
  4. Posters that track the curriculum and engage the learners
  5. Powerpoint versions of each lesson with animations
  6. Free online training systems
  7. A complete library of 120 decodable books
  8. Online assessments for each phase
  9. Progress dashboards showing exactly where weaknesses are
  10. A unique keep-up intervention system
  11. A phonics play zone for the smartboard
  12. A digital version of our decodable books in trainertext
You can flip through some images of our resources below.

Our Background in Reading Intervention

Our particular expertise at All Aboard Learning is how to help those children in each class who find phonics hard. We have researched our intervention processes by working directly with over 17,000 struggling readers. 

We target the underlying neurological issues that cause reading delay. In SEND settings there maybe multiple factors at play. We help you isolate the ones you can remediate and set you on the right path to success.

You can also see an independent academic study of our intervention processes in mainstream classrooms with struggling learner subgroups here. It showed an average gain of 2 years of reading age in 4-6 months.

We had some real skeptical members of staff. But the progress that those children have been making in their phonics has been phenomenal. And the teachers will often bring work in to share that is at least phonetically decodable… back in September these children couldn’t even do Phase 1 and they’re now on Phase 5!”
Kat
Rocklands School

Online Tracking of Progress

Each teaching manual has an integrated assessment process, so that you can be sure to move learners on when they achieve mastery. With a Premium Subscription, you can do each assessment within your All Aboard Learner Management System and see the progress presented digitally for each child.

So… no more hours spent collating results on bits of paper or spreadsheets! See them all on your dashboards as soon as the assessments are done.

“I just wanted to let you know that your programme is having a big impact on some of my pupils, all teenagers with SEND who have been really 'stuck' with reading for years. One of them has been inspired by wanting to improve his reading and the books from All Aboard and has actually written his own book, he wrote the words and also created the illustrations.”
Ginny
Springhead School

Free Teacher Training

The training processes offered for phonics teaching are often awkward to attend and very expensive. We do not believe that is necessary with modern technology and a well-designed course.

Instead, we use a menu of free bite-sized online training sessions, which are convenient for teachers to access and allow consistency to be maintained across the whole team at any time. You can also pick up the phone to chat with us at any time! You can read more about our training here.

Age-Appropriate Decodable Books

Our multiple sets of wordless, decodable, and trainertext-supported books give your pupils space to build fluency in controlled text. Our books also contain comprehension prompts to draw out both basic understanding and social emotional learning cues – though you should view them as putty in your hands to shape to the needs of your learners. 

The books contain a large percentage of non-fiction, which makes them especially appropriate for older children in SEND environments whose interests lie beyond taking naps, choosing a pet, or riding a bike!

"The books are being used really successfully. We love that there are lots of non-fiction books with photos, and the photos aren’t just of little kids. Age appropriateness has been really successful for our older learners."
Nikki
Foreland Fields

Interested to learn more?

Just send us an email at support@allaboardlearning.com. We will answer any questions you have and send you a quote for a starter pack of resources.