Literacy Hub phonics progression

Overview

The Literacy Hub phonics progression provides teachers with an order for teaching the sounds and letters of English, moving from simple to complex code, and from common to less common sounds and spellings across Foundation to Year 2.

Who is this document for?

Foundation to Year 2 teachers; school leaders. 

What will you learn?

Why and how to use a phonics progression.

A suggested order for teaching letter–sound correspondences.

Update May 2026

Some minor amendments were made to the progression in May 2026 to align with the Literacy Hub’s phonics and morphology lesson packs. It’s important to note that the amendments in this version are minor, and you can continue to use the previous version.

• Each phase is matched to a level in the general capabilities in the Australian Curriculum, to show the expected achievement for students for this phase. Year levels were removed to allow for more flexible responsiveness to student data.
• Column headings have been adjusted to 'Content' and 'Skills' to include more content types.
• Phase 22: a more precise meaning of the prefix mis- is included.
• Phase 23: the irregular word ‘field’ was removed.
• Phase 23: ‘s/si’ content was removed.

Related content

Phonics and morphology lesson packs

Download free lesson packs, aligned with the Literacy Hub phonics progression. These ready-to-use packs include lesson slides with teacher notes, student sheets, progress monitoring tools and decodable resources.

Phonics instructional model for reading and spelling

This instructional model shows how to structure a phonics lesson using explicit direct instruction.

Morphology instructional model

This instructional model for morphology outlines the attributes of instruction, a lesson and review model and a sample morphology lesson plan.

Introduction to SSP video series 

Jocelyn Seamer, an expert in systematic reading instruction, presents a series of videos about systematic synthetic phonics (SSP). View the first video in the series.

Phonics professional learning: getting started with a phonics progression

The Literacy Hub provides free, online professional learning to support schools through each step of building a systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) approach for reading and spelling. This first topic in the series addresses phonics progressions and phonological awareness.