The Literacy Improvement Iceberg™: Why Isn’t Our Phonics Teaching Showing Up in Student Reading?

Why your phonics teaching seems to be going well, but isn’t yet showing up in student reading

My recent post on explicit instruction and teaching phonics to mastery sparked more conversations with school leaders than almost anything I’ve shared. So many of you said the same thing: “This is exactly what’s happening in our school.” This webinar is where that conversation continues.

Many schools now have a strong synthetic phonics sequence, decodable texts and explicit instruction in every classroom. That is a great step forward, and it matters.

Yet leaders keep telling me the same story. Lessons look strong. Teachers are working hard. Students are accurate in the moment. But it isn’t showing up in their everyday reading or in the Year 1 Phonics Check. Taught, but not mastered.

The answer is rarely another program or resource. The issue is often underneath the surface: in expectations, dosage, practice, and how the whole school works together to take every student to mastery.

It takes more than a strong phonics sequence and explicit instruction. It takes explicit instruction to mastery.

Using the Literacy Improvement Iceberg™, we’ll step back from the busyness of the school year and look at where phonics teaching may be leaking impact, and what that means for your school.

The four steps to mastery

Haring’s instructional hierarchy describes four steps every student moves through on the way to mastering phonics:

Acquisition: learning the code accurately through explicit teaching.
Fluency: reading and spelling it accurately and with pace, through daily practice.
Generalisation: applying it in text reading and dictation.
Adaptation: using it independently, beyond the phonics lesson.

Most classrooms do the first step well. Far fewer get every student through all four. In this session, we’ll look at what each step looks like in a classroom, and why so many students stop at the first.

Knowing the steps is only the beginning. Getting every student through all four, in every classroom, every day, takes a whole-school approach: shared expectations, protected time, data that is tracked and acted on, and leaders who know what to look for. That is the work that turns good phonics lessons into student reading.

In this session, you will:

Understand why strong phonics lessons don’t always translate to student reading.
See what sits beneath the surface of phonics teaching that has impact.
Explore the four steps to mastery, and why explicit instruction is the essential starting point.
Take away a few practical starting points to discuss with your leadership team.
Leave clear on your next step.

This webinar is for:

It will be especially relevant if your school is:

teaching phonics explicitly, but not yet seeing it show up in student reading in your classroom/school
disappointed by its Year 1 Phonics Check results despite strong effort from your teachers
seeing inconsistency in phonics practice across classrooms
collecting data but unsure what to do next or how to use it most effectively

Why this matters

Phonics improvement isn’t sustained by one program, one professional learning day or one committed leader carrying the work. It’s sustained when the architecture underneath the work is strong enough to sustain it, and that is built over time, with the right conditions and support in place.

DATE AND TIME

Tuesday 10 November 2026

3:30pm–5:00pm WST (90 minutes)

Live online. Can’t make it live? All registered attendees will receive a replay, available for one week after the session.

What School Leaders Say

“Thank you for all your work supporting us this year. I recently sat with our ASIP Team and looked over our goals that we set at the start of the year and we have smashed them! Feeling very grateful for all the knowledge you've shared with me and our school.”

— Michelle Moodie, Deputy Principal, Woodroffe Primary School, Darwin

About Julie Scali and Literacy Impact™

Julie Scali is the founder of Literacy Impact™, author of High Impact Reading Instruction and Intervention in the Primary Years, and a national literacy and school improvement consultant.

Her work brings together more than 27 years of experience across classroom teaching, learning difficulties, inclusion, instructional leadership, schoolwide improvement and implementation.

Julie has worked as a primary classroom teacher in Australia and the UK, teaching students from Foundation to Year 7. She has taught in a specialist learning needs unit in London, completed postgraduate study in learning difficulties, and worked as a SENCO for four years, leading schoolwide inclusion and support systems.

Julie also worked at a statewide level in Western Australia as a Support Teacher Learning Difficulties with the Centre for Inclusive Schooling, now SSEN:D, supporting principals and deputy principals to strengthen multi-tiered systems of support in literacy and numeracy.

She then spent eight years as a Deputy Principal across two schools, leading literacy improvement, intervention, teacher development and whole-school instructional change.

Julie is a recipient of a Learning Difficulties Australia award for effective literacy practice, recognising her contribution to improving literacy outcomes for students.

Through Literacy Impact™, Julie now works with schools across Australia to help leadership teams move from fragmented literacy effort to coherent, evidence-informed and codified whole-school systems.

Her work brings together literacy research, implementation science, learning difficulty expertise, instructional leadership and the practical reality of leading change in real schools.

Julie’s point of difference is that she does not just talk about schoolwide literacy improvement. She has led it, supported it, codified it and has the evidence of her impact in terms of student data as a direct result of her effective support of schools across multiple schools and systems.

Contact the host of The Literacy Improvement Iceberg™ Why Isn’t Our Phonics Teaching Showing Up in Student Reading?

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