A Reception teacher's honest guide to reading milestones from age 3 to 7 - what most children are doing, how wide normal really is, and when it's worth a closer look.
Most parents who ask me this question have already been on Google for a while. They have usually found a chart, and the chart has usually made them feel worse.
So before the ages, one thing worth saying plainly: the range of normal at this stage is enormous. I have taught Reception classes where one child arrived in September reading chapter books and another was still working out that words are made of separate sounds. Both were fine. Both could read by the end of Year 1.
What follows is what I would expect to see at each age, based on twelve years of teaching Reception and Year 1. Treat it as a rough map rather than a target.
Almost nothing, and that is completely as expected.
At three, reading is not really the point. What matters is everything underneath it:
Some three year olds recognise a few letters, usually the ones in their own name. That is lovely but it is not a head start in any meaningful sense.
If you want to do one thing at this age, it is talking and listening games. Sound play - "I spy something beginning with mmm" - does more for later reading than letter flashcards do.
This is the year before Reception for most children in England, and it is where parent anxiety usually starts.
At four, I would typically expect a child to be:
Reading actual words is not expected at four. Some children do, and that is fine, but it is not the standard and it is not a sign of anything in particular.
The skill worth building at four is oral blending - hearing three separate sounds spoken aloud and putting them together into a word. If I say "c - a - t" and your child says "cat", that is the foundation of reading, and it happens entirely by ear with no letters involved. A child who can do this arrives in Reception ready.
Age five is Reception for most children, and this is where formal phonics teaching begins.
By the end of Reception, the Early Years framework expects children to be able to:
In practice, a five year old who is on track is reading books like "The pig can dig" rather than anything with a plot. Progress is often uneven - a run of weeks where nothing seems to shift, then a sudden jump.
The question I get asked most about this age is what reading level a five year old should be on. Honestly, book band colours vary so much between schools that comparing them across schools tells you very little. What tells you more is whether your child can decode a word they have never seen before, rather than recognising words they have memorised.
Age six is Year 1, and this is the year with the phonics screening check in it.
In June of Year 1, children read 40 words one-to-one with their teacher. Twenty are real words and twenty are made-up words, which are there because a child cannot recognise a made-up word from memory - they have to decode it. In 2026 the threshold was 31 out of 40. It had been 32 every year since the check began, so a lot of websites still say 32.
By the end of Year 1, I would expect a child to be:
A child who does not meet the threshold retakes the check in Year 2. It is worth knowing that this is common enough to be routine, and that schools put support in place afterwards.
Age seven is the end of Year 2, and by this point most children are reading rather than learning to read.
I would expect:
If reading is still effortful at seven - if every sentence is a struggle and your child avoids books - that is worth looking at properly rather than waiting. Not because something is wrong, but because the gap tends to widen once reading becomes the way children learn everything else.
Age matters less than pattern. These are the signs I would follow up on, whatever the age:
That first one is the most common by a long way, and it is the most misunderstood.
When a child is not reading and everyone is puzzled, the answer is nearly always the same. They know their sounds. They just cannot blend them.
Blending is the moment where separate sounds become a word - where "s - u - n" turns into "sun". It sounds small. It is actually the whole thing. Every other part of phonics is preparation for it, and until it clicks, knowing more letters does not help. A child can learn forty sounds and still not read a single word.
It gets missed because it looks like something else. From the outside it looks like not concentrating, or not trying, or not being ready. From the inside, the child is doing exactly what they have been asked to do - saying the sounds - and then nothing happens.
The other reason it gets missed is that it is easier to spot by ear than on paper. If your child cannot blend when you say the sounds out loud, with no book and no letters in front of them, then letters were never the problem.
If any of this sounds like your child, the useful next step is finding out whether blending is the sticking point, rather than guessing.
I built a free Blending Check for exactly this. It takes about three minutes, your child listens to sounds and says the word, and you get a clear picture of where they are - no letters, no reading required.
And if you would rather start with something to read, my free guide covers the five things most parents do not know about teaching blending, including the two mistakes that make it harder without anyone realising.