What replaces the English Online Interview (EOI) in Victoria?

As Victorian schools await the introduction of the new phonics screening check, EOI has been made optional. If you are wondering what you should do to assess students on their entry to school this year, you’re not alone! Here’s what we know, and a download that might help …

What are the EOI requirements? 

EOI requirements for 2025 and 2026 can be found here: https://www.schools.vic.gov.au/changes-english-online-interview-requirements 

“In 2025:

• for Foundation students, completion of the EOI will be optional
• for Grade 1 students, completion is required of either
  1. the new Year 1 Phonics Check
  2. the Year 1 EOI”

CRT time will be funded as usual, but you do not have to use this time and funding to complete an assessment of your new Prep students. When teaching an explicit and systematic program like Little Learners Love Literacy, formative assessment data collected on a daily and weekly basis gives teachers a good understanding of their students' learning and ability, and what to do as a result.  If students come with zero knowledge, the program is designed to teach from this point. 

But what about students entering school who are “already reading”? These students could be:

• High ability - the small % of students who will learn without much explicit instruction from their teacher.
• Pre-school taught - some students may have been to good quality Kinder or to pre-school literacy classes putting them ahead of their peers who have not had these opportunities.

Both of these groups of students will still benefit from whole class instruction with LLLL. They often have gaps, or are not explicitly aware of phonics or morphology meaning this knowledge and the associated skills will need work. Most students in both of these groups still need the program’s core instruction for spelling and handwriting. Additionally, participating in the whole class in term 1 teaching allows them to learn the routines and behaviours that will set them up for success during the rest of their primary education.

Why do we assess when students start school?

School entrant assessments could be doing one of two jobs:

• Baseline assessment - assessing student knowledge and ability on entry to school allows educators to measure the progress of each student from their own baseline. It allows us to answer this important question throughout the primary school years - have all students made similar rates of progress? Tools such as Dibels, that operate throughout the primary years could be used for this purpose.
• Screening assessment - Checking students’ knowledge and skills can help teachers inform instruction and differentiated student support - building on what students already know.  By this we mean use the data to broaden your understanding of each child and inform what you might do with them in your small group instruction time. If you are teaching with Little Learners Love Literacy we’d still recommend that you teach the scope and sequence explicitly, whole class to all students. All students will benefit. We have compiled some short assessment items (see below) that you could use to screen your new entrants.

When to use the Little Learners Love Literacy assessments

The Little Learners Love Literacy assessments are not designed to provide a baseline assessment of students and measure their progress made from the start of school. Why? Our assessments are diagnostic and designed to inform instruction. They support teachers to get all students to a benchmark achievement by the end of year 1 - almost all students can reach our benchmarks. The assessments will reveal gaps in knowledge and skills, informing weekly planning and additional tier 2 interventions.

Incidentally, we’ve also been asked if it is appropriate to use the LLARS and LLASS to assess students at the end of each stage in order for teachers to gauge whether to ‘move them on’ to the next stage of decodable books and/or stage of instruction, and our answer is no. Why? The LLARS and LLASS assessments are designed to be used twice per year. Between these assessment points there is a wealth of formative assessment data available to teachers.  This assessment schedule gives students the opportunity to master the content, and aligns with informing your 10-20 week Tier 2 interventions. The LLLL program is cumulative - this means our practice is interleaved - we revisit new learning over and over, giving students the opportunity to consolidate and master. We do not teach a block of content (or LLLL Stage) and continue to teach it until all students have mastered. Therefore no reason to assess mastery at the end of each LLLL Stage. Research and evidence tells us that interleaved practice is better for long term retention of learning - fighting the forgetting curve!

The Test of Phonological Awareness for Little Learners (ToPALL) is available to download for free from our website. This is an option for new entrant screening, but it will only check PA skills. Without another screening check in place, you are likely to want to check more skills/knowledge.

Feeling stuck? Maybe this could help…

For those wishing to assess at the start of term 1, we’ve collated some simple assessment items that you can use to learn more about your students on their entry to school. 

1. Letter knowledge: Say the letter name 
2. Phonic knowledge: Say the sound (phoneme)
3. Early writing skills: Write your name
4. Phonemic awareness skills: Identify initial and final sounds in CVC words
5. Phonemic awareness skills: Blending CVC words
6. Phonemic awareness skills: Segmenting CVC words
7. Early reading skills: Decoding/Word reading

You may also want to consider reading the student a short story and asking them what it was about i.e. retell it in their own words, but we don’t have an assessment to provide for that.

These are all important literacy skills that children will be explicitly taught over their first year at school. 

More information on assessments

• The ACARA Literacy Progressions provide useful descriptors of skills and knowledge in each area of literacy:  ACARA Literacy Progressions
• For more information on types of assessments you may like to read assessment practical guides compiled by The Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO), like this one: https://www.edresearch.edu.au/guides-resources/practice-guides/choosing-reading-assessments-mtss