How the placement works
If you don't yet know where your child sits, the placement is built to answer that in a couple of minutes, not a couple of weeks.
Sign up
Just an email address. No card needed, ever.
Add a kid profile
A nickname is all it takes; a birth year is optional and helps pick a starting point.
Play the placement
A short round maps your child to a phonics tier, shown against the named Cambridge stages.
Where a result lands, on a real ladder
- Reception (Cambridge Early Years B) The start of the ladder.
- Year 1 to Year 5 (Cambridge Primary Stages 1 to 5) The middle stretch, growing steadily.
- Year 6 (Cambridge Primary Stage 6) Tier 7 vocabulary, reaching into Grade 6 words.
A parent who wants that external reference point can see roughly where a placement result sits against these named stages, without needing a formal enrollment anywhere.
The named stages are there simply as a familiar landmark. Your child's actual placement is always expressed as a phonics tier first, since that's the level the game itself plays at from round to round.
What a placement lands on
The ladder a placement result maps onto, from first sounds to Tier 7.
What each tier is built from, single letters up to trigraphs.
Spread across those 7 tiers, so a placement always has real room to grow into.
A placement isn't a static score; it keeps adjusting as your child plays these.
Separate per child, per language
Placement runs independently for every kid profile and every language. English, German and Russian are each tracked on their own, so a sibling playing English at a higher tier and a younger one just starting German never collide, and adding a second language never disturbs a child's existing English placement.
This also means one child can sit at a confident level in English while only just beginning Russian, and both of those facts are simply true at once, tracked separately, with neither one pulling the other's level up or down.
A starting point, not a verdict
A placement estimates where to begin, nothing more. From there, the level adjusts round by round as your child actually plays, so a slightly-off first guess corrects itself through ordinary use rather than needing you to intervene or force a re-test.
That's a deliberate design choice: a two-minute play can only ever be a starting estimate, so the game is built to keep correcting it quietly in the background, every time your child plays another round.