Welcome to the Newcastle Intervention for Phonological Awareness (NIPA). 

The NIPA is an in intervention programme for children who have difficulty acquiring phonological awareness skills. These are children who:

• Do not have syllable level skills on entry to pre-school provision
• Do not have robust syllable level skills and emerging phoneme level skills as they start learning to read or at any stage in their development.

The NIPA can be used with individual children or with groups of children as a targeted intervention. It is not recommended as a whole class or universal intervention because, for optimal benefit, it is essential to progress at the right pace for each individual child.

The Newcastle Assessment of Phonological Awareness (NAPA) signposts the starting point of intervention with the NIPA.

Who should use this resource?

• The NIPA was originally developed for use by speech and language therapists for use with children with speech sound disorder. However, it is widely used by teachers in early years settings and with older children who are struggling with reading and spelling.

• Parents/guardians and other family members are encouraged to deliver phonological awareness activities and take part in sessions with support and guidance from SLTs/teachers.

What is in the NIPA?

• Information about phonological awareness, how it develops and why it is important.
• Guidance for delivery of the intervention, including how to integrated into teaching for bilingual children, what to say to children and how to choose stimulus words.
• Guidance on starting points and progression through the programme.
• Eleven session plans taking you through the sequence of phonological awareness skills.

About the Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit .  This gives you opportunity to adapt the intervention for your own context as long as you follow the conditions of the Creative Commons ShareAlike Licence. This will ensure the resource is always freely available and we can benefit from our hive knowledge and experience of phonological awareness.

You are welcome to copy the session plans for your own use. 

How to reference this intervention

Stringer, H. (2019). Newcastle Intervention for Phonological Awareness (NIPA) (1st ed.). Newcastle University, UK.