Year 6 Spelling List: The New Curriculum Word List Explained

If your Year 6 child is at home and you're trying to work out which spelling words they're supposed to know, the answer is in the National Curriculum's statutory word list — 100 words that every child in England is expected to be able to spell by the end of Year 6. Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland have their own frameworks, but the England list is the one most home educators reference as a benchmark, and it's worth understanding exactly what it contains and how to teach it without turning spelling into a battle.

The Year 5–6 Statutory Spelling Word List

The National Curriculum (2014, still current) specifies that children in Years 5 and 6 should be able to spell the following words. These are tested formally in the KS2 SATs spelling paper for state school pupils, though home educators are not obligated to sit SATs — the list remains a useful benchmark regardless.

The full 100 words are:

accommodate, accompany, aggressive, amateur, ancient, apparent, appreciate, attached, available, average, awkward, bargain, bruise, category, cemetery, committee, communicate, community, competition, conscience, conscious, controversy, convenience, correspond, criticise, curiosity, definite, desperate, determined, develop, dictionary, disastrous, embarrass, environment, equip, especially, exaggerate, excellent, existence, explanation, familiar, foreign, forty, frequently, government, guarantee, harass, hindrance, identity, immediate, individual, interfere, interrupt, language, leisure, lightning, marvellous, mischievous, muscle, necessary, neighbour, nuisance, occupy, occur, opportunity, parliament, persuade, physical, prejudice, privilege, profession, programme, pronunciation, queue, recognise, recommend, relevant, restaurant, rhyme, rhythm, sacrifice, secretary, shoulder, signature, sincere, soldier, stomach, sufficient, suggest, symbol, system, temperature, thorough, twelfth, variety, vegetable, vehicle, yacht

These words are deliberately chosen because they follow unusual or irregular spelling patterns — words that can't simply be decoded phonetically and require direct memorisation or explicit pattern teaching.

Why These Words Specifically

The Year 5–6 list focuses on three main problem areas:

Words with silent or unusual letters. "Muscle," "rhyme," "yacht," and "lightning" all contain letters that don't behave predictably under standard phonics rules. Children who have been taught a strong phonics foundation may actually find these harder initially, because they've been trained to trust letter-sound correspondence.

Latin and French root words. A significant proportion of the list — "conscience," "secretary," "parliament," "privilege" — derives from Latin or Old French. Understanding the etymology often unlocks the spelling. "Secretary" comes from the Latin secretarius (a keeper of secrets), which explains the unusual middle section. Teaching roots as a strategy is more efficient than rote memorisation for this category.

Double letters and ie/ei patterns. "Accommodate," "committee," "embarrass," "harass," and "necessary" are among the most frequently misspelled words in English by adults, not just children. The double letters exist because the root words required them — but English spelling has rarely been consistently logical. These genuinely require overlearning through repeated, spaced practice.

How to Teach the List at Home

Don't give all 100 words at once. Work through the list in groups of 10–15 over the two years of upper KS2 (Years 5 and 6). Ten new words every two weeks, with regular review of words already covered, is a manageable pace that builds retention without overwhelm.

Use Look-Cover-Write-Check. This is the method recommended in most UK primary schools and it works well at home. The child looks at the word, covers it, writes it from memory, and checks. The act of self-correction is more effective for retention than simply being told the correct spelling.

Link to word families and roots. When you introduce "prejudice," connect it to "pre-" (before) and "judge" to make the structure memorable. "Communicate" connects to "community" and "commune" — showing the word family helps the child internalise the pattern rather than treating each word as an isolated memorisation task.

Use CGP workbooks for structured practice. CGP produces KS2 SATs-style spelling practice materials that are closely aligned to the statutory word list. Individual workbooks typically cost between £3.99 and £8.99, and they provide a structured, low-prep way to track progress. They're particularly useful in the Year 6 term if your child plans to sit any formal assessments as a private candidate.

Test in context, not just in isolation. Spelling a word correctly in a list is a different skill from spelling it correctly while composing a paragraph. Dictation exercises — reading sentences aloud for the child to write — are a more authentic test of whether the word has genuinely been internalised.

Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland

If you're home educating in Scotland, the Curriculum for Excellence does not prescribe a specific statutory word list in the same way England's National Curriculum does. Literacy progression in CfE is described in terms of experiences and outcomes rather than fixed word lists. However, many Scottish home educators use the England Year 5–6 list as a practical benchmark, supplementing it with Scottish vocabulary and Scots language study where relevant.

In Wales, the Curriculum for Wales similarly describes literacy progression through the Areas of Learning and Experience framework rather than through a prescribed word list. Welsh home educators often use the England list alongside Welsh-language literacy materials.

Northern Ireland follows the Northern Ireland Curriculum, which includes literacy expectations under the Language and Literacy strand but again does not publish an equivalent statutory word list. The England list remains a widely used reference point across the UK home education community.

What Comes Next After the Year 6 List

Once a child has secured the Year 5–6 statutory words, KS3 literacy broadens into etymology, morphology, and vocabulary building across subjects rather than a prescribed list. Secondary English typically shifts toward inference, analysis, and writing skills — though correct spelling of subject-specific vocabulary (in science, history, geography, etc.) becomes increasingly important for GCSE performance.

If your child will be sitting IGCSEs as a private candidate — the route most UK home educators take for formal qualifications — spelling accuracy affects marks in written examination components for English Language and many humanities subjects. Building the habit of precision now pays dividends at 15 and 16.

For home educators working through the full KS2 curriculum and looking at how English, maths, and humanities subjects fit together, the United Kingdom Curriculum Matching Matrix provides a mapped overview of UK-aligned resources by Key Stage — including free options and what to prioritise for each year group.

See more United Kingdom homeschool guides →