Foundation English: Every Victorian Curriculum Code, Explained

Foundation English in the Victorian Curriculum F–10 Version 2.0 is 29 content descriptions, VC2EFLA01 through VC2EFLY15. If you have taught Victorian Maths you will expect the codes to line up with the national ones number for number, because in Maths they do. In English they do not. The Language and Literature strands map cleanly onto their Australian Curriculum counterparts, and the Literacy strand, which is half the level, has been completely renumbered.

That renumbering is not cosmetic. Victoria has reordered the Literacy codes into the order you actually teach them, split two ideas the national curriculum bundles, and written the technical vocabulary of reading instruction into the descriptors themselves. This guide covers all 29 codes, gives you the full VC2 to AC9 crosswalk for Literacy, and then works through the three descriptors that decide Level 1, a term-by-term order and six checks.

What Victoria does differently at Foundation English

Start with what is the same. All nine Language descriptions align by number: VC2EFLA01 corresponds to AC9EFLA01, VC2EFLA09 to AC9EFLA09, and the same is true of all five Literature descriptions. If your planning is organised by those two strands, translation is a prefix swap.

The Literacy strand is a different matter. Both frameworks have 15 Literacy codes at Foundation, and almost none of them share a number. This is the crosswalk:

Five differences in that table are substantive rather than clerical.

• Victoria separates phonological awareness from phonemic awareness. VC2EFLY03 covers the larger sound units (syllables, rhyme, alliteration) and VC2EFLY04 covers work on individual phonemes, and each descriptor carries its own named term. The national curriculum tags both AC9EFLY09 and AC9EFLY10 with the same bracketed label, phonological awareness. This is the distinction that most often collapses in practice, because a child who rhymes fluently can still be unable to isolate an initial sound, and Victoria has made it structural rather than something a teacher has to know to look for.
• The Literacy codes are ordered as a teaching sequence. Read VC2EFLY03 through VC2EFLY09 in numerical order and you get phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, CVC reading and spelling, letter knowledge, high-frequency words, morphemes, then decodable texts. That is the order you teach them in. The national equivalents are scattered across AC9EFLY04, AC9EFLY09 to AC9EFLY15, in an order that carries no instructional signal at all.
• Reading and spelling CVC words are one code, not two. VC2EFLY05 covers both directions in a single descriptor, where AC9 splits blending and reading (AC9EFLY12) from spelling with letter-sound knowledge (AC9EFLY13). Victoria is asserting that decoding and encoding are the same knowledge used two ways, and if you are writing a Victorian program that means the same lesson evidences both halves rather than two lessons evidencing one each.
• Creating and editing are two codes, not one. AC9EFLY06 bundles creating short written texts with shared editing. Victoria splits them into VC2EFLY13 and VC2EFLY14, and VC2EFLY14 names the four things being edited for: meaning, spelling, capital letters and full stops. That gives you a checklist rather than a verb.
• Victoria drops the sentence-segmentation clause. AC9EFLY10 opens by asking students to segment sentences into individual words before it reaches phonemes. Victoria’s VC2EFLY04 begins at the one-syllable word. The skill is still worth teaching, because it is the step that makes word boundaries visible in writing, but no Victorian code obliges you to and a national program converted code by code will silently lose it.

There are smaller wording differences worth knowing. VC2EFLA04 uses the term concepts about print, which is the phrase used in the assessment tools most Victorian schools already run, where the national version says conventions of print and screen. VC2EFLA07 adds sound to the images and words that contribute to meaning, so a soundscape or an audio story is in scope. VC2EFLE04 adds chants alongside poems, rhymes and songs, and VC2EFLE05 names drawing as a way of retelling. Victoria writes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors and illustrators where the national curriculum writes First Nations Australian, and VC2EFLY11 contrasts narrative with informative texts where AC9EFLY03 contrasts imaginative with informative. For the wider picture, see the Victorian Curriculum versus the Australian Curriculum.

The level at a glance

Literacy carries half the level on its own, and within Literacy the sound and letter sequence carries half again. If your Foundation program gives Literature and Literacy roughly equal air time, the weighting is wrong by a factor of three.

Reading the codes

Victorian codes run VC2 + learning area letter + level + strand + number. Foundation is written as F inside the strand block, so VC2EFLA01 is Foundation Language, VC2EFLE01 is Foundation Literature and VC2EFLY01 is Foundation Literacy. Level 1 becomes VC2E1LY01. A search for “VC2E0LY01” or “VC2EFL01” returns nothing, which is why so many teachers conclude the code does not exist. Victoria calls these levels rather than year levels, and the level a student works at is not required to match their year of schooling, which is the point of the numbering. Our guide to the Victorian Curriculum covers how that works in practice.

Strand by strand

Language (VC2EFLA01 to VC2EFLA09)

Three clusters. VC2EFLA01 and VC2EFLA02 deal with language between people: how it shifts between home and school depending on the relationship, and how preferences and opinions are expressed. Both live inside routines rather than lessons, and both are naturally evidenced during partner work.

VC2EFLA03, VC2EFLA04 and VC2EFLA07 deal with texts as objects: the many forms a text can take, concepts about print in printed and digital texts, and how images, words and sound work together to make meaning. VC2EFLA04 is the cheapest descriptor in the level to teach and the one most often assumed. Which way up the book goes, where the front is, where you start, which direction you travel, what happens at the end of a line. Two minutes at the start of a shared read, every day, for a term, and it is done.

VC2EFLA05, VC2EFLA06, VC2EFLA08 and VC2EFLA09 deal with how language is built: the sentence as a key unit for expressing ideas, sentences as groups of words working together, vocabulary in familiar contexts, and punctuation as a feature of writing that is not a letter. VC2EFLA05 is the load-bearing one, because VC2EFLY14 asks a Foundation student to edit for capital letters and full stops and you cannot place a boundary you cannot hear. Teach the sentence before you teach the full stop, or the full stop lands wherever the line runs out.

Literature (VC2EFLE01 to VC2EFLE05)

Five descriptions, the smallest strand, and the verbs tell you the level: discuss, respond, recognise, explore, retell. Foundation Literature is response, not analysis. Nothing here asks a five-year-old to explain an author’s choices.

VC2EFLE01 states its requirement explicitly, that students engage with literary texts by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander authors and illustrators alongside a wide range of Australian and world authors. It is written as a standing condition on the texts you choose all year, not a unit to be scheduled in one week and ticked.

VC2EFLE04 does the most hidden work in the strand. Exploring and replicating the rhythms and sound patterns of poems, chants, rhymes and songs is filed as Literature, but functionally it is phonological awareness practice and it feeds VC2EFLY03 directly. A daily rhyme or chant is the cheapest sound-pattern work available and it evidences two codes in two strands at once. VC2EFLE05, retelling and adapting texts already encountered through play, performance, images, drawing and writing, is similarly the natural home for oral rehearsal before writing.

Literacy (VC2EFLY01 to VC2EFLY15)

Read this strand as three groups. The oral and text-awareness group is VC2EFLY01, VC2EFLY02, VC2EFLY10, VC2EFLY11 and VC2EFLY12: interaction skills, delivering short spoken texts, recognising familiar text types and the contexts they belong to, distinguishing narrative from informative texts, and comprehension strategies. All five run on texts read to the child, so none of them are gated behind decoding, and all five can run at full difficulty from week one.

The production group is VC2EFLY13, VC2EFLY14 and VC2EFLY15: creating short texts, shared editing for meaning, spelling, capitals and full stops, and forming letters. VC2EFLY15 is handwriting, and it is the one descriptor that genuinely rewards short daily practice from week one, because letter formation habits set fast and are expensive to undo.

The code-breaking group is VC2EFLY03 to VC2EFLY09, and Victoria has already put it in order for you:

1. VC2EFLY03 phonological awareness: syllables, rhyming words, alliteration patterns and phonemes in spoken words.
2. VC2EFLY04 phonemic awareness: orally blending, segmenting and manipulating one-syllable words.
3. VC2EFLY05 phoneme-grapheme correspondence knowledge, used to read and spell CVC words.
4. VC2EFLY06 naming all upper- and lower-case letters and knowing the most common sound-letter relationships.
5. VC2EFLY07 reading and writing some high-frequency and familiar words.
6. VC2EFLY08 morphemic knowledge: a word can be made of more than one meaningful part.
7. VC2EFLY09 reading decodable and authentic texts with developing phonic knowledge, making and monitoring meaning.

One thing worth noticing about that order: VC2EFLY05, reading and spelling CVC words, is numbered before VC2EFLY06, knowing all the letters. That is not an error, and it is the most useful piece of sequencing advice hidden in the Victorian code set. You do not wait for all 26 letters before a child reads a word. Six sounds are enough to start, and the child who reads mat in May has a reason to learn the next letter.

The three codes that decide Level 1

VC2EFLY04: phonemes, not letters

The misconception: that VC2EFLY03 and VC2EFLY04 are the same work at different volumes. Victoria has given them separate codes and separate names precisely because they are not. Rhyme operates on the chunk at the end of a word; phonemic awareness operates on an individual sound anywhere in it. Plenty of children generate rhymes fluently and cannot isolate an initial sound.

What you will see: ask for the sounds in ship and the child gives four, /s/ /h/ /i/ /p/. They are reciting letters they have been shown rather than sounds they can hear, which means the work drifted from oral to visual too early. The harder signal: ask them to say sun without the /s/ and they either repeat sun or produce “un-s”. Manipulation is explicitly named in VC2EFLY04, and it is the part that gets skipped.

The fix: three to four minutes a day, oral only, no letters visible. One operation at a time in the order blend, segment, delete, substitute, and stay on an operation until it is automatic rather than cycling through all of them each session. Two- and three-phoneme words only.

VC2EFLY05: both directions, one code

Using letter-sound knowledge to read and spell CVC words. The fact that Victoria puts both in one descriptor is the teaching instruction: decoding and encoding are the same knowledge pointed in opposite directions, and they should be taught in the same session on the same words.

The misconception: that reading comes first and spelling follows once reading is secure. In practice spelling a CVC word is the better diagnostic, because a child cannot guess their way through it. Reading map can be done from the picture; writing map cannot.

What you will see: the child produces /m/ /a/ /p/ correctly and then reads the word as “mop”, or says the three sounds and then looks at the picture and offers “monkey”. The sounds are right and the word is wrong because each sound has faded before the next arrives. Sounding out is not blending.

The fix: continuous blending, stretching the word without stopping so no silence falls between sounds, then saying it at speed. Cover the picture, because a child who can guess will not blend. And write the same word straight after reading it, so the code gets used both ways in one minute.

VC2EFLY14 and VC2EFLA05: the sentence boundary

Victoria gives editing its own code and names capital letters and full stops in it. Its partner is VC2EFLA05, the sentence as a unit for expressing an idea, and planners routinely take the Literacy code and leave the Language one behind.

The misconception: that punctuation is a tidy-up applied after the writing. It is a boundary the child has to hear before they can place it.

What you will see: “I wnt to the prk and it wos fun and my dog cam and we had ice creem and”. One unbroken string, correctly spelled by Foundation standards, with no boundary anywhere in it. Adding full stops afterwards teaches nothing, because the child is guessing where they go.

The fix: oral rehearsal before the pencil moves. Say the sentence, count its words on fingers, say it again unchanged, then write it. One sentence, stop, full stop, then say the next one aloud before writing it. A new sentence is a new breath and a new idea, not a new line. Our deep dive on VC2E3LY11 and how sentences become paragraphs by Level 3 shows what this thread turns into three years later.

What students need to arrive with

Foundation has no prior level of codes, so the prerequisites are developmental rather than curricular: oral language volume, which is the single largest source of variation on day one, the ability to hear that speech is made of separate words, basic book handling, and enough fine motor control to hold a pencil without the whole arm. The spread in a Victorian Foundation room in February is enormous and is not by itself predictive of Level 3. What is predictive is whether VC2EFLY03 to VC2EFLY05 are taught systematically and daily, because that is the part of the gap that closes with instruction rather than time.

What this level sets up

• VC2EFLY03 and VC2EFLY04 become VC2E1LY03, where blending, segmenting and manipulating extend to words with consonant blends at the beginning and end and to words of more than one syllable. Level 1 assumes manipulation is already available.
• VC2EFLY05 and VC2EFLY06 become VC2E1LY04 (short vowels, common long vowels, consonant blends and digraphs across one- and two-syllable words) and VC2E1LY05, which breaks the one-sound-per-letter model deliberately: a letter can represent more than one sound, and a syllable must contain a vowel sound.
• VC2EFLY07 becomes VC2E1LY07, VC2EFLY08 becomes VC2E1LY08 (grammatical morphemes used to build word families), and VC2EFLY09 becomes VC2E1LY09, which adds phrasing and fluency to decoding.
• VC2EFLY13 and VC2EFLY14 become VC2E1LY13 (short narrative and informative texts with an opening, middle and conclusion) and VC2E1LY14, where the child re-reads their own text and discusses possible changes rather than editing in a shared group.
• VC2EFLA05 and VC2EFLA06 become VC2E1LA06, where a simple sentence is defined as a single independent clause, and VC2E1LA07, which names word classes by function. Note that Victoria includes prepositions in VC2E1LA07 where the national descriptor does not, so the divergence that starts in Literacy at Foundation reaches Language by Level 1.

The steep jump is the phonics one. Level 1 opens with consonant blends and digraphs and never returns to single-letter CVC work, so a child who arrives without VC2EFLY05 spends the year being taught the layer above the one they need.

A term-by-term order

1. Term 1: oral, print concepts and letters. VC2EFLY03 daily, VC2EFLY01 and VC2EFLA01 to VC2EFLA02 inside routines, VC2EFLA03 and VC2EFLA04 concepts about print at the start of every shared read, VC2EFLE02 and VC2EFLE04 through a daily rhyme or chant, VC2EFLY06 letters at a set pace, and VC2EFLY15 letter formation from week one.
2. Term 2: phonemes, then the first words. VC2EFLY04 in order, blending before segmenting before manipulating, with VC2EFLY06 continuing, and VC2EFLY05 started as soon as about six sound-letter relationships are secure rather than held until the alphabet is complete. Add VC2EFLA05 the sentence, VC2EFLE01 and VC2EFLE03.
3. Term 3: writing arrives. VC2EFLY05 pushed in both directions in the same session, VC2EFLA06 and VC2EFLA09 sentence structure and punctuation, VC2EFLY13 creating short texts and VC2EFLY14 shared editing against its four named targets, VC2EFLY07 high-frequency words, and VC2EFLY09 decodable texts, which only becomes possible now.
4. Term 4: manipulate, extend and apply. VC2EFLY04 finished at the manipulation end, VC2EFLY08 morphemes, VC2EFLY12 comprehension strategies pushed harder, VC2EFLY10 and VC2EFLY11 text types and contexts, VC2EFLY02 spoken texts to an audience, VC2EFLE05 retelling and adapting, and VC2EFLA07 and VC2EFLA08 on images, words and sound.

The one non-obvious choice is starting VC2EFLY05 in Term 2 with six sound-letter relationships rather than Term 4 with all of them. Victoria’s own numbering supports it, since VC2EFLY05 sits ahead of VC2EFLY06. Blending needs months rather than weeks, and holding it back compresses the hardest skill of the level into the term with the most interruptions.

Six checks before Level 1

• “Say the sounds in ship.” Four sounds means letters are being recited rather than phonemes heard. Reteach VC2EFLY04 orally with no letters visible.
• “Say sun without the /s/.” This is the manipulation clause of VC2EFLY04 and the clearest single predictor of a straightforward Level 1. Reteach deletion before anything else.
• Write the word map from dictation. Spelling is the harder half of VC2EFLY05 and cannot be guessed. A wrong or missing middle vowel is the standard result and points at the phoneme work rather than the letters.
• Read the written word map, picture covered. Correct sounds followed by a wrong word means blending, not letter knowledge, is the gap. Reteach with continuous stretched blending.
• Dictate “Sam had a big cat.” Words running together, or no capital and full stop, points at VC2EFLA05 and VC2EFLY14 rather than at spelling. Reteach with oral rehearsal and finger-counting the words.
• Hand the child a book upside down and back to front. If they open it and start anyway, VC2EFLA04 was assumed rather than taught. Two minutes at the start of each shared read fixes it.

Six checks, five minutes, one child at a time. Each failure names a specific piece of a specific term to repeat rather than a vague sense that a child is behind.

Capabilities and record keeping

Victoria assesses four Capabilities separately from the learning areas, and Foundation English sits closest to two of them. The Personal and Social Capability has Foundation content on collaboration and recognising emotions, which a shared editing session under VC2EFLY14 or a partner retell under VC2EFLE05 evidences directly. The Critical and Creative Thinking Capability picks up the questioning and predicting inside VC2EFLY12. One well-recorded activity can legitimately evidence an English code and a Capability code at once, which matters when the Foundation timetable has no spare minutes. We cover this in the four capabilities in the Victorian Curriculum.

Whether you are programming for a class or building a VRQA home education learning plan, record the code on the activity as you go. “Phonics” tells a reviewer nothing; “VC2EFLY05, reading and writing CVC words with m, s, a, t, p, i, 12 May” answers the question before it is asked. Our guide to homeschool resources in Victoria covers what the VRQA looks for, and the companion post on every Foundation Maths code covers the other half of the level.

Foundation is the level where the wrapper matters most. A five-year-old will do fifteen minutes of segmenting dinosaur names and about three of segmenting words from a list. The phoneme work is identical; the attention is not. Sprout Lessons builds an interactive lesson from any of these codes, pitched at Foundation and wrapped in whatever the child is currently obsessed with, with the VC2 code recorded in the footer. Try it free.

Curriculum codes reference the Victorian Curriculum F–10 Version 2.0 © VCAA. The curriculum can be accessed directly at f10.vcaa.vic.edu.au. The VCAA does not endorse this product. Always verify against the current content descriptions and achievement standards.

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