Watch a five-year-old attack the word was with their phonics — "w… a… s… wass?" — and you're watching the system meet its famous exception list. Tricky words are the small band of extremely common words whose spellings don't play by the rules children have learned so far. They're not a failure of phonics; they're scheduled around it.
English spelling fossilised centuries before its pronunciation settled, so its most ancient, most-used words — the, said, one, you — carry spellings no early phonics rule can unlock. Because these words are unavoidable (you can't write a sentence without them), schemes teach them alongside the rules as "learn the odd bit by sight" words: sound what you can, memorise the misbehaving part.
Here's the neat part parents rarely get told: many tricky words are only tricky temporarily. out is tricky before ou is taught and decodable afterwards; her surrenders once er arrives. The lists are phase-staged for exactly this reason — each phase's tricky words are the ones that misbehave given what's been taught so far. A few (the, one, people) stay genuinely irregular forever, which is why every adult reads them by sight too.
Sight words are learned by frequent, low-stakes meeting — not by sounding-out drills that the word is designed to defeat. When a tricky word stalls a sentence, just say it ("that one says was") and move on; the flow of the story matters more than the wrestle. Point them out in the wild — cereal boxes, shop signs — where spotting said is a game rather than a test. And keep the current list where reading actually happens, which is the entire theory of a bookmark.
Consistent with systematic synthetic phonics practice; word lists per the published Letters & Sounds sequence, August 2026. Your child's teacher is the authority on which list is current. CAAC.