Very few secondary teachers, according to our YouGov survey, doubt the importance of reading when it comes to accessing the curriculum. But what do teachers mean by ‘reading’, how do they think children learn to read, and how might their experiences and understanding of data affect a school’s reading strategy?
Beth Morrish, Director of Secondary Literacy and Lead for Professional Learning at Meridian Trust, believes there are six key issues that need to be addressed when it comes to developing whole school understanding of best reading practice.
Beth Morrish, Director of Secondary Literacy and Lead for Professional Learning at Meridian Trust
Teachers who were in school pre-1998 need to be taught the language of phonics – phonemes, graphemes.
1 Wide variation in ways teachers were taught how to read
The first is to recognise the vastly different experiences of how teachers themselves were taught to read.
“Those who were in school in the 1980s and 90s were taught by the ‘look and say’ approach to whole word reading,” explains Beth. “They weren’t taught to read using the systematic synthetic phonics method, which starts off with basic sounds and then builds up to the whole word.” So teachers who were in school pre-1998 need to be taught the language of phonics – phonemes, graphemes and so on.
2 Limited knowledge of how children learn how to read
The second issue is the limited knowledge among secondary teachers about how children actually learn to become skilled readers. “We want to assume that most of our students will arrive at Year 7 able to read, and when they don’t, we’ve had little training to draw upon that can help us target and tackle the various blocks to reading that students experience,” Beth says. “Covid unfortunately interrupted many students’ reading journey and made the situation worse.”
The Simple View of Reading can help colleagues understand how students learn to read. There are two parts to it: word recognition – learning how to decode words using phonics and practising until they gain fluency; and language comprehension – adding vocabulary, background knowledge, knowledge of language structures, and using strategies such as questioning and summarising to amplify that knowledge and support with inference. When these components are in place, the result is a skilled reader.
Beth is at pains to point out that it’s not about expecting the secondary school classroom teacher to suddenly become a teacher of phonics. “However, it is about requiring colleagues to create classroom environments that will support students of varying reading abilities to access learning within their classroom. We need to equip teachers with knowledge of how children learn to read in order to be able to identify those who are stuck and what kind of provision they may need.
“It’s about teachers adapting and shaping their curriculum in ways that consciously help to fill some of the deficits that unskilled readers have – be that a limited vocabulary, or limited background knowledge to draw upon when attempting to infer and make sense of a text,” Beth says.
We need to equip teachers with knowledge of how children learn to read in order to be able to identify those who are stuck.
Teachers need to easily see how NGRT data corresponds to different parts of learning to read so that they can target support and interventions.
3 Lack of awareness of how to align data with a model of reading
The third issue is helping teachers to understand how assessment data – such as the New Group Reading Test (NGRT) – can align with colleagues’ increasing understanding of how children learn to read.
“If we are introducing teachers to models such as the Simple View of Reading,” Beth says, “then they need to be able to see how NGRT data aligns within this conceptual model. Teachers need to easily see how NGRT data corresponds to different parts of learning to read so that they can target support and interventions.”
4 Confusion over the language of assessment data
“The statistical language of assessment can feel like a foreign language for many teachers,” says Beth, “so it’s understandable that easily recognised concepts such as reading ages are used as proxies to talk about reading ability. But there are problems with using reading ages as a metric and we should try to wean ourselves off it.”
Reading ages can be misleading, because they aren’t benchmarked to a standard score within a peer group, they can be demotivating and it’s also very difficult to demonstrate progress after age 14. As Ofsted says, ‘Reading age assessments tell schools less than they might seem, because older pupils vary a lot in how they read.’
Standard Age Scores (SAS), such as those given in NGRT, which give an indication of how a student of the same age is performing relative to their peers nationally, are a more robust and reliable metric.
Standard Age Scores (SAS), such as those given in NGRT, which give an indication of how a student of the same age is performing relative to their peers nationally, are a more robust and reliable metric.
It’s about creating more nuanced interventions – a fluency intervention, or a vocab intervention rather than a generic ‘reading’ intervention.
5 Lack of awareness of student reading profiles
“It’s important that teachers have some understanding of the different strands that make up reading, because until they have, they’re not going to be able to make sense of the different types of student reading profile,” says Beth.
Once they have, they can use NGRT data to illuminate those students with ‘spikey profiles’, where the granular detail highlights anomalies or contrasts, and helps teachers understand why they’re meaningful and what they can do about it.
“A student could be registering a high score in sentence completion, for instance, but are being held back by a lower score in passage comprehension, or vice versa. Once teachers can identify the block, it can be addressed and relieved with the right interventions. It’s about creating more nuanced interventions – a fluency intervention, or a vocab intervention rather than a generic ‘reading’ intervention.”
6 Making meaningful use of data in the classroom
The final issue is making effective use of what the data is telling us. “We can’t expect every teacher to develop a different intervention for every one of their students,” says Beth. “This is about developing best practice that supports a range of students with different abilities.”
“Weak readers will generally have both poor sentence completion and comprehension skills. But other profiles can be more nuanced – a struggling reader who has poor decoding skills but higher comprehension skills, for instance, or a satisfactory reader with weak vocabulary, or a skilled reader with relatively weak comprehension. These more nuanced profiles can be used as easy descriptors to help every classroom teacher deliver targeted interventions.”
- Gough, P. B., & Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, Reading, and Reading Disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7(1), 6–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/074193258600700104
These more nuanced profiles can be used as easy descriptors to help every classroom teacher deliver targeted interventions.
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Find out more about the New Group Reading Test
Developing strong reading skills is essential for accessing the whole curriculum. With reading being a complex skill to master and measure, find out how NGRT can help.