Ofsted English Review: some thoughts on reading
Well hello there and welcome to update #071!
There are a number of important insights from Telling the story: the English education subject report and it’s worth reflecting on what’s going well and what needs to be done to improve outcomes for all young people.
The good news is that results from the Year 1 phonics screening check show that standards have risen since 2012. And this appears to be reflected in the PIRLS (Progress in international reading literacy study) reports which show that the gap between the lowest and highest scoring pupils is reducing, mainly due to low attaining pupils performing better.
And yet one in four pupils are moving to secondary school without having met the expected standard in the key stage 2 national reading test. This holds many of them back in secondary school, both in their English lessons and more widely across the curriculum.
Some pupils are not reaching the expected standard in reading due to a lack of vocabulary. So how can we develop pupils’ vocabulary? Well, perhaps they can be drilled with more SATs practice papers, but the issue here is that while pupils need some test practice, what they really need is exposure and encounters with a rich range of material across the curriculum that will both provide background knowledge and develop their vocabulary. Another option is to have them learn spellings of new words. Again, this only goes so far, without the wider context provided by rich texts.
So, the question is what can be done to help pupils develop their reading and consequent knowledge of the world? As it happens, there is some promising research which can help us to help our pupils with reading, comprehension and vocabulary development.
A research trial from the University of Sussex, called the Faster Read, found that over a 12 week period, Year 8 pupils’ reading ages improved overall by 8.5 months. For those pupils who had been identified as being ‘poorer’ readers, their reading ages improved by 16 months. Wherever we are in the sector, I think we have to take these findings seriously.
While any research has its flaws and the Sussex research was with about 400 pupils, other schools, both secondary and primary have found similar results. We can see what happened when the Nene Park Academy tried a similar fast read in their school and similarly in the Gloucester Road Nursery and Primary school.
So, the next question is whether there are implications for reading across the curriculum and I will explore this in the next post.
Until next time
Mary
PS The Huh Academy has a number of self-paced courses to support work on the curriculum:
Huh Curriculum Leaders with live check-ins with John Tomsett and me
Leading the Diverse Curriculum also with live check-ins with Hannah Wilson and Bennie Kara
Children are being drilled to pass the Phonics Screening Check with the phonics first and only approach. This is because a test out of 40 is easy to measure, but it tells us very little. Phonics is being taught in isolation and 'reading' taught through decodable books only. It's killing reading for meaning and pleasure. The young people I meet, who have often been excluded from mainstream education, have told me how awful the experience has been for them. Many of them are 12years + and they have been failed by the system. They have not been encouraged to talk about stories, poems, plays, etc. They have not been exposed to language rich books that model good language structure and offer vocabulary extension. They have not had opportunities to read the kind of stories they love or had the opportunity to find out more about topics that interest them. They have been zip zopping on the zop!