What would a school leader say to a reading strategy that promised a 10% improvement in student performance across the board by Year 11 (Grade 10)? Show me the evidence, probably! Which Lisa Ling, Words for All co-creator at Whole Education, is happy to provide.
After a single term kick-starting UK school Nene Park Academy’s reading strategy, Lisa says that one of the initiatives it used, the Faster Reading project, resulted in some of the weaker readers in a Year 8 (Grade 7) cohort improving their New Group Reading Test Standard Age Scores by up to 20 SAS points in one term. (A change of 3 or more SAS points over a year is considered significant.) The programme was one of five that Lisa helped lead and implement at the large UK secondary school in Peterborough, all of which showed great promise.
However, it would be a mistake, says Lisa, to think a school can pick a programme off the shelf and start it. “Getting children to read sounds easy, but so much complexity is involved in implementing a proper reading strategy. It needs someone senior to lead and own it, it needs planning, it needs teacher training, it requires discussion about what will and won’t work. Faster Reading, which involves a teacher reading to a class for 40 minutes, for instance, has a certain skill set to it. We’re not all natural at reading aloud – there’s a pedagogy to it that must be learnt.”
Lisa Ling, Words for All co-creator, Whole Education
We looked beyond reading ages and overall Standard Age Scores to look at the differences between the two main areas of the assessment – sentence completion and passage comprehension – to pinpoint areas of focus.
Being forensic with data
At Nene Park, the aim of the reading strategy was “to make everybody a skilled reader”, she explains, “and the method can be simply summed up as ‘small but significant projects to replicate and scale’.”
The first thing the school leaders did with Lisa to get ‘inside the data’. Nene Park uses GL Education’s New Group Reading Test (NGRT) – an adaptive, standardised assessment that measures reading skills and comprehension – to provide a clear baseline, and identify strengths and needs. “We helped teachers to understand exactly what the NGRT data was telling us – and why it wasn’t so black and white as ‘readers and non-readers’. We looked beyond reading ages and overall Standard Age Scores to look at the differences between the two main areas of the assessment – sentence completion and passage comprehension – to pinpoint areas of focus.
“For our purposes we split every cohort in Years 7, 8 and 9 (Grades 6, 7 and 8) into four categories. The first group were those with significant reading difficulties, with a Standard Age Score (SAS) below 85. The next group were just below average readers, those with an SAS of between 86 to 99. They can read enough to get by, but they don’t really understand most of every lesson. These were the key group, ‘the invisible students’ (and the group that made the most progress in the results cited above) – this is where you can get your quick wins.
“The third group were the average reader group, with SAS scores between 100-115, and the final group were the ‘good’ readers, those with an SAS above 115, who are often ignored because they are good but who would benefit from gaining more automaticity to understand what they are reading.”
Reading aloud
Once the data was categorised, Lisa and her colleagues developed five programmes, spread across different year groups. The first was the Faster Reading project, which involved half of Year 8 (Grade 7) and students across the range of reading abilities. For a term, they were read aloud to in their English classes for 40 minutes from two novels, The Hunger Games and The Prince of Mist.
All the initial teachers were trained in the programme, even though they were skilled English teachers. “It was important to get them to understand the emotional energy it would take to read for 40 minutes,” explains Lisa. “They needed to know the pitfalls, including, crucially stopping any writing taking place during the lesson – because reading, and listening to the text, has to be the primary focus. These teachers then became ambassadors to train other colleagues.”
Students were encouraged to repeat read at home with their parents. They made more progress with the second book, The Prince of Mist, “because it was unknown and difficult” and as it was one of a series, they could then dive into the next. Progress was astonishing. Overall, students went up two SAS points in a single term – as above, three points over a year is regarded as significant.
The second programme, dubbed Project 39, were those 39 students in Year 9 (Grade 8) who had the lowest reading ability. “We tested each individually using NGRT and then one-to-one assessments, including the York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension (YARC) and the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS) to uncover their specific reading difficulties. The key here was to treat them as individuals requiring specific interventions rather than a group. Students received additional core skills lessons, reading lessons and targeted cross-curricular reading strategies in class – for example, taking a science textbook and crossing out all the irrelevant lines with a marker pen. Overall, results moved from 71.9 to 80.4 SAS during the term.”
It was important to get them to understand the emotional energy it would take to read for 40 minutes.
One science teacher said it made them aware how much he had been dumbing down lessons and cutting out a lot of information because he thought some classes couldn’t cope with it – so he cut out a lot of information.
Sticking to the script
The third project was Immersive Reader for below average readers, those with a typical SAS between 86-99, who couldn’t read fluently. “The aim was to focus exclusively on decoding and automaticity to increase reading fluency.” Every day for an hour for four weeks, two sets of students were given passages from a non-fiction travel book. This involved much more repeated reading, taking selected passages, reading aloud and testing.
“To be honest it was hard going for teachers and students,” Lisa, who taught this programme, admits. “And the results for the first group were much better than the second – improving from 92.1 to 95.6 SAS, compared to 91.2 to 92.9 for the latter.” She firmly believes that this was because the first group were less receptive, which led her to stick rigidly to the programme rather than “go off-piste and indulge the more motivated and keen second group”. “I learnt that, tempting though it is, you can’t do the heavy lifting for the students. They have to do it themselves.”
The final two programmes were Powerful Words, using sixth formers to teach high frequency tier 2 vocabulary to other students thereby helping both learner and instructor, and Reciprocal Reading, encouraging young people to talk about the reading they have done. Powerful Words, Lisa says, is promising but a work in progress, not least when it comes to embedding consistency across the school, but Reciprocal Reading, which was first rolled out in the science department, is already proving its worth.
“One science teacher said it made them aware how much he had been dumbing down lessons and cutting out a lot of information because he thought some classes couldn’t cope with it – so he cut out a lot of information,” Lisa says. “You can’t do that with this programme because it involves keeping the quality text and adopting methodologies to teach it, such as chunking the text up, re-reading it, using synonyms and so on.”
Lisa's top tips
To implement a successful, whole school reading strategy, Lisa advises, a school must do the following:
- Put a senior school leader in charge of the reading strategy and make it their main focus, at least initially. Nothing a school does will improve overall academic performance more comprehensively than a well implemented reading programme – and it therefore requires commensurate senior support
- Understand what you mean by ‘improving reading’. It shouldn’t, for instance, mean ‘reading for pleasure’, which is a problematic concept and risks diminishing other purposes of reading, but ‘reading for empowerment’ or ‘reading to be skilled’
- Train teachers. This isn’t about turning every teacher into an English or phonics expert, but making them aware that good pedagogy and evidence-informed practice can help them teach their students how to read and acquire the necessary vocabulary to access and thrive in any subject
- Don’t just concentrate on the weakest readers. Think how you can improve the reading for all students, particularly those ‘invisible students’ who are doing just enough not to be noticed but who struggle with reading fluency and don’t really understand what is being taught all of the time
- Take time to understand the data. Delve into the data depths, understand at a forensic level what it is telling you about your students. Keep using it to monitor progress and if a particular intervention doesn’t appear to work – stop it
- Don’t use dumbed-down texts. Equip students with the tools to access high-level texts – lift them up, rather than dumb down
- Recognise that there are no short-term fixes. Training teachers, identifying champions, picking pilots, rolling programmes across departments takes time. It’s an arduous, messy business that schools have to do year after year – there are no silver bullets but it’s worth it in the end.
Words for All supports a sustainable, school-led approach to improving language acquisition by extending students’ knowledge of vocabulary and reading. Working in triads, teachers and leaders trial and scale strategies that work within the context of their school and meet the specific needs of their students. They then become part of a community of practitioners who can exchange peer support through the programme. Find out more
Think how you can improve the reading for all students, particularly those ‘invisible students’ who are doing just enough not to be noticed but who struggle with reading fluency and don’t really understand what is being taught all of the time.
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