Leading reading in the secondary school: the three pillars and the three links

In this blog post, I signpost three pillars (diagnostic reading intervention, whole-class teaching, and reading for pleasure strategies) that can help us to lead reading in secondary schools.

Image credit: AgnosticPreachersKid on Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Three_in_a_row_-_National_Capitol_Columns.jpg

I’ve blogged about the importance of reading in secondary schools before (Part 1: https://www.brittanywright.co.uk/post/we-need-to-think-twice-about-reading-in-secondary-schools-part-1-improving-practice-with-theory; Part 2: https://www.brittanywright.co.uk/post/we-need-to-think-twice-about-reading-in-secondary-schools-part-2-making-reading-matter-in-school.) However, it feels like the conversation has only just begun for so many of us. I’m in a privileged position. As a trust-wide CPD lead and NPQLL facilitator, I get to work with leaders and teachers from schools across the country. Many of us are facing increasing levels of need from our cohorts, as well as challenges around staffing capacity and budgets. These challenges can – understandably – leave us firefighting with scattergun approaches. We can be so immersed in the day-to-day that we struggle to take a step back and consider how we can build systems and processes that enable us to use the capacity we have strategically.

I want to use this blog post to showcase one approach that involved stepping back to build the infrastructure for a high-quality reading culture. As a consultant, I worked with a fantastic senior leader at an all-through specialist social, emotional, and mental health (SEMH) school to build a systematic approach to reading intervention, whole-class teaching of English, and reading for pleasure. These three pillars are mutually reinforcing, but we wanted to prioritise and strategically approach each area.

Pillar 1: Reading Intervention

The first step was to establish a systematic approach to screening pupils for reading issues. We used NGRT Digital as a screening tool. We then used the YARC test to identify specific areas of need for those students who were reading below their chronological reading age. Students who required phonics intervention received Fresh Start phonics sessions. Students who were able to decode but struggled with fluency read aloud to a trained TA from decodable books at the appropriate level from Piper Books Mature Reading Instruction. NGRT Digital was used three times per year. This – along with the assessment tools built into the interventions - enabled us to see whether the interventions were helping to close the gap between the students’ reading ability level and those of their peers. We tracked this through the standardised age score (SAS), aiming for each student receiving intervention to move closer to a score of 100, which would mean they were achieving in line with the mean average for peers of the same age nationally.  

The systematic approach to screening also meant that we were able to triangulate our inferences about the impact of our whole-school teaching of English and reading for pleasure approaches. For those students who weren’t receiving intervention, we were able to see whether they were falling behind, keeping pace with, or going beyond their peers nationally. The regular, systematic testing also meant that we were able to counterbalance issues with test reliability. The paper versions of NGRT have a reliability measure of above 0.9, with the digital version having slightly lower levels of reliability. Whilst this is high, it still leaves a margin of error that could result in a student being placed in an intervention group unnecessarily or a student with some reading need being mistakenly viewed as ‘on track’. The YARC testing enabled us to illuminate or discount erroneous NGRT results, whilst the termly testing enabled us to identify students who may have achieved an erroneously high score on a previous test and had therefore not been tested with the YARC. This termly testing also ensured that new students joining the school mid-year were baselined through a systematic process that other students were used to. Termly testing is expensive, but I’m sure you can see how this helped in the context of this school. In a mainstream secondary school, the potential advantages of termly data would have to be weighed against the time and cost. Personally, I don’t think termly screening of all students is likely to be necessary for most mainstream secondary schools.

Pillar 2: Whole-class teaching of English

The staff team at the school cared deeply about the wellbeing of their students, but their subject expertise varied. There was a mix of qualified teachers and unqualified teachers. No one had a background in teaching secondary English. In this context, we needed to build capacity strategically. I designed and delivered a bespoke professional development programme weekly. We started by exploring the experiences of English for teachers and TAs. Uncomfortable emotions were brought to the surface for some, highlighting how important it is to remember that every member of staff brings their own set of experiences to bear on how they approach their work in school. Conversations around our own academic insecurities and experiences of the education system enabled me to refocus discussions on what we wanted to achieve for our students. I introduced a structure based on Rosenshine to support the planning of sequences of lessons. Through fortnightly meetings with teaching staff and team-teaching with staff who required further support, we gradually built staff confidence.

Whilst delivering the first term of CPD, I had been busy building a curriculum model that embodied the headteacher’s inspiring vision for the school: educating the whole-child by focusing on their head, heart and hands. With a background in educational research, I immersed myself in the life of the school and saw how children who struggled to engage in academic subjects were flourishing in Forest Schools and other areas. I noticed how staff supported one another and took a holistic approach to student learning, teaching them to cook and garden. I realised that the school needed a reading curriculum which enabled the pupils to make three key links:

·         Text-to-self links

These enabled pupils to have a personal response to texts, drawing on their own experiences and prior knowledge.

·         Text-to-world links

These enabled students to consider the relationship between texts and the ‘real world’, increasingly understanding that how writers explore real and fictional worlds in order to comment on the societies of which they themselves are members.

·         Text-to-text links

These links enable students to understand that the form and structure of texts is tied to genre, purpose, and audience.

To support all students in making these links, I devised a text-driven, thematic, spiral curriculum that facilitated the mixed-age nature of many classes and scaffolded students’ text-to-world and text-to-text links. A student joining the school in Year 7 will read a minimum of 30 high-quality books across the rest of their compulsory education. This might not sound like much to a secondary English teacher, but these 30 texts have been strategically chosen to help the students’ read like experts. They will have read five books that link to each of the six themes, supporting their text-to-world and text-to-text links and encouraging their appreciation of literature. I supplemented each theme with a wider reading list which was used to augment the school’s library, enabling students to build on the 30 core texts by meaningfully connecting them to other texts. I hope that this brief summary signposts how high-quality curriculum design can scaffold a reader’s schema – if I haven’t managed to convince you, Ofsted described the curriculum as “ambitious and well-structured”.

An example text map for one theme for Cycle A, with the multiple cycles enabling the school to reorganise classes in future if necessary – primary colleagues who have taught mixed-age classes will be familiar with this cycle-based approach to curriculum design!

The ability levels of the school’s classes would potentially change over time, with class composition also responding to SEMH as well as cognitive ability. The wider reading list enabled teachers to shift from the texts I’d mapped to the current class structure, giving the curriculum genuine longevity and flexibility over time.

We used the weekly CPD sessions to build staff expertise and confidence in teaching English before launching a trial of the new curriculum approach, supported by further CPD and coaching. We then implemented the model fully at the start of the next academic year - and it has gone from strength to strength ever since!

Pillar 3: Reading for pleasure

I hope it’s not reductive to highlight that this pillar relies on the first two pillars. So much of what we do in schools to promote reading for pleasure can fail if we aren’t addressing the reading needs of our students. It’s very difficult to inspire a love of reading in a child who cannot yet read or comprehend the written word themselves. They can still develop a love of story though – in conversation, oral storytelling, art, images, TV, music, and film – even if they cannot yet read.

The approach outlined in Pillar 2 enabled students to connect what they were reading in class with their own experiences. I selected one of the six themes, ‘the power of nature’, to make the most of the popularity of Forest Schools and the school’s pets. Staff at the school also took the students on trips to local libraries, so that they could see themselves as part of a wider community of readers. Lots of schools do dressing up and ‘get caught reading’ competitions and all sorts. I’m not a complete Scrooge, but I do want to emphasise that we can sometimes get carried away with gimmicks and end up spending a lot of time and effort on strategies that don’t necessarily promote reading for pleasure. We can’t make children enjoy reading, but we can encourage a love of reading to grow. If we think of potential reading-lovers as tiny seeds, we can plough the soil before we plant them and give them lots of water, nutrients, and sunshine (our three pillars). You don’t need a science teacher to tell you what happens to those seedlings that only get one of the three!

Reading for pleasure – for me – is about the sociocultural context of reading. It’s about inducting our young people into a genuine community of readers, harnessing staff enthusiasm, and linking to the real world. As a secondary English teacher and middle leader working in a school in a former coalmining town, I used to take students on residential trips to Stratford-upon-Avon to watch plays that weren’t set texts and to take part in workshops from world-leading academics. I’d sit in the school office, on hold for Cheltenham Literature Festival tickets from the minute the box office opened, clutching the wishlist that the students and I had come up with as soon as the line-up had been announced. I ran book clubs, creative writing societies, and mindful poetry sessions in the run-up to exams. Reading isn’t a medicine that needs to be coated in sugar. Most young people are readers of the world around them, even if they can’t read the written word. They activate prior knowledge, summarise what has happened to them, predict what might happen next, and infer meanings every day. This can be our starting point for helping them to move from the periphery of our reading community towards the centre.

Closing thoughts

We are all working tirelessly to make a difference to young people in our schools. Sharing and reflecting on our strategies – those that succeed and those that fail – can only be a good thing. My example here was a real success, but there are plenty of failures in my teaching and leadership back-catalogue too. This curriculum model, the CPD, and the impact it had on that fantastic school and its incredible students and staff is one of the proudest achievements of my career. I hope that the three pillars and the three links are useful tools that might help you to support and inspire readers in your school too.

Helpful links:

NGRT Digital: https://www.gl-assessment.co.uk/assessments/products/new-group-reading-test-for-secondary/

YARC: https://www.gl-assessment.co.uk/assessments/products/yarc/

Piper Books Mature Reading Instruction: https://www.piperbooks.co.uk/buy-mri-books

Shakespeare's Birthplace Trust School Workshops: https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/education/courses-workshops/

Cheltenham Literature Festival Schools Offer 2023 (for an example): https://www.cheltenhamfestivals.com/learning-participation/literature-for-schools