I have been leading Reading in schools for nearly 6 years and in that time I have changed my focus and learned plenty that I believe has made me a better leader. I don’t think I’ve ever visited the Dunning-Kruger ‘Mount Stupid’ but there have definitely been times where my enthusiasm outweighed my experience/knowledge.
I became reading lead due to my passion to get every child reading and building reading cultures within the schools that I worked for. I had the naive assumption that all children needed just needed a little support to find the love of reading. Now whilst I still hold this belief that many children do require gentle nudges towards books that they will enjoy or adaptations to their routines to grow their love and appreciation for books, there is a huge chunk of children that require a whole lot more.
The large group of pupils that get stuck with the label signalling ‘reluctant readers’ can be cut (perhaps overly simplistically) into a few different factions;
- Better things to be doing – These readers are capable readers but they have too many other things competing for their attention. Hobbies, clubs or friends. These children usually need two things to enhance their reading routines. 1) Dedicated distraction free time to read 2) Guidance to find the right book for them.
- Books are boring –This is often a large group of children that have had other people’s favourite books pushed onto them and have therefore begun to distrust recommendations and find everything presented to them as boring. These readers need to the option to spend time in a bookshop/library and really look for books that interest them. It can be frustrating at first as it can seem like they’re only reading about the same non-fiction topic or they may appear to be reading below their ability level. But the key to getting them on board is choice and autonomy.
- I want to but I can’t – This is the group that I feel are often forgotten about. We create all these opportunities for children to read, push many great stories their way but what if they simply don’t have the skills to be able to confidently tackle books that they want to.
There are lots of amazing activities that can be done with children that can help hooking in the first two groups, but many of them can leave the struggling readers feeling more frustrated and left behind. So surely we need to make sure that we are fully throwing everything and the kitchen sink to ensure that these children are able to read confidently and fluently as soon as possible.
While some argue that a focus on phonics and decodable books may hinder a love of reading, this is often due to misconceptions or misapplications of these methods. If a school says that children can only read/borrow books that they are able to decode – one of the stranger Ofsted myths floating around currently – Of course this is going to have a detrimental effect if children aren’t continuously tempted by the magic of stories and good books. Another of the biggest mistakes that schools make is only teaching phonics in EYFS and Year 1 – dropping it once the Phonics Screening Check has been completed.
We need to almost create a reading for pleasure sandwich… Hook children into the joys of stories. Let them see that books are a source of joy and then use that as the carrot to dangle over our phonics teaching. Phonics is the key that will unlock more stories to them. All of us find it easier to work hard towards a goal when there we’re being intrinsically motivated. This is when we must focus on the teaching of reading and once that is secure, then we can turn our focus back to reading for pleasure.
Reading is a ridiculously complex skill to master, Both Scarborough’s Reading Rope and The Reading House demonstrate just how many elements a reader needs to conquer before being a masterful reader. But until children have mastered these skills they’re never going to be able to independently make use of their love of reading.
In the same way that we can begin to develop children’s comprehension skills before they are able to accurately decode or read fluently, we can ensure that reading is enjoyable and something that they want to do before they are sufficiently skilled at it. Ensuring that they have reading material that is correctly pitched at their level is essential – too hard and it becomes too much of an impossible challenge, too easy and it becomes boring or they begin to think that you underestimate them. I agree that some of the early stages of decodables aren’t going to win any awards for exciting twists and turns, but the excitement should come from the fact that the child is able to fluently read the words independently. We all love to feel successful and it encourages us to continue our journey.
A year ago, I started a new school that didn’t have a strong reading for pleasure culture, it was one of the reasons that I thought I’d be able to improve the school and hence why I applied for the role. recently, I have been looking deeply at reading across our school and looking at how we support our ‘struggling readers’. What strategies and interventions do children require if they are finding a particular strand of reading challenging? Upon delving into the data and the children themselves, it became apparent that there are some cohort specific issues, but there are also school-wide problems. Fluency seems to be flagging behind where it should/could be. This could be due to the fact that some children are developmentally behind where they should be, remembering that Years 3 – 6 missed much of their early phonics instruction due to lockdowns (which now thankfully seem like a lifetime ago). It could also be that the children are not reading enough at home or in school and therefore not practicing as much as they could and thus not improving their fluency at a satisfactory rate. So, we needed to ensure that our children were getting as many opportunities to read as possible.
I have used ‘reading buddies’ in my previous schools as a way of getting children to look forwards to hearing stories and building supportive friendships in other year groups. With a little tweak, we have started using it as a way to build our children’s reading fluency. One week the older children read a story to their younger partner. The next, the younger child reads their decodable book to their partner. So far it has had a really positive effect. Older children are carefully selecting the texts that they want to share, they’re also taking the time to rehearse their reading. Younger children are more happy to read their books to their peers and having higher aspirations than when reading to adults – they want to show off rather than asking for support. Only time will tell whether this has a positive effect on reading scores across the school.
As a teaching team, we began looking at our reading lessons and how we used prosodic reading strategies. Ensuring that we use a variety of these strategies consistently and effectively in our lessons. Firstly we looked at shared understanding of all of the terms we use in our planning – choral reading, echo reading, timed practice, model reading etc. to make sure that we all knew what was meant by each of these and how to implement. Next we looked at things we do in lesson to support children that are not able to consistently able to be successful in our lessons. Sharing what works in our own classroom and then picking strategies that each year group feels that their cohort would benefit the most from. Bringing the disadvantaged children to the forefront of our thinking will enable them to have greater success in their time with us.
Simultaneously, we’ll be immersing the children in fantastic books in our English lessons and as stand alone class readers. Our library is well stocked and becoming a lot easier to use, thanks to genre sorting and clear labelling. Hopefully this plus the additional work we put in to enable every child to read will pay us dividends in the future.
To summarise, I feel that sometimes we chase the utopian dream of all children reading for pleasure without addressing the issue of children not being able to decode or read fluently enough for it to actually be pleasurable. We must use the magic of reading to hook them into the long and challenging journey of learning to read but then the graft must be done before they become fluent and masterful readers – It is then that we can continue to tempt them to read for pleasure. If you have children who don’t love reading, take a moment to reflect on why and whether any crucial steps have been overlooked. With careful consideration and adjustments, the joy of reading can become a reality for all children.
Mister Bodd 