1.  “Senior leaders prioritised reading.”

Make sure that reading features heavily on your school improvement plan. Assign responsibility to key staff members and implement a selection of reading strategies (if you’re stuck for ideas, I can help!) that will work for your school. Have regular meetings with those key staff to get their insights and ideas – not all of them will work, but try them out and then assess impact and practicalities.

Next, enable ALL of your staff to become reading mentors. Ensure everyone to feel confident about books and reading – no matter if you’re a maths teacher, a receptionist, a science technician, or a principal! It’s got to include everyone - that’s how you really create a successful culture of reading.

Ofsted states that thriving reading schools “invested in additional, bespoke help for struggling readers and training for staff who taught reading”. Get in outside, expert help to facilitate this through regular training – it’s worth it. If you have a librarian, this is their field of expertise too – talk about and showcase new kids’ books so that staff can have meaningful discussions with students about reading. This is a controversial one, but what can be hugely impactful is to actually allocate and give all your staff time to read!

2.  “Schools accurately identified gaps in pupils’ reading knowledge.”

There has been a lot of talk about testing kids too much in schools but it is necessary when trying to figure out where a student is at with their learning and ability and to understand what progress they have made.

Reading programmes like Accelerated Reader can be a great way of monitoring students’ reading ability – through data and hands on support. STAR testing, which is done three times a year, can give really accurate figures on reading levels. Regular quizzing on books also gives you excellent, detailed information about what they are reading, as well as how often.

Ideally, the best person to oversee this is the librarian, who can talk to students about their reading choices directly as they issue the books then and there. These one-to-one discussions can be really impactful and help support students to read more to their ability, more widely and with confidence.

3.  “Staff who taught reading had the expertise they needed to teach weaker readers.”

If you have a librarian, or someone else in charge of your reading programme, make sure they are properly trained and supported regularly by senior leaders. It’s really not enough for someone to ‘like books’ – you need a person who is knowledgeable about reading strategies and has a wide knowledge base about books.

SENCOs are also key to ensure SEN students are included and supported fully. This goes for teaching assistants too as they can be great for reading one-to-one with students during lessons – make sure staff read aloud AND listen to students reading too so that they can role model good reading and offer guidance to students.  

4.  “Leaders shared information about struggling readers with staff.”

Student data and the outcomes of reading programmes or strategies must be filtered down to staff. Make sure it all gets emailed out maybe once or twice a term to keep people in the loop. Particularly focus on tutors, who have that daily time with certain students.

Make that information accessible as possible and free to access on shared drives too so that staff can view it whenever they like. If staff are aware of who are the weak readers, they know to prioritise support for these students, in whatever way that they can. For teachers, they can use this information in lesson planning and create a consistent approach to teaching struggling readers.

5.  “As pupils’ reading improved, they gained confidence and became more motivated to engage with reading in class.”

As a former school librarian, I have carried out interventions in the form of reading clubs for weak Year 9 readers, who were not meeting trust reading targets. I worked hard and created weekly activities to motivate students and grow their confidence with reading.

Many kids hate reading because they see it as something that is not for them; something they are bad at so don’t want to do. Changing those perceptions wasn’t easy but by the time we’d had 12 sessions, their reading levels had sky rocketed! And they no longer saw reading as something to be stressed out about. For more information on how to implement a reading group like this, just get in touch.

6.  “Schools tended to stop additional support, monitoring once pupils were beyond Key Stage 3.”

I know many schools will say they don’t have the capacity to support KS4 students with reading, as they need to focus on studying for students’ GCSEs. Many Accelerated Reader or reading programmes only last for a couple of years in secondary, and the support literally just stops for students. But you need to be able to facilitate continued reading support for older students. It doesn’t have to look the same, but it needs to be there so that students can recognise how important it is.

For example, regular visits to the school library needs to be regularly planned in so that students can access books and still read, in lesson time. English lessons could explore comparing and contrasting set texts with modern, accessible books with similar themes, structures or styles in order to deepen students’ knowledge. My curriculum linked posters are also ideal for putting up in classrooms, so that students can clearly see specialist vocabulary connected to new books. It diversifies learning and can encourage reading for pleasure that is powerful and exciting.