Some cynics claim that Ofsted’s renewed focus on reading from the 2022 framework has made everybody jump to attention in this area, but many schools have placed reading at the centre of their whole-school curriculum and approach for years. Over 2018 and 2019, I visited over 10 schools across Bristol, London and Birmingham to learn about what they do well when it comes to reading. I was welcomed by very traditional schools, progressive schools, schools with very high levels of deprivation, private schools, and everything in between. Since then I have been working on building a culture of reading at my own school, as an Assistant Headteacher from 2018 – 2020, and then as a UPS teacher with a TLR for the role of whole-school reading lead. This blog comes from a secondary school perspective, but I welcome the thoughts and feedback from my primary colleagues: the real experts in this area.

Developing a reading culture at secondary level can feel like an intangible, messy affair. The reasons for this span a broad plain, including the fact that once fluency is achieved in a student, it’s hard to track and monitor reading progress. We turn to online platforms, which never really do the job that we want. Discussion of how to bring students along can feel loose, with phrases like ‘cross-curricular’ and ‘everybody’s responsibility’ being bandied around to the point where nobody really knows what they should be doing to actually teach reading. We talk about reading for pleasure and then, to our dismay, students tell us that they derive absolutely no pleasure from reading. Some students have woefully low reading levels, and struggle to access any aspect of the curriculum. Poor reading can become an excuse for students and teachers alike as to why students are not achieving well.

This blog is a series of strategies and ideas, especially for schools starting out to build a culture of reading. I have tried to write what I probably needed in 2018.

1.       Invest

Building a reading culture needs investment – mental, physical and financial. SLT and the budget-holders need to be on-board and willing to support with a decent budget and human resources. Here are some of the ways we have invested in reading: release of teachers for targeted one-to-one intervention (more on this below); purchase of over 70 full class sets of novels for Reading and Registration; a librarian; a library budget; two full-time EAL expert teachers; investment in the Thinking Reading programme; an NGRT licence; a TLR for whole-school reading (and previously an explicitly defined responsibility as part of an AHT role); prizes for students; funding for visiting authors and more. SLT need to be fully on-board and back you up if you have push-back with any of your strategies. I am very lucky to be in a school where it feels that everybody is supportive of reading, but this culture needs to be promoted from the top, too.

2.       Write a strategy

Because it’s such a messy, intangible affair, the way to properly untangle the threads is to map out the ways in which you will do this. My original plan was organised around reading for pleasure and reading across the curriculum. All literacy interventions lay under the SEND umbrella and were therefore loath to cite OfSTED here but Alice Visser-Furay kindly sent me a link to their training, in which they suggest ways in which a whole-school strategy could work. I was two-thirds of the way there, and after watching the webinar, I organised our strategy with 3 priority strands:

o   Reading for pleasure and interest

o   Support for struggling readers

o   Reading across the curriculum

Support for struggling readers now sits under the whole-school reading strategy, although some of the interventions are still delivered by LSAs.

The Reading Strategy feeds into our SDP, but functions as its own resource; I have mapped out a calendar of what will happen across the year. We have a clear idea of where we want to be at the end of the year, at the end of three years, and after five years. I would recommend not using another school’s off-the-peg strategy. This document needs to be tailored to the ways of your school. However, the template I created for our school’s strategy can be accessed by clicking here. I have deleted the content to allow you to populate it with your own actions. However, I have left the opening spiel in place, should it be of use. I have also left the headings and priority strands in place.

3.       Shift the mindset

Everybody can be taught to read. If you are saying ‘this child can’t read so he can’t access the curriculum’ and then not doing anything to remedy this, then this child will fail. There needs to be a whole-school understanding that every child can learn to read and that every child will be taught to catch up. It’ll take time – years, in fact – to achieve this. We’re only just starting to properly tackle this, with our use of Thinking Reading.

The best people to tell you about Thinking Reading are the Thinking Reading team themselves. For a brief overview, though: Thinking Reading is a one-to-one intervention programme for children with a reading age of more than two years below their chronological age. We have a team of staff delivering the programme, and we’ve started with year 7. By the end of this academic year, we aim to have over 40 students, who started the year with reading ages of 6-8, reading at or above their chronological age. If you are interested in knowing more, they can be found here: https://www.thinkingreading.com/ and they are also on Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/ThinkReadHQ

Thinking Reading is an investment – there are almost two weeks of training days, and the one-to-one nature of the programme means that you will need to take the staffing requirements seriously. The Thinking Reading team are amazing, though, and there are multiple options of commitment and payment.

The other mindset that needs to shift is that every lesson can include reading. Whether it’s a short extract about an artist in art, or the description of a process in science, every teacher can include reading in their lessons. Our amazing sports and health team set reading as homework, and the students discuss and apply their reading in the practical lessons. Our maths teamwork to ensure that our students can use the domain-specific vocabulary in context and correctly. It was at my visit to Michaela School that I saw reading in all subjects with little exception, and since then we have worked with middle leaders to grow this at our school. This brings me to the next point – teach the teachers.

4.       Teach the teachers

Do you know how to undertake effective guided reading with a class? Which steps do you take? And if the answer is yes, then do the other teachers know too? Is this true across all faculties?

The idea of investment is underpinning much of this blog, but you need to be given time and capacity to teach your teachers how to read with children. We have used three hours at inset and CPD time over the last year to explicitly take our teachers through guided reading strategies. I have made resources available (simple prompts which can either be printed, projected or displayed) so that teachers are not having to create their own every time. For whole-school reading, we have used Alex Quigley’s approach to guided reading: predict/question/clarify/summarise.

5.       Make time for reading

We read every morning at our school. Students come to school at 08:20 (we are a city community school – I appreciate that not all contexts would manage such an early start) and between 08:30 and 08:50 we take the morning register and then read a novel. Every child has a copy of the text. Students can choose what they read next from a selection available for each year group. We have between 12 and 15 titles for each year group. Nothing interrupts this time; it is precious and closely guarded.

We have library lessons once a fortnight. In these lessons, we start with a teacher recommendation, which is planned centrally by the librarian. Teachers are free to recommend something else, of course, but for those who do not regularly read fiction, or those who do not read recommendable fiction, then our librarian has this ready. We then listen to children read, prioritising those with the most need. Students read silently and when they have finished, they can use Accelerated Reader (AR) to take a quiz. Students log what they are reading in their planners, which teachers can also monitor in the library lesson. I haven’t said much about AR here; I am not entirely sure that it does what it claims and I haven’t seen evidence that it provides much extrinsic motivation or develops intrinsic motivation, but at the moment it serves a purpose for us to look at what and when the children are reading. I’m yet to find something to replace it.

6.       Remind students that they read – daily.

I end on a point which may feel odd, but our student voice surveys of 2019 indicated that students didn’t really think that they read very much, even though they were reading for 20 minutes every morning. We have worked towards constant reminders that they read; we reward with ‘Orchard Loves Reading’ pens, and we run regular competitions related to reading. We have ‘reader of the week’ awards which go to as many students as are nominated each Friday. The message that we read as part of our school culture is made explicit in order that it becomes an internalised expectation of what we do.