Reading: ‘The First Among Equals’

Understanding the tensions at the heart of reading catch-up

‘Reading is the most important thing in the world because it affects everything.’ Sally Shaywitz

When deciding how and where reading catch-up fits within the curriculum, leaders face difficult choices:

1. Breadth vs Foundations: How do we balance protecting subject breadth with creating enough time for pupils to secure the foundations in reading?

2. Catch-up vs Exams: How do we balance the need for intensive reading support with preparation for GCSEs as pupils move into Key Stage 4?

3. Precision vs Capacity: How small should groups be to ensure targeted support and fidelity to reading catch-up programmes without making the timetable or staffing financially unsustainable?

4. Support vs Expectations: How do we help parents understand the need for temporary adjustments, and keep their confidence and support?

5. Perception vs Progress: How do we manage perceptions of pupils being extracted from lessons so that the vital role of reading is understood and valued?

It’s not easy! It can seem like there are too many obstacles to overcome in order to establish a catch-up programme with the rigour required to make a genuine life-changing difference to students’ reading knowledge and confidence.

But it really, really matters.

The more I read about reading, the more essential I realise it is.

For those who cannot read, every day is a struggle. Experts in reading emphasise this repeatedly:

‘Ultimately, a child with an unremedied reading problem can never function at his full potential and suffers incredible emotional damage and loss of self-esteem.’ Dianne McGuinness

‘To be unable to read is to be locked out, to be isolated from discourse, to grasp the edges of conversations, to be without the knowledge of one’s companions. It is to be terrified of failure, and haunted by its presence. It is humiliation and frustration, and it builds into anger, or despair. It is loneliness and a formless sense of injustice.’ James Murphy

‘Illiteracy turns everyday life into a struggle, disempowering and alienating people.’ Chris Such

‘Think what it would be like to be in a failure situation day after day. No matter how hard you try, you can’t get out of the situation. The failure has to be faced day after day, year after year. Think what that failure would do to your self-image and of how you might react. Then think of the remedial reader who has failed day after day, year after year.’ Douglas Carnine, Jerry Silbert and Edward J.Kameenui

‘Once a pattern of reading failure sets in, many children become defeated, lose interest in reading, and develop what often evolves into a lifelong loss of their own sense of self-worth.’ Sally Shaywitz

‘The frustrations of reading failure can lead to a cycle of learning failure.’ Maryanne Wolf

‘When it comes to pursuing one’s dreams, the ability to read well carries an importance that’s hard to overstate’ Paul Bambrick Santoyo

Emotionally, the struggles described above resonate deeply. Practically, though, we often find it difficult to reconcile the tensions we face when trying to put the necessary support in place.

Curriculum Breadth vs Securing the Foundations.

Subjects are vital. Comprehension relies on background knowledge, which is built in all lessons. So reducing the concept of reading support to reading catch-up lessons oversimplifies what’s involved in becoming a confident reader. It is true that we are all teachers of reading. But if students are not yet fluent, we know that, no matter how broad the taught curriculum, the learned curriculum will be exceptionally narrow, as they simply will not be able to access what is being taught. As Alex Quigley puts it, ‘if pupils can’t read fluently, knowledgeable and strategically, we can plan the best curriculum but they will not access it.’

We also need to recognise that, as Douglas Carnine explains, ‘a student decoding several years below grade level is in serious trouble’ and ‘an enormous amount of practice is required to develop decoding fluency.’ The odd hour or tutor slot here and there won’t cut it. ‘Learning to read requires lots of practice. Hundreds of repetitions may be necessary.’ It’s therefore essential to create sufficient time within the curriculum for this to take place.

But even if we recognise the need to prioritise reading foundations in Key Stage 3, a further tension emerges as students approach exam years.

Reading Support Vs Exam Preparation

Natalie Wexler offers a crucial warning for our Key Stage 3 decisions: ‘Literacy issues are often the can that gets kicked down the road’. The unintended consequences of not taking urgent action in Key Stage 3 are that we have students still significantly behind by the time they reach Y10 and Y11. What do we do then? Do we take them out of certain lessons, or reduce the number of GCSE options they take, in order to give them a chance to pass at least some of their exams, given the average reading age of a GCSE paper is age 15? Or do we keep them in all lessons in the belief and hope that continual exam support will prepare them, and risk leaving gaps in the very foundations needed to access the paper at all?

Even if we do commit to the principle of intensive support, we face another challenge: delivering it with the precision required when capacity seems tight.

Precision Vs Capacity

Alex Quigley rightly states that ‘we should be wary of assuming simple solutions will attend to what are complex changes to the habits and practices of pupils, parents and teachers.‘When an easy solution is proposed for a complex problem…we should assume it’s too good to be true.’ We may hope that we can take shortcuts, like increasing class sizes beyond the recommended caps within the programme guidance, choosing available teachers rather than those who are most motivated or prepared to take on the challenge, or reducing the number of hours recommended, in order to overcome obstacles such as financial constraints and teaching capacity. Doing so risks diluting the very precision that makes the intervention effective. It leads to slower gains, which ultimately prolongs the time pupils spend without the fluency they need. We need to find ways to protect precision even when capacity feels tight.

The decisions we make also have implications for how families understand and experience these choices.

Support Vs Expectations

Parents want their children to experience a full, rich curriculum, and intensive reading support can understandably feel like a step back. Our task is to communicate clearly that a temporary reduction in breadth is essential. We must be confident in our decisions, trusting the educational expertise we hold, and offer calm, clear reassurance about why foundations must come first and when breadth will be restored. We can also take every opportunity to celebrate progress every step of the way. Doing so reduces concerns and hesitations and leads to parents recognising that this focused support is helping their child to succeed.

Alongside parental expectations, our decisions may also be shaped by broader perceptions within and beyond the school.

Perception Vs Progress

Extracting pupils from lessons can create understandable concern, both within school and among families, who may fear that pupils are missing valuable learning. This could lead us to reducing reading support, fearing that the perception of extraction will outweigh the benefits. But we must remain steadfast in our commitment to ensuring every child learns to read, and resolute in what we know: that securing fluency requires hours of rigorous instruction. We can hold the line with confidence, while conveying the impact of this support on our students’ reading progress in order to ensure that we share an understanding of the importance of this intervention in securing better life chances for our students.

When we step back from these individual tensions, we return to the core truth that needs to guide every decision we make: as Doug Lemov states, ‘Of all the subjects taught in schools, reading is first among equals –the most singular in importance because all other subjects rely on it.’ If students cannot read, they cannot access school.

There is no silver bullet for teaching reading. Success lies in a simple but powerful concept, shared by Paul Bambrick Santoyo: overdetermination. We must be resolutely determined to do whatever it takes to ensure our students learn to read. Because all children – not just some – ‘deserve the assurance that one day they will be great readers’.