Across education there is alarm at the impact of learning loss from lockdowns. One very obvious impact is on students’ reading, especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
How can schools address the need to ‘catch up’ on reading effectively? After all, time is now at a premium in all subjects as teachers try to make up lost ground.
Firstly, the research is clear that children can catch up. Learning is not fixed or linear. They can progress quickly with effective teaching: socio-economics and background don’t matter. Even SEN labels don’t matter – it is possible to teach nearly all but the most profoundly disabled children to read.
Secondly, we need to be honest about the fact that teaching can contribute to learning problems: it is possible to confuse children with unclear teaching; it is possible to teach something and then let students forget; it is possible to teach children contradictory or unhelpful strategies. Fortunately, it is also possible to correct all of these problems through teaching.
Rather than provide a list reading of interventions and their effectiveness[1], here are 12 elements that schools should employ in their approach to securing rapid catch-up for readers:
1. Detailed assessment is essential. Proactively screen all children, then focus closely on those with low scores to identify their needs precisely.
2. In testing and teaching, decisions should be informed by objective data generated by the child’s responses. Avoid ‘professional judgement’ (aka gut) feelings.
3. Teaching programmes should be carefully sequenced in small steps so that children master each step rapidly and move through the programme rapidly.
4. Explicit, unambiguous presentation of materials must be carefully planned and executed so that students can learn quickly and confidently.
5. Teaching sequences should be structured so that all learning tasks provide immediate feedback to the teacher about the student’s learning.
6. When students make errors, they need to be given immediate, unambiguous correction so that they don’t practise errors. Practising errors can lead to misconceptions or unhelpful strategies becoming embedded in long-term memory.
7. Provide short, daily, timed and carefully sequenced practice to establish knowledge in long-term memory.
8. Build key skills to high levels of fluency to strengthen long-term memory and combine with other skills.
9. Following initial practice, use spaced retrieval to continue to strengthen retention and generalisation of knowledge.
10. Pull the different strands of reading together by having students read connected prose at their current level with a high level of accuracy.
11. Ensure that students build their comprehension skills in parallel with reading increasingly challenging texts.
12. Connect decoding with encoding through spelling and handwriting.
In summary, reading intervention programmes should be thoroughly planned, explicitly presented, and take account of all the strands of reading including phonics, comprehension and fluency.
[1]For a useful overview of interventions, see Lavan, D.G. (2020) ‘Brooks’s What Works for Literacy Difficulties?’
Reading intervention support you might like:
Fix it reading, a KS3 intervention programme
This article was first published as a Teachit talks newsletter in 2022.
