5 Key Ideas from Primary Reading Simplified

First, let’s cut to the chase: this blog is a thinly disguised advert for my new book, Primary Reading Simplified. I devoted a frankly absurd amount of time and energy to writing the book, and I think it might be rather useful to a lot of teachers and school leaders. If you’re interested, you can find it here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Primary-Reading-Simplified-Whole-School-Implementation/dp/1036201414

However, for those with no interest in buying the book – and those who might buy the book who nonetheless would like a little taster – in this blog I’ll share five key ideas upon which Primary Reading Simplified is built. I hope this might allow you to reflect upon the teaching of reading in your school and consider where there might be room for improvement:

1. Misconceptions about the nature of reading comprehension – reinforced by accountability pressures – have commonly led to ineffective, stultifying teaching.

A pupil’s ability to comprehend text is usually tested via standardised assessments. The most influential of these is the end-of-key-stage-2 assessment, usually just called year 6 SATs. This assessment is divided arbitrarily into domains that are supposed to align with certain types of questions: questions that test vocabulary knowledge, questions that require inference, etc. Of course, dividing the questions asked about texts into these categories makes little sense. Don’t all questions rely on a pupil’s grasp of the relevant vocabulary? Don’t most questions require inference? These domains might serve a purpose in helping assessment-creators achieve a degree of consistency between each assessment and the ones that have come before, but the nature of these artificial domains tells us nothing about reading comprehension and how to teach it. (It isn’t necessarily a problem if you divide the questions you ask into categories to ensure you ask a variety of questions. However, there is no reason to think that categorising your questions as ‘inference questions’ or ‘vocabulary questions’ is a particularly productive way to achieve this.)

Sadly, this hasn’t stopped many schools from reverse-engineering their approach to reading instruction from these question types. In the absence of a shared understanding of the nature of reading comprehension, they have assumed that an effective way to teach reading is to try to teach pupils how to answer particular types of questions. The result of this has often been reading lessons in which pupils briefly read disconnected snippets of texts before spending most of the lesson practising how to identify and answer different types of questions.

If you ask trainee teachers what they think might be necessary ingredients in reading instruction, they tend to name a few things: texts chosen for the language and perspectives they offer to pupils; lots of time spent reading; discussions about the craft of writing and pupils’ own ideas; shared exploration of entire stories and other texts to build motivation. It is a sad reality of our profession that accountability pressures gradually push teachers towards a status quo that rarely offers any of these. It is even sadder when you realise that this status quo doesn’t even succeed on its own cynically narrow terms. There is nothing wrong with some well-timed SATs rehearsal in year 6 to build pupils’ familiarity with the nature of the assessment so that they can tackle it with confidence. (A chapter of Primary Reading Simplified is dedicated to this very subject.) But I can think of almost nothing that could impede pupils’ reading development – and consequent SATs results – quite like reading instruction that minimises the amount of time spent reading and turns lessons into tedious practice of non-existent transferable skills.

So, once pupils have learned the basics of decoding through phonics, what might a more effective and engaging approach to reading lessons include?

2. Any approach to reading lessons can be effective if it includes three things: plenty of decoding practice to build fluency, vast amounts of experience with written language, and meaningful text discussions.

Primary Reading Simplified describes a tried-and-tested approach to reading lessons, including how these can be introduced and sustained in a classroom or across a school. But the book also makes it clear that there isn’t just one approach that can be effective. What matters is that all the essential ingredients of post-phonics reading lessons are included and that these are balanced appropriately to meet the needs of individual classes of pupils. Let’s explore these three ingredients one at a time:

The purpose of systematic phonics is to provide pupils with the decoding knowledge and habits that allow them to begin their journey to reading fluency. By applying what they have learned to countless unfamiliar words, pupils learn more about the real complexities of the English writing system. Through conscious decoding, they gradually become able to recognise tens of thousands of words automatically, which allows them to flow through text and devote their efforts to comprehension. This all means that the sheer amount of active decoding that a pupil does is a vital factor in their likelihood of becoming a capable reader. But organising this decoding practice is especially tricky when pupils are at the early stages of fluency. Structures like repeated oral reading are useful throughout primary school and are utterly essential for pupils at the beginning of their journey to fluent reading.

There is a great deal of overlap in our understanding of spoken language and our understanding of written language. As pupils learn more about spoken language and the world to which it relates, their ability to comprehend texts develops accordingly. But spoken language is not exactly the same as written language. There is much to learn about the way that books and other texts are put together, from punctuation and paragraphing to the purpose of sub-headings and the conventions of different genres. Equally, books and other texts offer pupils an understanding of the world that goes beyond their own lives. Thus, another vital factor in a pupil’s likelihood of becoming a capable reader is the breadth and variety of their reading experiences. A thoughtfully built reading curriculum – facilitated by sufficient time devoted to pacy, engaging experiences with entire texts – ensures pupils develop the necessary understanding of written language and the wider world.

Text discussions are the third vital factor in a pupil’s likelihood of becoming a capable reader. Shared exploration of texts allows the craft of writing to be explored by analysing the language choices of authors and their potential impact. And these discussions recognise pupils’ personal interpretations of written language, helping them to develop a sense of themselves as readers with their own ideas and preferences.

The three vital factors in effective post-phonics reading lessons are important throughout primary school, but as pupils become more fluent, the need for structures that scaffold accurate decoding – such as repeated oral reading – gradually decreases. Equally, pupils’ capacity for sustained discussion of the craft of writing gradually increases. This means that the appropriate balance between these three factors tends to change as pupils mature. Ideally, a school’s approach to reading should reflect this.

3. Any approach to teaching reading should be judged both on the scope it provides for expert teachers to excel and on the support it provides for novice teachers to achieve adequacy.

As an experienced teacher who had learned a fair bit about reading development and was, I hope, proficient at teaching reading, I could never understand why I was rarely left to simply teach reading however I saw fit. But the reason became clear once I was the one in charge of co-ordinating reading across a school. Much though we might feel this way sometimes, our classrooms are not islands. Pupils move from one year group to the next, and the transitions between classrooms are supported by shared routines. And without some coherent structure to the way a school teaches reading, more-expert teachers are ill-equipped to support novice teachers.

However, it is perfectly possible for experienced teachers to be unnecessarily stultified by structures that are put in place to help ensure that the learning in classrooms of novice teachers is at least adequate. It is essential that any whole-school approach provides enough structure to scaffold the teaching of those new to the profession while providing plenty of scope for expert teachers to apply their hard-won understanding of reading pedagogy and to develop further. Without recapitulating several chapters from Primary Reading Simplified, it suffices to say that guaranteeing the three factors mentioned in section 2 of this blog is a good place to start.

4. A reading curriculum mostly consists of the texts pupils experience.

Across the country, schools have spent – and continue to spend – time and energy creating reading progression documents, consisting of lists of comprehension skills for each year group. Such progression documents at best provide no direction to classroom teaching (and, where they do, this is usually counterproductive for the reasons described in section 1 of this blog). These documents are equally useless in terms of assessment.

So why do they exist at all? They exist, in part, because schools have tried to follow the lessons they have learned from the rest of the curriculum. It makes perfect sense to specify the knowledge and skills to be learned and a sequence for this in subjects like mathematics, history and music. However, beyond the sequence of alphabetic code knowledge in a phonics programme, the vast experience and understanding of written language required for reading development simply refuses to be delineated in the same way as other school subjects. (For more on this, here is a blog that explores this further: https://primarycolour.home.blog/2024/02/10/why-reading-progression-documents-are-probably-a-waste-of-time/)

This means that we need a different approach when specifying the content of a school’s reading curriculum. Naturally, there is a chapter dedicated to the art of constructing a reading curriculum in Primary Reading Simplified, but a sensible starting point is to include the following:

• A general statement of end-of-school expectations (i.e. that pupils become capable, confident readers who understand their own reading preferences and recognise the individual and social aspects of interpreting texts)
• A scope and sequence relating to the chosen systematic phonics programme
• A list of the comprehension strategies to be introduced and when these are likely to become more explicit in reading lessons
• A list of the texts that pupils will experience in different ways and the text structures, themes, tenses, perspectives, familiarity of content and other language choices of these texts

5. To support those that find learning to read more difficult, a systematic, achievable approach to assessment and intervention is required.

Schools have limited resources at their disposal to assess and address barriers to reading development. It makes sense to target the majority of these resources at foundational barriers, especially as these are hardest to address in whole-class teaching. A sensible starting point is represented by the flow diagram below:

For many schools, even this might seem unattainable. A simpler starting point might look this this:

While significantly more sophisticated approaches to intervention are possible (i.e. those that are more personalised to the barriers of individual pupils), the basic approaches outlined above would be a step forward in many cases. For example, far too many schools are trying to support pupils on the basis of nonsense feedback from question-level analysis, sold to them by companies that should know better but clearly do not.

Of course, a systematic approach to assessment and intervention does not obviate the need for teachers and SENDCOs to work in partnership to identify other barriers to literacy development that might need to be addressed (e.g. developmental language disorder, hearing impairments, etc). But a systematic approach allows interventions to address foundational barriers to reading development, leaving capacity for greater precision in the relatively rare cases where it is required.

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I hope you found this blog useful. There is so much more that I could explore relating to the five key ideas above. And there are countless other ideas that need to be addressed if we want to maximise the chances that all pupils in our schools become capable, confident readers. If you want to learn more about every aspect of classroom teaching and whole-school implementation relating to reading, then Primary Reading Simplified, can be found here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Primary-Reading-Simplified-Whole-School-Implementation/dp/1036201414

For those of you who have already read my first book, The Art and Science and Teaching Primary Reading, I promise you that my new book is infinitely more practical and better written. If you’re interested, here is a preview of the contents of Primary Reading Simplified: