The Most Common Reason Why Children Don’t Become Fluent Readers… And What We Can Do About It

There are myriad reasons why a child might struggle to become a fluent reader: they might have extreme difficulties in learning to decode words relating to phonological issues, working memory or other aspects of their unique neurobiology (i.e. they might be dyslexic); they might have missed large chunks of their education due to illness; they might have experienced undiagnosed hearing difficulties such as otitis media with effusions (i.e. glue ear) during crucial phases of their reading development; they might have difficulties with spoken language such as developmental language disorder. The list goes on. But, from my experience at least, none of these tops the list of reasons why so many pupils leave primary school as dysfluent readers.

So, what is the most common reason?

There is no comprehensive survey of how reading is taught nationally, no way to be absolutely certain that what I am about to say is correct. But I have spent the last decade asking countless teachers and school leaders about their school’s approach to reading, so I say this with some confidence:

In most primary schools, many pupils don’t become fluent readers simply because they do precious little reading in the classroom.

I strongly suspect that this is also the central reason why the vast gains in decoding seen in phonics screening check results have not been mirrored by similar gains in key stage 2 reading outcomes. To get to the bottom of this problem – arguably the most consequential oversight in the entirety of primary education – there are three questions that need to be addressed:

Why do pupils need to read lots to become fluent readers?
Why do many primary schools not ensure that pupils do enough reading to become fluent?
How can we ensure that pupils do read enough to become fluent?

Let’s take these questions one at a time:

1. Why do pupils need to read lots to become fluent readers?

A pupil’s ability to understand what they read relies, in part, on their ability to read with fluency so that they can devote cognitive resources to comprehension rather than word recognition. This fluency relies on the automaticity of this word recognition. It is impossible for anyone to flow through text if they have to painstakingly decode the words, working out the sounds that are represented by the letters and then blending these together. Put another way, pupils need to reach a point where the vast majority of the words they encounter in text are familiar to them, part of an ever-increasing list of words they can recognise without conscious decoding effort.

At first, this might sound like succour to those who see phonic decoding as an over-emphasised capability, one that pupils should not rely upon too heavily. However, the opposite is true: it is the conscious decoding of a word – paying attention to every letter – that allows a pupil, after a few repetitions, to come to recognise it without this conscious effort. (If this sounds paradoxical, think about the learning of any other skill, such as how to form letters neatly or how to change gear in a car – the end goal is unconscious automaticity, but getting there requires conscious practice.) This process – effortfully decoding words to unlock automatic recognition – is commonly called orthographic mapping. This orthographic mapping is precisely the reason why you can read the words on this screen without having to consciously decode each of them.

In short, fluent readers are those who have built up a bank of thousands upon thousands of words that they can now recognise automatically because of the conscious effort they spent decoding these words in the past. Providing pupils with plenty of reading practice offers various other benefits, but this one is especially vital.

2. Why do many primary schools not ensure that pupils do enough reading to become fluent?

Over the last two decades, schools have been strongly incentivised to teach pupils the foundations of word recognition through systematic phonics, i.e. the explicit teaching of the most common relationships between letters and sounds. Unfortunately, while the uptake of systematic phonics has been widespread, many schools are unclear on the purpose behind systematic phonics. And the pupils who are most in need of support suffer most from this lack of clarity.

It is common for schools to think of systematic phonics as a method of teaching reading. It is tempting to describe systematic phonics in this way because for many pupils the only significant obstacle they face to eventual reading expertise is an inability to decode. Once they have the basics of decoding in place, they can begin the journey to reading expertise. For luckier pupils, this involves reading aloud regularly to an attentive adult at home, one who can help them to correct their initial mispronunciations (e.g. ‘wasp’ said in a way that rhymes with ‘clasp’) and use the valuable knowledge they learned through phonics to develop their grasp of the real complexities of the English writing system. Crucially, however, in almost every school, there is a significant number of pupils who will not be supported in their reading at home in this way. Thus, it is the responsibility of schools to provide their pupils with some form of scaffolded decoding practice that emulates the benefits of one-to-one reading at home.

It can be difficult to figure out how to organise this practice for the pupils who need it most. Of course, once pupils are already relatively fluent, they can usually build this fluency further without someone scaffolding their decoding. But the challenge is getting pupils to this stage in the first place. The simplest way to provide this would be lots of one-to-one reading for every pupil, but – as any headteacher will tell you – it is logistically unfeasible to provide this for all pupils. Thankfully, alternatives exist…

3. How can we ensure that pupils do read enough to become fluent?

Providing some one-to-one reading for targeted pupils, especially those still at the very earliest stages of reading development, is a good idea. But there is no way that this can provide all pupils with the scaffolded decoding practice that they need. What is required is an efficient, evidence-informed way to get pupils accurately decoding unfamiliar words and, as a result, developing their word recognition automaticity. The only way I have seen of doing this with groups of pupils, ideally whole classes, is repeated oral reading, in which pupils read the same text aloud a number of times, aiming for a higher degree of fluency with each read.

There is no single ‘correct’ way of organising repeated oral reading, but one way of doing this that has been tried and tested in lots of classrooms looks something like this 30-minute lesson:

Model reading a brief text (50-200 words, depending on the pupils’ stage of development).
Briefly discuss unfamiliar vocabulary.
Model reading the text again, this time asking pupils to follow the text as you read. (You might even get pupils to echo each sentence after you have read it.)
Get pupils to rehearse reading the text 3-4 times each, taking it in turns in mixed-attainment pairs. If the text length is right, this should take around 10 minutes (which can be broken into shorter bursts with younger pupils). Pupils who are not ready for this, even with a supportive partner, can continue echo reading the text with the teacher.
Perform the text in some way (e.g. a choral read or volunteers reading parts of the text).
Briefly discuss the text, revelling in how much can be learned from the text now that it can be read with a greater degree of fluency.
Repeat the steps above in subsequent lessons, using a different brief text in each lesson and using a variety of texts (e.g. poetry, chunks of stories, information texts)

As pupils become increasingly fluent further up the school, you can then begin to incorporate some independent reading into your reading lessons (and across the wider curriculum), further building pupils’ word reading automaticity, knowledge of written English and reading stamina.

It’s important to bear in mind that developing pupils’ reading fluency in this way is only one element of effective post-phonics reading instruction. We must also build pupils’ knowledge of written English and the world it describes through pacy, meaningful experiences with entire books and other texts chosen for this purpose. And we must engage pupils in discussions about texts that further build this knowledge and develop their identities as strategic readers capable of their own unique interpretations of written language. But without the essential scaffolded reading practice provided by structures like repeated oral reading, the foundations laid by systematic phonics too often have nothing built upon them.

If you want to find out more about evidence-informed, tried-and-tested approaches to post-phonics reading instruction – including much more detail on the fluency read lesson structure described above – you might be interested in my book, Primary Reading Simplified.

You can buy it direct from the publisher (with a 30% discount and free delivery for a limited time by using the code UK30BOOKS) here: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/primary-reading-simplified/book292010

Alternatively, if you prefer Amazon, you can find it here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Primary-Reading-Simplified-Whole-School-Implementation/dp/1036201414

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.

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:

12 Tips to Maximise the Impact of One-to-One Reading

Every experienced teacher of reading recognises the power of hearing pupils read on a one-to-one basis. While whole-class reading can, and should, be organised to provide the mixture of reading practice, modelling and feedback that is the essence of one-to-one reading, there is no substitute for the real thing, especially for those struggling with the early steps towards reading proficiency.

But opportunities for one-to-one reading are difficult to organise across a school, and asking a teacher or teaching assistant to focus their attention on just one pupil has an obvious opportunity cost. As such, where we commit to one-to-one reading, we need to know that we are doing it well.

Here are my top tips for maximising one-to-one reading in your setting, taken from my book, Primary Reading Simplified, which is released January 2025 and can be pre-ordered here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Primary-Reading-Simplified-Whole-School-Implementation/dp/1036201414

1. From their reading experience, pupils will immediately and automatically recognise at least a few of the words they encounter. The key to effective one-to-one reading is the support you offer to pupils with the rest of the words, those that are not immediately and automatically recognised. With each and every one of these unfamiliar words, support pupils to decode throughout the word by paying attention to all the letters and the sounds that are represented. [i] Specifically, we want pupils to apply their knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs). Model this decoding whenever pupils get stuck on a word, and then ask the pupil to repeat what you did (e.g. ‘ch-a-m-p’ –> ‘champ’).

2. Keep an eye out for pupils who take a guess at the whole word after decoding the first sound or two that is represented within it. This ‘partial-decode-then-guess’ strategy can appear successful for some pupils, but it is counter-productive over the long term, often drastically so. Again, a key aim is to support pupils to use decoding through the entire word as their go-to strategy for recognising any unfamiliar word.

3. If a pupil decodes a word using GPCs that they know but then comes unstuck (e.g. they decode ‘café’ as ‘caif’ of ‘caffee’), ask them if they know a word that sounds similar. If not, tell them what the word is, what it means and point out the GPCs in this word (e.g. *pointing to the ‘e’ in this word*, “This letter spells ‘ay’; ‘c-a-f-e’ –> ‘café’.”).[ii] In this way, you are priming the pupil to learn new GPCs by applying the ones they already know. This orthographic learning is essential to reading development.

4. Where a pupil struggles to decode polysyllabic words (i.e. words with more than one syllable), model breaking the words into syllables and decoding these piece by piece (e.g. ‘unhelpful’: ‘u-n’ –> ‘un’; ‘h-e-l-p’ –> ‘help’; ‘f-u-l’ –> ‘ful’; ‘un-help-ful’). Again, get the pupil to practise this immediately after modelling. Some argue that there are particular rules that we should follow when breaking words into syllables. However, teaching pupils to do this flexibly appears to be more beneficial.[iii]

5. Nascent readers often struggle most with blending. If this is a particular difficulty for a pupil, this is often because of the load placed on working memory: by the time a pupil gets to the end of the word, they have forgotten the first sound they recognised. Scaffolds can help. Consider progressively blending challenging words by elongating sounds that allow this (e.g. mmmmiiiillllk –> milk).[iv] It can also be helpful to incrementally reveal graphemes, blending each time (e.g. chomp: ch –> cho –> chom –> chomp). This is best thought of as a scaffold to the usual step-by-step decoding used in your school’s phonics programme.

6. Until a pupil has developed the habit of paying attention to all the GPCs within an unfamiliar word, it makes sense for their decoding practice to be undertaken with decodable text (i.e. text that allows them to practise using GPCs with which they are already familiar).[v] The transition to ‘regular’ books depends on the pupil. This transition often happens towards the end of year 1, though it can be made considerably earlier or later, depending on a pupil’s decoding capabilities. Carefully manage this transition to ‘normal’ text, watching out for the counterproductive ‘partial-decode-then-guess’ strategy described above.

7. Where pupils are capable of decoding individual words without too much help but are still particularly dysfluent (i.e. their reading is stilted or much more stop-start than their peers), give them occasional opportunities to re-read sentences, aiming for a little more flow the second or third time around. Again, this can be modelled for the pupil.

8. Where pupils struggle to the point that motivation or attention become a factor, consider taking turns with the pupil. This might be on a sentence-by-sentence or page-by-page basis. You should try to read at a pace that is fluent but steady. You should also point at the words as you read them, modelling how to decode particularly challenging words.

9. When pupils’ reading is relatively dysfluent and/or decoding is still laborious, do not expect pupils to make much sense of a text independently as they read. Support meaning-making by briefly discussing and summarising what the text has said. If you want a relatively dysfluent reader to independently make sense of a chunk of text, they will probably need to re-read it to the point where it does begin to flow. In particular, a sense of prosody – the way oral reading sounds (i.e. rhythm, stress and intonation) – is often a sign that comprehension is more likely. This prosody can be modelled and supported.

10. If a reader is relatively fluent, then other pupils are likely to benefit more from one-to-one reading time than they are. One-to-one reading is valuable to all pupils, but it is a precious and (usually) scarce resource. It makes sense to target it at pupils who are struggling most with foundational aspects of reading. However, in the rare circumstances that a pupil is relatively fluent yet has significant issues with comprehension relative to their peers, one-to-one reading can emphasise the active role that pupils need to take in making meaning. This can be achieved by supporting the pupil to summarise and visualise what they have read, by showing where to re-read tricky bits and by emphasising the ‘detective work’ that is often required to make sense of a text, such as when a word refers to something that has come before.

11. Where it becomes apparent from one-to-one reading that a pupil struggles with a particular aspect of decoding, allow this to inform the interventions that you might use beyond one-to-one reading. If adequate knowledge of GPCs is lacking (i.e. not enough to allow pupils to begin successfully decoding words for themselves and learning more GPCs in the process), the suitable intervention will likely be a phonics intervention aligned with your school’s phonics programme. If a pupil has adequate GPC knowledge but struggles with blending, then an intervention that targets blending is more likely to be fruitful. If the difficulty relates to the decoding of polysyllabic words, then the intervention should support pupils to flexibly break these words into syllables before decoding these and then the entire word. Decoding interventions work far better when they target the aspect(s) of decoding with which a pupil is struggling. All of this means that if someone other than a teacher is undertaking one-to-one reading with pupils, it is helpful for them to give feedback to the class teacher on pupils’ individual progress with decoding and fluency.

12. This is arguably the most important tip of the lot: make clear to every pupil exactly what a pleasure it is to witness their improvement, and tell them how worthwhile their efforts are. Helping pupils to develop as readers is one of the joys of being a teacher. Let pupils know this through your words and actions.

A final aside on the ‘who’ of one-to-one reading: it is common for volunteers – usually parents or governors – to come into school to support pupils with their reading. This support can certainly be beneficial for those that are well on their way to decoding proficiency but who lack fluency. However, pupils who are struggling most with the foundations of reading are best served by support from teachers and teaching assistants with the sufficient training required to understand reading development in theory and practice.

[i] Specifically, the relationships between sounds and letters that we are talking about are correspondences between phonemes (the smallest chunks of sounds that differentiate between two words) and graphemes (the individual letters or groups of letters that represent these phonemes.

[ii] For more on this, check out work on ‘set for variability’ or ‘mispronunciation correction’. This paper is a good place to start: Colenbrander, D., Kohnen, S., Beyersmann, E., Robidoux, S., Wegener, S., Arrow, T., … & Castles, A. (2022). Teaching children to read irregular words: A comparison of three instructional methods. Scientific Studies of Reading, 26(6), 545-564.

[iii] For more on this idea: https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/on-eating-elephants-and-teaching-syllabication

[iv] For more on this: Gonzalez-Frey, S. M., & Ehri, L. C. (2021). Connected phonation is more effective than segmented phonation for teaching beginning readers to decode unfamiliar words. Scientific Studies of Reading, 25(3), 272-285.

[v] This, of course, is not to say that decodable text is the only kind of text that pupils should experience. They should have the opportunity to hear and discuss all sorts of texts, including books that they have freely chosen from a reading corner or library. However, asking pupils to undertake sustained decoding practice with words primarily containing unfamiliar GPCs can be exceptionally demoralising and can foster counterproductive habits.

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How I Help Schools to Teach Reading More Effectively

Warning: Parts of this blog are going to feel like an advertisement for my consultancy work and books. This is unavoidable as I have written this for those who ask me about the issues relating to reading instruction that I see across primary schools and how I seek to address them.

In this blog, I’d like to explain how I try to support schools and, in the process, offer some thoughts about patterns that I see that might be of use to classroom teachers and school leaders.

I spend a few hours most weeks in conversations with school leaders talking about their current reading provision. In some cases, these online chats are the pre-cursor to my working with their school. In other cases, schools simply want constructive feedback on their current approach to reading. As a result of these conversations, I have identified a number of recurring issues with schools’ approaches to reading lessons, of which these are by far the most common and important:

Fluency development is not explicitly targeted through scaffolded reading practice.
Reading lessons involve precious little actual reading, especially of whole texts.
There is a lack of text discussions aimed at developing pupils’ appreciation of written language and their active, personal role in reading.

As a result of these conversations, I have become increasingly convinced of the importance of teachers and school leaders knowing the fundamentals about reading development, something I generally refer to as the theory behind reading: the connections between word recognition & the structure of the English writing system; the connections between decoding, fluency & comprehension; the integrated bodies of knowledge required to make sense of a text; etc.

I have consistently found that schools that understand this domain make better decisions in how they approach the teaching of reading. Often I work with schools that are less confident with this domain, helping them to better understand reading so that they can develop their approach to reading with greater confidence. This work ranges from hour-long keynote presentations to professional development days. Central to this work is my reading map, an aide memoire for the key things I believe every teacher and school leader needs to understand about reading:

(A 9-minute introduction to this reading map can be found here: link to YouTube video)

For some purposes, I am wary of one-off professional development sessions. If you want to support teachers to make practical changes in the classroom, sustained support is required. But when it comes to helping schools to strengthen their grasp of reading development and identify potential areas for future improvement, I’m confident that this sort of work can be useful.

However, some schools and MATs want considerably more than this. Specifically, they want to be shown a particular approach to reading lessons beyond phonics that they can adopt, adapt or merely use as a jumping-off point for change. In these cases, initial support on the theory behind reading is usually followed by three sessions that help schools to balance the three priorities addressed by every effective approach to teaching reading lessons:

Build reading fluency through practice.
Read plenty of thoughtfully chosen texts.
Discuss texts in depth.

Specifically, I discuss in detail how to teach using three reading lesson structures, each of which matches one of the above priorities:

Fluency reading
Extended reading
Close reading

These reading lesson structures are not stunningly innovative or hugely difficult to pull off. They are also certainly not the only way to meet the three priorities of reading lessons. They are simply ways of organising reading lessons that aim to meet the needs of developing readers while providing teachers with the mixture of support and agency required for high-quality teaching and ongoing improvement. Usually, I introduce teachers to these lesson structures one at a time with a gap of at least a couple of weeks between them so that teachers have the chance to experiment in the classroom and get support with any initial challenges to implementation. (For schools who want more flexibility or those in parts of the world that make live professional development difficult, I also have a sequence of videos that can be used for this professional development.)

That’s basically it. Of course, there are other issues that I help schools with (how to systematically assess & address reading difficulties; how to build a reading curriculum; how to nurture a reading culture; etc), and the work that I do is moulded to meet the requirements of each individual school or multi-academy trust. But I can sum up the vast majority of the consultancy work that I do thus:

(1) I provide constructive feedback on schools’ current approach to teaching reading and their reading curriculum either as part of informal online conversations or formal in-person consultancy.

(2) I help classroom teachers and school leaders to better understand reading development so that they can make better-informed decisions about their approach to teaching reading.

(3) I explain in detail one specific evidence-informed approach to reading lessons that schools can then adopt, adapt or use merely as a jumping-off point.

The last thing to say is that I always try to provide a free or cheap alternative to any consultancy work that I do. I do not want schools to spend money they don’t have, and I don’t think I could ever justify earning more than I did as a school leader.

The free version of (1) is available to anyone who works in a state school; just drop me a message via email, Twitter or Blue Sky with any questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them. If things are more complicated (and I’m not too busy), I might offer to follow up with a brief online chat via Zoom.

The cheap version of (2) involves buying my first book, The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading, which is designed to help schools understand the key theory behind reading and how it relates to practice: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Science-Teaching-Primary-Reading-Corwin/dp/1529764165

The cheap version of (3) involves buying my second book, Primary Reading Simplified, which is designed to provide practical guidance for every aspect of classroom teaching and whole-school leadership relating to reading. This book goes far beyond just addressing (3), but the core of the book does this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Primary-Reading-Simplified-Whole-School-Implementation/dp/1036201414

Below are testimonials from schools and multi-academy trusts that I have worked with:

“We’ve absolutely loved working with Chris across our trust. His reading CPD has been a real game-changer, not just for how we teach reading, but for how we think about teaching in general. His sessions are full of practical ideas, grounded in research, and delivered in a way that’s clear, engaging, and genuinely useful.

One of the things we’ve really appreciated is how approachable Chris is. He doesn’t just deliver the training and disappear—he’s been brilliant at answering follow-up questions and offering support whenever we’ve needed it. That kind of ongoing help has made a big difference in helping staff feel confident and supported.

The impact has been clear across our schools. Teachers are feeling more empowered, pupils are more engaged, and the quality of teaching has stepped up a notch.”

– Aimee Tinkler, Head of Education at Diocese of Coventry MAT

“The impact from Chris’s reading CPD has been superb, really helping to bring to life the EEF recommendations. Our teachers now have a much clearer understanding of how to develop vocabulary in reading lessons, and our pupils now spend much more time engaged in quality reading and discussion activities: with trust averages on the rise, the proof really is in the pudding!”

– Ross Brevitt, Director of Primary Curriculum at Star Academies

“The training was incredibly practical and gave me immediate strategies to use in my classroom. I feel much more confident in helping my students develop not just their fluency, but also their overall confidence in reading.”

– Sophie Cooksley, EYFS Lead and Classroom Teacher at Rodmarton Primary School

“Chris provided fantastic professional development that has been highly valued by our schools. He has captured the attention of our teachers through a range of research-informed approaches that he has shown in practice in ways that are engaging and impactful. It’s great to walk into classrooms and see it in action!”

– Jaimie Holbrook, Director of Improvement and Effectiveness at the Enquire Learning Trust

“Chris’s knowledge of – and passion for – reading is second to none. He has helped us to overhaul our reading curriculum and reading for pleasure with superb results. His advice is so easy to follow and has instilled a new confidence into both pupils and staff alike.”

– Hannah Carvell, Executive Headteacher at Queens C of E Academy

“Through your support, we’ve been able to provide pupils far greater opportunities to engage with texts in both purposeful and pleasurable ways. You’ve helped create a reading culture where books are not only tools for learning but also sources of joy, curiosity, and reflection. Pupils are now more enthusiastic about reading and are developing into thoughtful, critical, and deep-thinking readers.”

– Sarah Hodge, Headteacher at the Priestley Academy Trust

“Chris’s training, modelling, feedback and ongoing support has transformed the teaching of reading in our school. Our staff’s knowledge and pedagogy have developed significantly, along with their confidence. As a result, our children are fast becoming the fluent, confident readers we want them to be, and everyone is enjoying reading!”

– Amy Bills, Headteacher at Holbrook Primary School

“As part of our ‘Year of Reading’ project, we contacted Chris to provide rich, evidence-based CPD around the teaching of reading. This training kickstarted a series of CPD sessions which ran across the autumn term, providing invaluable strategies and resources aimed at helping teachers to improve students’ reading fluency—a key factor in boosting comprehension and fostering a lifelong love for reading.“

We know that this professional development will have a positive impact on classrooms across our ‘Year of Reading’ project.”

– Rachael Scott, School Improvement Lead (Primary) at Corinium Education Trust

“Chris’s training has had a huge impact on how we teach reading. It was a perfect combination of research-backed information and practical strategies that could be easily and immediately implemented. We have seen improvements in our test scores, and even more importantly, the whole-class approach has brought renewed enthusiasm for the shared joy of reading to our classrooms.”

– Janet Fox, KS2 English Subject Leader at the British School of Paris

“Chris is a textbook example of how to teach effectively. He commanded the room in such a way that you could hear a pin drop, leading to incredible retention and long-term memory for everyone present.

As a trust, we adopted Chris’s strategies, which have led to significant improvement in children being able to read more effectively. The way he delivered the information meant it stuck! I would recommend his training to anyone passionate about reading and evidenced-based pedagogy.”

– Emma Grice, Executive Headteacher at the Fioretti Trust

“Chris took the time to tailor his support so that it matched our needs exactly. Chris is incredibly knowledgeable, and the training he delivered to teaching and support staff was clear, precise and very relevant to classroom work. The training has informed our reading strategy and staff have been empowered to deliver high-quality reading lessons that are having a positive impact on learning.”

– Laura Wright, Deputy Principal at Woodvale Primary Academy

“Chris’s book really spoke to the team and offered lots of positive clarity and ideas which we were keen to explore further. We then engaged him over the year with four online sessions for all teachers in the primary section of our school. It was fantastic, to the point where people would rewatch the recordings he offered and refer to his work regularly, and eventually many ideas were then adapted and embedded into our new reading policy ready to implement next academic year. He was able to break down key concepts into clear areas of focus and respond to our many questions around specific elements. He then remained on hand should we be reflecting on anything specific. I would highly recommend him to any school looking to reinforce best practice, refresh staff’s awareness on key teaching strategies or reflect on up-to-date approaches.”

Aidan Stallwood, Head of Primary at Northbridge International School, Cambodia

Thanks for reading. If you want to get in touch, you can reach me via the ‘Contact me’ tab above or via this link: https://primarycolour.home.blog/contact/

Why Reading Progression Documents Are Probably a Waste of Time

I spend roughly five hours per week responding to questions about reading instruction via emails and direct messages on Twitter. And I receive one question more than any other:

“What should our school put on its reading progression documents?”

This question is usually followed by the reason for the request:

“A member of SLT / an LA advisor / a visiting consultant told me we needed
this.”

There is a sort of logic behind a reading progression document. In other areas of the curriculum, it makes perfect sense to write down what we intend to teach in each year group. For example, if teachers know that they will teach equivalent fractions in year 5, they can look at a progression document when considering the prior knowledge that has been developed and the future knowledge for which they are laying the foundations. This can then inform classroom teaching.

So, does this sort of progression document make sense for reading?

Mostly, the answer is no.

There are parts of reading that benefit from a clearly defined progression. Systematic phonics programmes by definition are built around a scope and sequence of the knowledge and skills to be learned, specifically knowledge of the relationships between letters and sounds and the phonemic skills required to make use of these. It can also be argued that it is helpful to specify reading fluency expectations in terms of accuracy, rate and prosody for each year group.

But when people ask me about progression documents for reading, they are not referring to the teaching of decoding or the development of fluency. What they are searching for is a list of clearly defined knowledge and skills for the development of reading comprehension. And the purpose of this blog is to explain why such progression documents are inevitably a waste of time.

I have seen many examples of progression documents for reading. They are usually divided into categories like ‘vocabulary’, ‘retrieval’, ‘inference’, etc. They are populated by statements that attempt to identify what a pupil should be able to do in a given year group. It is common to see things like this:

Year 4 – Inference: be able to infer characters’ emotions from explicit details in the text.

Then there is an attempt to show progression by making the next year group’s statement sound a little more complex. Sometimes this is done by just adding adjectives like ‘challenging’ or adverbs like ‘confidently’. What makes something ‘challenging’ or what it means to infer ‘confidently’ is never detailed. It is left for teachers to divine these distinctions. Sometimes, instead, the statement is changed in a more substantial way:

Year 5 – Inference: be able to infer characters’ emotions from implicit references in the text.

Let’s put aside for a moment why the transition from year 4 to year 5 is considered to be the precise moment when pupils should begin to understand implicit references to characters’ emotions. Instead, let’s focus on the absurdity of thinking that these statements mean anything in isolation from a specific text. If a pupil in year 2 recognises that Winnie the Pooh is confused to find Piglet in his house, is this pupil working at a year 5 level for inferences of this sort? Equally, if a pupil in year 7 struggles to recognise Mr Rochester’s repressed ardour towards Jane Eyre, does that mean that they are working below this level?

One might argue that we should only make these judgements with age-appropriate texts. This might make sense if the age-appropriateness of texts wasn’t fundamentally subjective beyond measures of word and sentence complexity that tell us very little. The unavoidable truth is that a pupil’s ability to meet every criterion written on a progression document depends on the specifics of the text they are reading. And this depends primarily on the pupil’s understanding of the language contained in the text and the world to which that language relates.

Of course, parts of this knowledge could in theory be specified. Take vocabulary: we could write down a list of the tens of thousands of words, phrases, idioms, metaphors, etc that we wish pupils to understand by the time they leave primary school. We could then attempt to divide these up and assign several thousand of them to each year group. But – and this is the question at the heart of this blog – what purpose would this serve? Any such list would either to be too short to adequately reflect the complexity of what is to be learned or too long to be of any use to teachers. Yes, we might decide to select a list of particularly valuable vocabulary that we want pupils to learn across the curriculum to support their understanding of academic texts, but such a list would not inform us at all about how to teach reading or how to assess pupils’ progress.

In other words, the integrated bodies of knowledge upon which comprehension depends are vast and beyond any attempts to condense them. They relate to everything that pupils learn about language and the world. And trying to boil down the application of this knowledge into a list of ‘comprehension skills’ on a progression document is useless in terms of assessment or teaching.

In fact, such progression documents are worse than useless. First, the creation of these documents wastes the time of the school leaders who create them and the teachers who use them. Second, attempts to assess pupils’ reading against the statements on these documents are nothing more than a pretence in which teachers reverse-engineer what statements they will tick based on what they already know about a pupil’s reading. And third, the existence of these documents perpetuates a false impression of the nature of reading comprehension development, warping teaching further towards ill-conceived, counter-productive test preparation.

So, what should we use instead? We need to begin by accepting that the bodies of knowledge that underpin comprehension cannot be written down in a worthwhile way. And on this basis, we should use a minimalist approach to assessment and a meaningful approach to teaching.

What does a minimalist approach to assessment look like? It means only using things that have a chance of providing meaningful information:

Phonics assessments for those in the early stages of word recognition development tell us what might need re-teaching and which pupils require additional support.
Fluency assessments tell us which pupils are likely to benefit most from independent reading and which pupils require extra supported practice.
Standardised comprehension assessments – the results of which can only give a vague overview of pupils’ current reading capability – allow us to share with pupils’ families fairly reliable information and track big-picture trends across a school.

In concert, these assessments allow us to determine pupils’ most pressing barriers to reading development so that interventions can be provided. (Of course, such a systematic approach should be complemented by bespoke assessments of language-related needs by a SENDCo.)

It might also be worth keeping track of individual pupils’ attitudes to reading: how much they read, what books they like, how they contribute to class discussions of texts, etc. This information can be passed on from one teacher to the next at the end of the academic year.

And what does a meaningful approach to teaching look like? When it comes to defining what we will teach, it means our reading curriculum for comprehension development is the collection of texts that we have curated and the lesson structures we use to teach them. Why? Because introducing pupils to the wonders of written English through exploration and discussion of the language within these texts is how we teach reading comprehension. Part of curating this selection of texts involves ensuring we provide pupils with a variety of text types, language choices and perspectives. These aspects of the chosen texts can be specified in a curriculum to (a) support the teaching of these texts, including the making of connections to pupils’ knowledge of prior texts, and (b) influence future discussions about changes to the curated selection.*

Alongside this, we might include a short list of comprehension strategies (e.g. summarising, self-questioning and re-reading), specifying when we might explicitly begin teaching these to pupils. However, we should bear in mind that these strategies can be integrated into classroom teaching that focuses on text exploration.

In short, I suspect there is no worthwhile argument for the existence of progression documents for reading comprehension. I have sympathy for those who feel compelled to create such pointless artefacts to satisfy ill-informed authority figures. But, ultimately, for the sake of pupils and those who teach them, the best thing we can do is to refuse to waste everyone’s time.

P.S. – Since writing this, I have been reminded of the disappointing fact that the list of ill-informed authority figures asking for pointless documentation includes some – but certainly not all – Ofsted inspectors. It appears to be an unfortunate (and timeless) reality of our accountability system that inspectors are required to cast judgement on aspects of teaching about which they might be relatively ignorant. This being the case, it might be wise (if somewhat cynical) to call your list of texts and their contents a ‘progression document’ so that the inspector can feel like they have got what they asked for. I appreciate that the result of an Ofsted inspection shouldn’t come down to doing stuff like this, but I have lost count of the number of dedicated school leaders who have told me about the importance of ‘playing the game’.

All this makes it even more essential that school leaders are knowledgeable about reading development. For more on the theory behind this, a really good place to start is the idea of constrained and unconstrained aspects of reading (Paris, 2005; Stahl, 2011; Snow & Matthews, 2016). And this blog on the US equivalent of this subject by Professor Timothy Shanahan is also well worth a read: https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/should-we-grade-students-on-the-individual-reading-standards-1

If you’d like to find out more about how I organise every element of reading in a classroom and across a school, please consider my second book, Primary Reading Simplified, which is released January 2025: link

Equally, if you’d like to learn more about the theory behind reading and how it relates to classroom practice, please consider my first book, The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading: link

All royalties from The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading go to the Malaria Consortium, a Give-Well-recommended charity.

* Hat tip to Clare Sealy for letting me know that this idea was not clear in the first version of this blog.

The Cost of Consistency

I think this blog might be relevant beyond a primary context. For those of you who aren’t interested in phonics teaching, please bear with me. I promise this isn’t just about phonics…

A few years back, I was offered the chance to return to year 2 after nearly a decade in key stage 2. I’d taught phonics in reception and key stage 1 at previous schools, and I had recently taught phonics with small groups of children in key stage 2. But when it came to teaching phonics to 30 children at a time, I knew I was out of practice.

I arranged a meeting with the literacy co-ordinator to find out what I needed to know. I was reminded about the four-part lesson structure that I was familiar with from Letters and Sounds, and a hotchpotch of resources was downloaded from a memory stick onto my laptop. The literacy coordinator was swamped with her responsibilities, so this brief chat was the full extent of the structured support that I received before teaching phonics to a whole class for the first time in years.

At the start of the following term, I began teaching my year 2 class. It took me a while to get back into the swing of working with 6-year olds, but I was fairly satisfied with the lessons I taught, with one exception: phonics. I finished most days with a nagging sense that it wasn’t quite working. I did what I could to get better, relying on the advice of my colleagues, but this took longer than it should have. Even once I was teaching phonics adequately, I felt the nagging sensation that I’d let the kids down up to that point. For those still struggling with decoding, I couldn’t help but wonder how much better off they would have been with the more experienced teacher next door.

Fast forward to now, and things have changed. If you are teaching phonics in an English primary school, you are almost certain to have been given a structure to follow and resources to use. You might even have been given training in the underlying theory behind word recognition. Sounds good, right? Mostly.

Why only ‘mostly’? Well, it’s hard not to wonder about the expert teacher next door and how she would feel about being required to follow the precise steps of her school’s prescribed scheme. My best guess is that she would largely do as she was asked, and her phonics teaching would be slightly weakened as a result. Where possible, she would continue to furtively use the full range of her expertise, not least her judgement of how activities could be adapted to match her own capabilities and the needs of her class. But she would feel frustrated. Her expertise had been hard won, so not being able to fully exploit it would feel understandaby galling.

I know that feeling. The same school introduced a maths scheme that was relatively prescriptive. As a fairly experienced maths teacher, I didn’t like it, and I reckon that – in the short term at least – my teaching was slightly poorer as a result. I railed against anything that even slightly limited my ability to maximise my impact. The school quietly gave me more flexibility than some of my colleagues, but I was still aggrieved whenever this wasn’t possible.

But I felt different once I was required to take on some responsibility for the quality of teaching across an entire school. Suddenly, my first priority was universal adequacy, even where that placed constraints on the most expert teachers in the school. I saw the value of consistency as pupils moved between classes. I saw the challenges of setting different expectations for different teachers, especially where levels of expertise didn’t appear to align with a teacher’s classroom experience. And all too quickly, I let myself forget the frustrations of the more expert teacher, to the point where I almost pretended that these frustrations didn’t exist.

I think it is a sensible for schools to be required to pick a phonics programme that has been checked to ensure that it supports all teachers who use it. I think it’s sensible for school leaders to ask teachers to use these programmes consistently. But sensible doesn’t mean flawless. It’s easy to tell staff that a new scheme or a new structure will provide benefits for all, but often this just isn’t true. It’s much harder to explain to staff that you think that consistent application of something new will elicit a net benefit despite compromises that will affect some teachers more than others.

Some might argue that these compromises don’t need to exist, that we can offer support to less expert teachers and unmitigated autonomy to those who can make the most of it. This is, of course, the ideal situation, but often it isn’t possible. For one thing, there are limitations on school leaders’ ability to recognise expertise. There are also subtle gains from consistency that compound: teachers can better support each other, professional development can be better targeted and interventions can build more readily on routines that are familiar to all pupils. But such consistency tends to involve compromise.

One such compromise is that there is a level of expertise that some argue is only acquired by capable individuals being left to learn the hard way, working things out for themselves. No one would argue against support for new teachers, but being required at some point to find your own way can perhaps build a level of resilience and nous that might otherwise not manifest itself. However, there is survivorship bias at play when experienced teachers talk about what they gained from this experience. And there are obviously costs to pupils’ learning while teachers are learning the hard way. These costs are often intolerable to those whose central priority is to ensure that all teaching across a school at any given moment is at least adequate.

And this isn’t just about phonics schemes or maths programmes. The compromises around consistency and autonomy play out in every area of the sector, from curriculum products to behaviour management to mentoring under the Early Career Framework. I think there is a tendency to downplay the frustration of experienced teachers who feel boxed in by the requirements of consistency. This frustration often finds its expression in narrow complaints that reflect a broader issue. I suspect that the pushback against systematic phonics teaching and detailed curriculum resources, for example, is frequently the conduit through which stifled voices within the profession try to make themselves heard. It can be tempting to respond to the surface details and to seize upon misconceptions while ignoring the underlying source of frustration. It’s certainly convenient to do so, and I know that I’ve been guilty of this.

We need honest conversations about the compromises that are deemed necessary, ones that will allow us to include on the balance sheet all of those often-hidden items like the demotivation of more experienced colleagues and the potential loss to the profession of their expert presence in the classroom. While total agreement is unlikely, greater openness about these compromises might help us to better identify where the cost of consistency is genuinely worth paying and where it might just be too high.

Thanks for reading. I don’t tend to write many of these blog posts that go beyond specific aspects of teaching, not least because it’s much harder to be confident about this sort of thing, and it’s easy to come across as patronising or foolish or both. Feel free to tell me that I’m wrong and why. I hope you’ll forgive me if you vehemently disagree with what I’ve written. If it helps, I am very much open to changing my mind.

My book, The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading, is available here. All royalties go to Malaria Consortium, a Give-Well-recommended charity: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Science-Teaching-Primary-Reading-Corwin/dp/1529764165/ref=asc_df_1529764165/?tag=googshopuk-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=501078043437&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=18104477721521958473&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9046212&hvtargid=pla-1211300438763&psc=1&th=1&psc=1

The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading… in 500 words

Reading is one of the most valuable capabilities that a person can acquire. Every other capability of equal or greater value, such as walking or talking, comes relatively instinctively. In contrast, we have not evolved to be readers. Learning to read is a singular challenge that demands expertise from teachers and school leaders. Thankfully, reading development has been studied for decades. The accumulated evidence, informed by professional experience, can guide us in our aim to give every pupil the best chance of becoming a capable, confident reader…

Reading is the comprehension of visual symbols that represent language. To do this, pupils must develop two capacities that become increasingly integrated as expertise develops – (1) recognising words, and (2) building meaning from those words:

To recognise words on a page, pupils must learn to associate the sounds of our language with visual symbols. (The sounds represented are the smallest chunks of spoken sound that we can categorise, called phonemes. The visual symbols representing these phonemes are letters of the alphabet operating individually or in groups.) Explicit teaching can help pupils to learn these associations and how to use them. This is called phonics. Over time, pupils also associate these visual symbols with units of meaning directly. (Words can be thought of as composed of chunks of meaning called morphemes.) Due to the complexity of our writing system, lots of reading is required for pupils to learn these associations between visual symbols, sound and meaning.

Building meaning from written words uses mostly the same knowledge that is used to build meaning from spoken language: knowledge of concepts that words represent and knowledge of how words interact with each other. This means that developing pupils’ spoken language and their knowledge of the world is key to fostering their ability to read. Building meaning from words is also supported by some knowledge that is unique to written language, including knowledge of how words are presented within texts.

As pupils become more expert at recognising words and building meaning from them, their reading begins to flow. Pupils can reinforce this important sense of fluency through text experience and through rehearsed reading aloud.

Teaching comprehension involves the provision of fascinating, challenging experiences with texts that have been chosen for the breadth and relevance of their content. It also involves awakening pupils to the active, personal nature of comprehension through explanation, modelling and rich discussion.

Pupils learn aspects of reading at different rates. While the same principles apply to all developing readers, struggling readers require targeted teaching that is sensitive to their specific needs, motivation and self-efficacy.

The relationships between teachers, pupils and books is central to the promotion of pupils’ independent reading. Reading aloud to pupils is both a necessity and a privilege.

There are various ways to organise reading instruction. If you keep in mind the ideas outlined above as you construct, implement and evaluate your reading curriculum, then you are likely to give pupils the best chance of becoming capable, confident readers.

Thanks for reading. For those that prefer a visual map to a 500-word summary, just such a visual map can be found here.

Equally, if you’d like to learn more about the theory behind reading and how it relates to classroom practice, please consider my first book, The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading: link

All royalties from The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading go to the Malaria Consortium, a Give-Well-recommended charity.

The Science of Reading Visualised

This is a copy of the simplified reading map that I tend to use in professional development:

I’m just dropping this into a blog-post as I suspect that this will forever be a work progress, and I’d like it to be kept somewhere accessible in case anyone is interested. It can be found here: link to reading map

There is also now a short video that explores this reading map that can be found here: link to video

As ever, constructive feedback is appreciated.

The Case for Chunking (or Why Recall and Reasoning are Best Buddies)

Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.
A N Whitehead

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the driving lessons I took when I was 17. By the time I first stepped into his car, my instructor had been teaching people to drive for decades. Every sentence he said felt reassuringly rehearsed. This was especially true of a maxim that he repeated whenever I was struggling with an aspect of driving:

“First, we think. Then we practise until we don’t have to.”

Sometimes he’d justify this little maxim by describing hypothetical situations:

“When you see a football rolling into the road in front of you, I want you thinking about the kid that might be chasing after it. You can’t do that if you’re thinking about how to change gear or how to use the brakes. How can you think about the important stuff if you’re still thinking about the little stuff?”

In other words, my driving instructor recognised the importance of chunking to the development of expertise.

Chunking is the process through which individual pieces of information are consolidated into larger meaningful units. For example, in my first few driving lessons, I had to pay conscious attention to operating the clutch, moving the gear stick and assessing whether my speed required a gear change. Through conscious thought and practice, these separate actions each became automatic and were eventually chunked into a single unit: changing gear.

I am able to drive to a legal standard precisely because various skills and bits of knowledge were consolidated into larger chunks through conscious effort and practice. This chunking of bits of knowledge and skills into larger meaningful units so that we can do more and more complex things is a pretty powerful way to think about the learning process.

And this brings me onto the year 4 multiplication table check. In relation to the check, an education journalist recently posted the following tweet:

At first glance, we might agree that this is a remarkable state of affairs. After all, don’t we want pupils to grasp that 8 x 7 can be reimagined as (8 x 5) + (8 x 2) or as (8 x 10) – (8 x 3)? Isn’t this reasoning about the distributive property exactly the sort of thing we want pupils to become familiar with? It certainly is. Nevertheless, it seems that the government doesn’t want pupils to use such reasoning to work out basic multiplication facts forever. They want pupils to have chunked these reasoning steps into a single multiplication fact in each case by the end of year 4, as evidenced by the need for rapid recall to pass the multiplication table check. Why might the government see this as necessary?

If we look at the components of the national curriculum that are commonly taught in year 5, it is clear that pupils need to put their knowledge of basic multiplication facts to a lot of use. And if pupils are reasoning their way to basic multiplication facts like 8 x 7 (i.e. reaching the answer of 56 through multiple steps), then we are adding extra steps to any chain of reasoning that they undertake.

Let’s consider an example of what this means. Imagine that we want to teach pupils that we can work out 8 x 69 using the distributive property. We might consider this as one particular chain of reasoning:

8 x 7 = 56 → 8 x 70 = 560 → 8 x 69 = (8 x 70) – (8 x 1) = 552

This is tricky stuff. It takes time and exactly the sort of understanding of the distributive property to which pupils will have been introduced when they were initially learning about multiplication. Every pupil that has to go through multiple steps to find the answer to 8 x 7 is forced to add extra steps to an already complicated chain of reasoning. In contrast, those that can fluently recall 8 x 7 can focus on this more advanced application of the distributive property.

Let’s consider another example. Imagine that we want pupils to simplify ⁴²/₄₈. If they have to use multiple steps to divide each of these numbers by 6, they are less likely to focus on the underlying mathematics that allows this process to work. (One way of thinking about this process is to recognise the equivalence between 1 and ⁶/₆ and to know that dividing by 1 leaves a value unchanged → ⁴²/₄₈ ÷ ⁶/₆ = ⁷/₈)

In other words, pupils should absolutely be taught to reason their way to basic multiplication facts. But this is part of the learning process, not the end goal. At some point, pupils should be encouraged through practice to recall each basic multiplication fact without having to work them out. (Michael Pershan has a cracking blog on this subject: http://notepad.michaelpershan.com/what-people-get-wrong-about-memorizing-math-facts/)

I have met many people over the years who have stated that they coped fine with mathematics without being able to recall multiplication facts. This isn’t a surprise. I have no doubt that some are capable of overcoming almost any impediment in almost any situation. The issue really is that not all will overcome these impediments. Having spent a decent chunk of my career working specifically with those who have struggled academically, I am certain that it is these pupils who are most impeded by a lack of foundational knowledge on which to rely. The learning of number bonds and multiplication facts to fluency has often been the catalyst that has led to positive changes in what children deem themselves capable of in mathematics. I make no apology for advocating the fluent recall of multiplication facts as an aim for the vast majority of pupils.

Of course, there are other questions to consider in relation to the multiplication table check:

Are the expectations of the national curriculum in year 5 reasonable?
Do accountability measures such as the year 4 multiplication table check achieve what they aim to?
Will teachers prioritise the learning of multiplication facts with children for whom other aspects of maths might be more urgent (i.e. number bonds inside 20)?

These are interesting questions, and this blog is not a defence of the check itself. Instead, this blog is simply a reaction to the belief that fluent retrieval of multiplication facts (or other foundational knowledge) is somehow at odds with mathematical reasoning. It isn’t. Regardless of one’s views on the multiplication table check, it is perfectly sensible to want pupils to fluently recall basic multiplication facts if we also want them to apply these facts as elements of more advanced reasoning.

In short, chunking knowledge and skills into larger and larger single units is essential to learning, and the development of arithmetic is no exception to this. Pupils find it much harder to reason with basic multiplication facts if they are still reasoning their way to basic multiplication facts. Aiming for eventual rapid recall of basic multiplication facts is a perfectly sensible aim within any primary mathematics curriculum.

What’s Stopping Us From Teaching Reading Comprehension Really Well?

On a scale of 1-10, how good are you at comprehending what people say to you?

It’s a bit of a silly question, isn’t it? Whether or not we comprehend what we are told is dependent on our grasp of the individual words being used, the concepts to which they relate and how these interact to convey meaning. Talk to me about the first nine seasons of The Simpsons using familiar words and I’ll comprehend pretty well. Talk to me about your favourite anguilliform Pokemon character and I’ll probably stare at you blankly. Yes, there are some basic capacities that underpin our ability to understand what people say aloud, such as our hearing and our working memory capacity. But – on the assumption that these things aren’t an impediment – our ability to comprehend what we are told is dependent on what we know about the subject at hand and the words being used to describe it.

In other words, there is no generic listening comprehension ability. There is instead a vast network of understanding that determines the extent to which we can construct meaning from the words we hear. Trying to determine – or, heaven forbid, quantify – a person’s ability to comprehend what they are told would rely on some way of measuring their grasp of all there is to know about the world and the language used to describe it. How do you measure a person’s entire understanding of their world and their language? How do you effectively sample a domain this extensive? Answer: you can’t.

And this brings me on to reading comprehension. Our ability to comprehend what we read is reliant on much the same network of understanding that is required for listening comprehension. Let’s assume that we can recognise the words on a page fluently enough to free up the cognitive resources necessary for comprehension. Under these circumstances, whether or not we comprehend what we read is dependent on our grasp of the individual words being used, the concepts to which they relate and how these interact to convey meaning. Just as with listening comprehension, this is a domain so vast as to rule out precise, valid assessment.

To be clear, what I’m suggesting is that – beyond the development of relatively fluent word recognition* – our ability to comprehend what we read is based on everything we know about our world and our language, alongside an additional layer of knowledge related to written text conventions (e.g. punctuation, sub-headings, italics, etc). How do you measure a person’s entire understanding of their world, their language and the conventions of written texts? Answer: you can’t.

From this we can see that the result of any single standardised comprehension assessment needs to be interpreted with plenty of caution. However, such assessments can offer a loose sense of the overall reading capability of a pupil or cohort of pupils, especially when multiple assessments are used over a longer period of time.

And this is where this blogpost would end if reading comprehension assessment hadn’t warped the teaching of reading. But it has. A lot. For the sake of assessment, teachers have been incentivised to see reading comprehension as a generic skill, or, more precisely, a small set of generic skills. If this perspective were a canvas, it would look something like this:

Here is reading comprehension ability interpreted as a small collection of generic skills, things like retrieval, prediction and summarising. Reading comprehension assessments tend to divide the questions they use into a few categories such as these. Countless teachers and school leaders have thus made the understandable leap that teaching reading comprehension is the process of building up each of these generic comprehension skills. They attempt to add another broad-brushstroke layer to a pupil’s prediction skill as a means of filling up the canvas. This conveniently allows for the creation of medium-term plans that state that a given class is working on prediction or inference or some other generic skill. It also allows schools to make lists related to those skills that can be ticked off as children develop. If we’re going to gather evidence of a pupil’s reading comprehension development, then what we presumably need is a small set of statements that correspond to a relatively small set of generic skills. This interpretation of reading comprehension achieves that.

The problem, of course, is that this interpretation is completely bogus. It is based on a view of reading comprehension that is palpably false. Yes, when we comprehend what we read, we tend to be able to retrieve information, to make predictions, to summarise what we have read, etc, and doing this stuff while we read is a useful set of habits that keeps us awake to what we are doing.*** But this is an unhelpful way to visualise our ability to comprehend what we read. I’d argue that this is better:

Forget for a moment the exact scene being portrayed, and consider the means of portraying it. Here reading comprehension ability is interpreted as a vast interacting network of understanding. It is not built up through broad brushstrokes, but through the painstaking accumulation of knowledge about words, texts and the wider world to which they relate. The natural consequence of such an interpretation is that the teaching of reading comprehension must prioritise the guided exploration of text, involving lots of reading and lots of rich discussion. Retrieval, prediction, summarising, etc will naturally form a part of this, but developing these habits is not the central goal of reading comprehension lessons. The central goal of reading comprehension lessons is to understand the specific text being read, the world to which it relates and our relationship to both of these through exploration of the text’s use of language. Everything else is secondary.

However, this interpretation leaves us with some problems. I’ve lost count of the number of school leaders and teachers who – despite their instinctive enthusiasm for this more meaningful conception of reading comprehension – have asked the same two questions:

“How would we evidence this?”
“What would this look like in terms of our long-term planning?”

I will address these two questions in turn:

The answer to (1) is simple: Don’t bother.

I’m serious. Just don’t bother. Ofsted have made it abundantly clear that they don’t want teachers gathering evidence for its own sake. If your interpretation of an assessment requires you to pretend that reading comprehension is something that it clearly is not, then it’s time to reconsider how you use that method of assessment. You need to know how fluently your children read and you need to try to get a sense of much they know about the English language and the wider world. The former can be assessed by hearing children read aloud and by undertaking quick fluency assessments; the latter, however, is not accessible via reference to simple rubrics. Standardised reading comprehension assessments can give a rough idea of overall reading attainment and progress, and they are potentially useful for this purpose, but they tell us little about what we should or should not teach. It’s time to accept that there are some things that we can measure and other things that we cannot, and we need to change our assessment decisions accordingly.

The answer to (2) is a little more difficult. Think back to the canvas above. To build up a picture like that, many thousands of dots are added across the breadth of the canvas, each chosen partly based on its relationship to the other dots on the canvas. In a language-focused view of teaching reading comprehension, our planning must focus on the content being read: the characters, the themes, the text features, the aspects of the world being described, etc. And it must do so in relation to the rest of that which has been, and will be, added to the canvas. In short, stop focusing on how non-existent generic comprehension skills will be taught. Instead focus on the texts themselves – not least their variety and their relationship to the rest of the curriculum**** – and on how you will ensure that pupils learn lots about them.

A meaningful approach to the teaching of reading comprehension aligns with a more accurate view of what reading comprehension is. It allows teachers to do away with pointless, time-consuming forms of tick-box assessment. It encourages school leaders to re-imagine their reading curriculum primarily in terms of the texts to be shared. Most of all, it offers our pupils a more authentic, enriching and effective experience of reading.

So, what’s stopping us from teaching reading comprehension really well? Absolutely nothing.

Equally, if you’d like to learn more about the theory behind reading and how it relates to classroom practice, please consider my first book, The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading: link

All royalties from The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading go to the Malaria Consortium, a Give-Well-recommended charity.

* Fluent word recognition is also dependent on our broader language comprehension alongside our knowledge of phoneme-grapheme relationships, phonemic skills, etc.

** The Teachwell blog has an excellent series on this idea: http://www.teach-well.com/reforming-the-key-stage-2-reading-sat-why-its-needed-and-possible/

*** There is lots of research into comprehension strategies. This blog is a good place to start if you want to know more: https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/comprehension-skills-or-strategies-is-there-a-difference-and-does-it-matter#sthash.ZC5WlzWX.dpbs

**** This does not mean that every text has to directly relate to something else in your wider curriculum. It might even be the case that texts are chosen precisely because of how they supplement the curriculum. (E.g. If a primary history curriculum doesn’t include a study of a South American civilisation, a non-fiction text relating to the Maya civilisation might be an apt choice to add breadth to the pupils’ understanding of the challenging – and often controversial – concept of civilisation.)