The teen reading crisis - and the plan to start fixing it

Teaching reading is generally seen as the job of primary schools. This makes sense, given that it is the foundation upon which all other learning is built.

In reality, though, too many teenagers start secondary school lacking the reading ability they need to access the secondary curriculum.

That doesn’t just include the approximate quarter of children who don’t reach the expected standard on the Sats reading paper and those who don’t sit the paper, but also those who do hit the expected standard but can have huge variations in reading ability right up to school leaving age.

Professor Jessie Ricketts knows more about this group of struggling secondary readers than most: the Language and Reading Acquisition (LARA) lab she leads at Royal Holloway, University of London is the leading research operation looking at these students.

Tackling reading problems in secondary schools

And, having recognised that there is an issue with secondary reading, the Department for Education has enlisted Ricketts’ help to develop a training package of online resources aimed at all secondary school staff, not just English teachers.

It includes videos and guidance on understanding the diverse reading profiles found in key stages 3 and 4 and how to support students at all reading levels. What’s more, it can be completed in an hour.

The programme was co-created and piloted with teachers, and it builds on the decades of reading research from Ricketts and her team. It launched on 28 April on Ricketts’ website and videos will be accessible via the Department for Education YouTube channel. Other resources will be available on the government webpages.

Tes caught up with Ricketts to explore why she has created the resources, what impact she hopes they will have, and the wider issues around reading in secondary schools.

Tes: How did you first become aware that secondary schools were facing challenges around reading?

Professor Jessie Ricketts: I came across the problem when I was doing a very large research project across both primary and secondary schools. Staff from the secondaries would often come to me saying that they had lots of students who couldn’t read at the level that they needed to in order to fully access the curriculum.

The staff really didn’t know what to do. They had some resources, but they were woefully inappropriate and often aimed at four-year-olds. They were telling me that they didn’t really have the knowledge or the capacity or the confidence to know how to best support those learners.

They knew there was a need; they just didn’t know what to do about it.

I went off thinking, “There must be loads of research on this,” having done most of my research up to that point in the primary context, and found that, actually, there really wasn’t.

And you then took up the challenge?

Yes, since then I’ve done two large research projects - one funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and one funded by the Nuffield Foundation - looking at reading in secondary and also reading across the transition from primary to secondary.

Those were longitudinal studies, where we looked at how young people’s reading skills and knowledge change, and also their reading behaviour and engagement, too.

More on reading in secondary schools:

• Four ways our secondary reading strategy boosts literacy
• How to get secondary boys reading for fun
• Teenage reading: 5 things schools need to know

And in addition to looking at how things change over time, we looked at the variation among young people.

Indeed, that variation has ended up being much more interesting than the small changes that occur over time that you would expect.

So the variation was larger than you expected?

It’s much more marked than we could have anticipated. At the bottom of the distribution are young people who may be 10, 12, 14 or even 16 years old who are reading at about the level you would expect of an average six- to nine-year-old.

And that’s about 16 to 17 per cent of the population, which maps on quite neatly to the group of students that show up in international assessments like Pisa [the Programme for International Student Assessment] as not having adequate reading ability.

And for teachers that’s a huge challenge.

So if you’ve got a class of Year 6 or Year 8 or Year 10 students in front of you, you’ve got this huge variation in terms of what they’re bringing to any reading task that you might give them.

That variation actually looks quite similar across those age groups, though the demands of the curriculum are very different. And from that we realised that more professional development was needed.

This brings us to the new DfE-promoted training resources. What is the objective with this training package?

This isn’t a training package that will solve everything we might want to solve about secondary reading. That’s not the goal.

The goal is to upskill the workforce so that everyone has a better understanding of reading, and we have an environment that is much more supportive of reading.

We want to build confidence and capacity and capability and knowledge so that every teacher feels that they can be a teacher of reading and that they can support reading.

It’s partly about getting that buy-in from secondary teachers; that understanding that this is something that we all need to be thinking about. It doesn’t matter whether we’re a teacher of maths or science or geography or English, reading is something that’s important for every curriculum subject. And so it’s something that we all need to be conscious of.

We don’t all need to be experts, but we do all need to be conscious of it.

I’ve spent the past 10 years-plus doing a lot of CPD with teachers, so the training very much builds on the knowledge of what teachers tell me that they want to know or need to know.

Is that why you have kept the training short, at just an hour?

We know the barriers and challenges around time for CPD, and we know that workload issues are crazy. So I was trying to think, “OK, well, how can we do something that’s effective at building confidence and capability but also can actually be done by schools and teachers?”

I homed in on this idea of developing a one-hour video. We piloted the training to make sure that it was effective in raising confidence and capability and was accessible, feasible and acceptable. And the pilot data showed that all of those things were positive.

The pilot also led to you tweaking the model, didn’t it?

The main change after the pilot was that we created two programmes, one for school leaders and one for teachers.

So what the training looks like now is a package for school leaders with some guidance they can read and videos for them to watch suggesting what we think they need to know and some delivery support so that they can bring teachers in their schools into this, as well as some ideas for how they might deliver it at scale and make it accessible to their staff.

Then there’s a separate package for teachers and teaching assistants, which again includes guidance and videos. It’s really about what we think might benefit them to know from the research, and some useful, evidence-based strategies that they can use with any student in any classroom in any subject.

So are the strategies for use in interventions or the standard classroom?

They are all universal strategies, so they’re all designed to be used in the mainstream classroom.

You could use them in small groups and you could use them independently, but we wanted to provide universal quality-first teaching strategies that a maths teacher can use, a design and technology teacher can use, an art teacher can use in their lesson, and they’re just part of that toolkit.

The strategies will benefit every reader, but may disproportionately benefit those who have reading needs.

If you are introducing new vocabulary items with more than one meaning, for example, you might have students in the class who have no knowledge of the word or have heard the word before or know one meaning of the word.

When you define that word, they will learn depending on where they are at: those students who know something about that word can add depth, but those who don’t know anything about it have now been exposed to it, building their store of words.

At this point, it’s all about how staff can upskill students so that they have some frameworks to use when they approach a new text.

“It’s about having that confidence to really go after a text actively and trying to construct that meaning”

It’s also about reminding students that comprehension is an active process; it’s not something we do passively.

We often don’t understand something that we’re reading the first time and have to read it several times. That can happen to anyone because it’s dependent on not just your reading knowledge and skills, but also what it’s about and your background knowledge and all sorts of things.

So it’s about having that confidence to really go after a text actively and trying to construct that meaning.

Has confidence come up as a key issue for young people who struggle with reading?

I understand from working with teachers that secondary school students who are not so confident about reading often think that it’s a magic thing that everybody else can do and they can’t.

They don’t see that often those very skilled readers are working really hard to make that text comprehensible to them and to make it come to them, to create that mental model of the text.

You mentioned vocabulary knowledge before. Why is that important to highlight?

The longitudinal research didn’t only look at reading, but also vocabulary. And again, we found that huge variation. What that means is that we can’t assume that students are going to know the words they need to know for any given text.

It’s not just about technical terms. It’s also about the words we use to define those words, and those can be everyday words. We can’t assume that everybody in front of us has all of the words that we might be using.

So in the training there are some strategies that are about vocabulary, some around choosing texts, some about the ways that you might read with your class, and others about building comprehension strategies, reminding [teachers] they might actively need to do things with the text.

And the aim is for non-English specialists to develop their skills in teaching reading?

It’s designed for all secondary teachers, and school leaders and teaching assistants, too. Anyone who has had a lot of training in reading might find that these are strategies they already know, but the important thing is that they are not strategies that every secondary teacher knows about.

And the purpose of the training is to try to give every secondary teacher just that little bit more knowledge and, therefore, confidence.

Is the training going to develop in the future?

The resources are going to be openly available and we’ve structured it to be future-proof, so the videos contain information that we think is very unlikely to change: information about the research and about the strategies that are very well established.

The guidance has all of the stuff that goes around that and it’s very easy to change and update. So if we find there are things that we need to add, we can add them.

It is clear that the government is going to be investing more money in secondary reading, and I think there are going to be lots of other things that will come after this and partly off the back of this, that I’m sure will be fantastically useful.

This is just the first step and it’s about doing what we can do. It will hopefully make a big change without demanding too much time from busy teachers.

Visit Jessie Ricketts’ website for more information about the training, to sign up to trial the training or to find links to the resources when they are launched

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