Education secretary Bridget Phillipson is set to announce a reading assessment to be taken by all pupils in Year 8. There are concerns that a significant number of low income white British pupils are falling behind in literacy, and this measure aims to identify them and…
and what?
The UK is a world leader in reading research. From the pioneering work of Snowling and Hulme on phonological awareness, Cain and Oakhill on reading comprehension and Duff et al on language intervention, research has been unequivocal that reading difficulties can be ameliorated with targeted intervention. We know how to assess all manner of literacy difficulties, how to plan and monitor successful interventions, and how life changing they can be to receive.
We just don’t fund them.
The SEN code of practice has a protocol to escalate learning concerns called the assess-plan-do-review cycle. In theory, it should respond to assessment concerns by planning interventions of increasing specificity, provide them (do) and then review their efficacy. If they were successful - super. If not, it suggests something more needs to be done: increase the frequency, the session length, the overall intervention duration, and target a finer grained skill. We know this because randomised controlled trails, the gold standard in research studies, has proven that these interventions improve reading.
So why is this so hard to achieve? Schools face two main obstacles.
Timetabling: when would this happen? What other subject should a pupil miss?
Staffing: Who should provide this? How skilled do they need to be? How trained in a particular intervention protocol? Who is paying their salary? Do they have other tasks?
This becomes more difficult in secondary school. There are fewer random controlled trials on adolescent literacy interventions. The threat of GCSEs looms, which acts as a deterrent to timetabling; to meet national targets, teaching time focuses on skills development, those skills being ones which will be assessed - and reflect school success.
One thing that is not an obstacle? Knowing who would benefit from intervention. There is also a raft of research suggesting that most teachers are skilled at identifying who is in need of additional support, even if they don’t know what that support would look like, do not have the time to implement it nor feel comfortable implementing it themselves. I don’t have data on the cost of rolling out this national assessment, but I do know that if you want to know who is likely to fail a reading assessment in Year 8, the most economical way to determine this would be to ask a Year 5 teacher.
Assessment is just one part of the assess-plan-do-review cycle for SEN. If you want to ensure kids in Year 8 can read, invest in KS2 intervention.