The Reading Ape

Research seems to conclude emphatically that ‘reading for pleasure’ has huge literacy-related, social and cultural benefits.  It apparently increases reading and writing attainment (OECD, 2000 and Krashen, 1993; Anderson et al, 1988; but also see Taylor et al., 1990); improves text comprehension and grammar (Cipielewski and Stanovich, 1992; Cox and Guthrie, 2001); improves vocabulary (Angelos and McGriff, 2002); improves general...

You want your students to go university.  Of course you do.  That's why you track them so carefully.  So what are you tracking?  Well, you track them against standardised scores and grade outcomes in the hope you can predict their SATs results and GCSE and A-level grades, but do you track their reading automaticity and fluency?

Thought not. 

In primary schools they track phonic competency until the end of year one (...

The phonics screening check at the end of Year 1 is arguably the most important assessment in primary education.  The ability to master the decoding of the English alphabetic code is fundamental to the development of reading automaticity and ultimately reading fluency and the phonics screening check assesses this mastery (NB phonics deniers and 'whole word' guessers please go away and read the research).

Well hold on a minut...

‘Once you learn to read you will be forever free,’ is the quotation by Frederick Douglass (2017, p1) that adorns numerous primary school libraries across England and who would disagree?  With 25% of young offenders having reading skills below that of the average seven-year-old and 60% of the prison population having literacy difficulties (Clark and Dugdale, 2008) the assertion might have more accurately quoted that an inability...

School-led school improvement?  Such a catchy title, such an enticing concept: great schools helping failing schools to improve.  The establishing of the Teaching School network and the academisation programme are entirely based on this delicious but fatally flawed abstraction.

But hold on one gold-darned minute  I hear you cry!  Who better to improve schools than those who operate within the system, who under...