Reading the signals: monitoring reading improvement

How do you best secure a successful reading culture? How can you ensure pupils, and teachers, are reading better in every classroom? 

These questions about reading in classrooms are vital questions about how we monitor change and steer school improvement. 

Literacy leaders – including literacy leads in secondary schools, or reading leads in primary schools, or trust curriculum leads – know these questions well. You can build training programmes, implement new curricula, share resources, but you cannot mandate better reading in every classroom. 

Most leaders know the routine: you deliver training on Monday and observe classrooms a week later. The training is being interpreted in different ways by different teachers. Some are displaying what is known as ‘ceremonial conformity’. That is to say, we perform a practice the observer wants to see, before quietly shelving it. 

For reasons like this, monitoring change, and reading the signals of change, is tricky and difficulty. How do you understand how teachers are interpreting training, or delivering on the clever new teaching technique we are expecting them to trial and deploy? 

Though monitoring may not be the most exciting aspect of leadership or improvement, it may just be the most important step. More important even than delivering a training session, buying a new programme, or collecting data of impact. 

‘Reading culture’ is not a good measure of improvement

In the OFSTED framework, it describes reading as ‘foundational knowledge’. It inspects for the following: 

 “a strong culture of reading is embedded across the school, shown by pupils’ confidence and enjoyment of reading, which sets them up to be lifelong readers.”

We may nod in agreement about the importance of a ‘reading culture’ but be not the wiser about what it is or about how to monitor it. Leaders need to break down the fuzzy phrase into practices and ‘leading indicators’ of improving practice. For example, the following practices may be leading indicators of an evolving/improving ‘reading culture’:

• Who reads: Does the teacher model reading? Do they model rereading? Do they ensure a range of readers are well prepared to read and experience success? Are we tracking the span of readers in each class?
• Reading fluency: Do pupils get frequent experience or reading fluency practice e.g. echo reading, paired reading? It is well scaffolded? Is there a record of fluency? Are struggling readers identified for additional fluency practice? How are we using data about fluency to improve reading outcomes?
• Reading challenge: Are there high expectations of the text choices being read by pupils? Is experience and scaffolds for complex texts evident? How well do pupils read challenging texts beyond typical curriculum expectations?  How are weaker readers scaffolded to ensure more exposure to complex, extended texts?
• Reading volume: Do teachers promote reading every day? Do they seize opportunities for related reading across the curriculum? Are struggling readers given more opportunities to read beyond what is expected in class? How do we track this reading volume without resorting to expensive programmes?
• Supporting reading outside the classroom: What is the access to reading beyond the gates? How are disadvantaged pupils supported to access reading? How well is library data used? How is ‘reading for pleasure’ understood/supported/rewarded? How do we track wider reading and use it to make decisions? 

I’ve written recently about the value of standardised reading tests but also the challenges. Too often, all monitoring and evaluation comes back to the single data point of a reading age. It sounds accurate and reliable, but it isn’t monitoring, and it seldom leads to change and improvement without it being wedded to a more targeted of what is happening in lessons. Reading the signals requires both.

Steps to monitor reading  

The temptation with monitoring is to pursue more and more data. Instead, leaders should pursue a manageable and precise picture of changing behaviours and data. Here are meaningful steps to take:

1. Break down vague goals (like 'a positive reading culture’) into a small number of practices. The perfect is the enemy of the good here – pick a few manageable but meaningful practices you can observe.
2. Choose valuable signals. For each targeted practice pick a leading indicator and a lagging indicator. For instance, reading homework completion rates alongside standardised reading scores. 
3. Sample and check. Select a ‘little and often’ approach to lesson observations, 'book looks', or similar. Seek out trends, talk to teachers and pupils, before triangulating with other indicators. 
4. Make sense of the monitoring data and act. Without specified review windows, monitoring can go by the wayside. Make a manageable plan, review, then act. 

[Of course, each of these four steps could apply to any area of literacy monitoring, or indeed any area for school improvement].

Invariably, school leaders have too little time to monitor. Even just the administration burden of tests and assessments maxes out their bandwidth. With this in mind, we may aim to collect less but learn, and do, more. 

If we are spending any energy on training, planning, resources and more, monitoring is simply essential, otherwise we don’t know if our efforts are being well-spent. 

If we are not reading the signals and tracking leading indicators the glossy new programme or the existing new inset day may simply fade away and have little to no impact.