To fit our school’s context and our pupils needs, we adapted his suggestions, enabling us to include a more diverse range of text types. Shanahan’s point is that reading aloud is valuable insofar as it improves students’ reading fluency, which is strongly associated with comprehension (e.g. see the EEF’s most recent guidance on literacy at key stage 2). But, Shanahan argues, students need large volumes of practice to improve reading fluency – taking turns one-at-a-time is ahighly inefficient way of providing this.

In addition, we decided that reading lessons would be separate to literacy lessons, with word reading and comprehension taught in the former, and writing skills taught in the latter. Reading widely and often increases pupils’ vocabulary because they encounter words they would rarely hear or use in everyday speech. Reading also feeds pupils’ imagination and opens up a treasure-house of wonder and joy for curious young minds. Redesigning our reading curriculum I started off by reading the Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance reports on literacy in EYFS, KS1 and KS2. I also found the following three books incredibly useful: We carried out a staff survey, asking questions about how often teachers read to their class and which text types they chose. We also surveyed pupils and asked then if they enjoyed reading, which types of texts they liked and if they read at home. Shanahan is Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chi­cago, and has led the US Government’s National Reading Panel. Recently on his blog, he fielded aquestion about the effectiveness of whole-class reading approaches, where one student reads aloud while their classmates follow thetextSkilled word reading involves both the speedy working out of the pronunciation of unfamiliar printed words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words. This means you can spend your science lesson practising scientific skills rather than researching. During the reading lesson pupils used their comprehension skills to answer VIPERS questions. Secondary Year 6 leavers - Covid-safe transition activities and ideas It's been a chaotic year but Year 6 children still deserve the best ending to their primary journey All pupils must be encouraged to read widely across both fiction and non-fiction to develop their knowledge of themselves and the world in which they live, to establish an appreciation and love of reading, and to gain knowledge across the curriculum.

Our end-of-KS2 results have been above the national average for many years and children were reading, so change didn’t seem urgent. In addition, different year group teachers were asking different types of reading comprehension questions: some used the ‘ VIPERS’ approach (vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanation, retrieval, summarise), while others used different approaches they’d found online. Comprehension skills develop through pupils’ experience of high-quality discussion with teachers, as well as from reading and discussing a range of stories, poems and non-fiction. Reading fiction and non-fiction It breaks the process down into four stages: explore, prepare, deliver, sustain. Reading for pleasure and reading & writing

Erica Woolway

We knew that the children in our school start significantly below where they should be in terms of speaking, listening and language development. The Education Endowment Foundation’s ‘Putting evidence to work’ guidance report was a really useful starting point for implementing change.