Reading seems easy to those who do it well. But it’s not. Right now, as you spend a mere 250 milliseconds fixating on each word you are reading, you are also near-instantly cohering each sound and word and connecting it with a vast wealth of background knowledge.

That ability is not the product of a process of natural evolution: someone has had to teach you to do it. They have had to manipulate your non-reading brain into a state in which it can bring multiple pieces of the reading puzzle together, enabling you to read fluently and confidently and access all the benefits that such a skill offers.

In schools, we think we have got pretty good at that teaching process; we feel as though we know the steps we need to take and the order we need to take them in. However, there is good evidence that some of the vital pieces in the reading puzzle are clearly not slotting into place for both pupils and teachers alike.

We need to fix that in our classrooms, and right now we need to make sure we are extra clear about our aims and responsibilities while we are guiding learning at home.

The evidence that there is an issue is chastening. Around 57 per cent of adults read at the level of a GCSE pass, whereas 15 per cent of adults still read at a primary school level (Skills for Life Survey, 2011). The implications of adult illiteracy can be ruinous for individuals and for our society.

We also know that more than a quarter of Year 6 pupils don’t go on to read at the “expected standard” and there is evidence that this issue persists into secondary school. Recently, an analysis of a large sample of more than 370,000 pupils in England revealed that a quarter of all 15-year-olds have a reading age of 12.

The blunt implication is that far too many students will not be able to make sense of the complex reading demanded by their GCSE examinations. So what’s going wrong?

The first issue is knowledge: we should ask whether teachers are trained enough to tackle the challenge of teaching reading.

Reading is the core skill for children to learn if they are to succeed academically, yet teachers don’t receive as much training on the basic theory of reading compared with their international counterparts (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, 2016). Though primary teachers receive a lot of instruction about phonics and how to teach reading development, they are overworked and are often under-resourced at the same time. There is little time to think beyond those first two puzzle pieces.

As pupils advance through school, they experience a gradual but unrelenting increase in the reading challenge. Crucially, though, as primary school pupils make the leap to secondary school, many teachers prove less skilled in teaching reading. Though they are proficient teachers of physics or geography or computer science, invariably they are less well trained in teaching the nuances of reading in that self-same domain.

Linked to all of the above is the fact that schools at all phases are prone to fads and fashions when it comes to literacy.

So what should be happening? Below, I outline the different pieces of the reading puzzle that every teacher (and perhaps parent) should know.

Puzzle piece number 1: Putting phonics first

Few aspects of reading inspire debate like phonics. Unfortunately, the vehement arguments and long-standing “reading wars” don’t prove very useful for busy teachers looking to improve their teaching of reading.

The evidence stacks up in support of structured phonics and most primary teachers would agree with Snow and Juel (2005) that it is “helpful for all children, harmful for none, and crucial for some.”

But are we doing phonics properly?

Most primary school teachers have their own repertoire for daily phonics sessions, systematically teaching the matching of letters to sounds, wedded to multisensory approaches including rhyming, wordplay and so on. That said, given that not all phonics programmes are equally as successful in high-quality trials, we need to support teachers to implement their phonics approaches with care.

We also need to upskill secondary teachers in phonics. Though it is common for there to be a significant proportion of secondary school students who may struggle with decoding and lifting words from the page (particularly in key stage 3), it is more common for nearly all of their teachers to know next to nothing about phonics instruction. Some basic training for secondary teachers to understand the code-breaking that our students undertake as they read should be a prerequisite.

And lastly, we also need to ensure that our messaging about reading is clear: phonics alone is not enough. We need to support teachers to consider “phonics and …”. We then broaden the focus of reading development to vocabulary, reading comprehension, fluency and more. Phonics is rightly characterised in primary school as very important, but it is still only a part of the bigger reading puzzle, as we shall see.

Puzzle piece number 2: Connecting vocabulary to the bigger picture

Over the past couple of years, vocabulary has gained a much more prominent place in a teacher’s view of the reading puzzle. And as the “vocabulary gap” became much more visible, practical strategies proliferated.

Though the importance of vocabulary to comprehension is both incontrovertible and obvious, how you best teach it is less certain.

It is easy to be seduced by quick fixes. For example, word walls and “word of the week” can too easily prove a fig leaf for vocabulary development, with the likelihood of actually improving comprehension proving rather low.

Similarly, the assumption that simply reading more will help all pupils to acquire the complex academic language of school has been challenged. The evidence that our pupils need knowledge of anything between 95-98 per cent of the words in a given text to ensure full comprehension has proved a challenge to many teachers. Not only that, but secondary school teachers have also become wise to how word knowledge connects with knowledge of the world - you can’t understand the word if you don’t understand the context of its use.

Those who recognise these issues may opt for explicitly teaching vocabulary, but how well is it integrated into the big picture of reading complex texts? The jury is still out.

Teachers could deploy strategies like the teaching of word parts (morphology) and word histories (etymology). In doing so, they offer independent word-learning strategies. So, teaching the Greek roots in science - eg, “bio”, “photo” and “meta” - can offer pupils ways to make more connections to new words.

We are less likely to be successful if we merely memorise terminology and definitions from a “knowledge organiser”. That is unlikely to unlock understanding when you are reading related words that do not appear on that list.

Clearly, this is an area where we need more research and more sharing of best practice.

Puzzle piece number 3: All-conquering knowledge

As mentioned above, what you already know and bring to any text that you read in a classroom is vital to the act of reading comprehension.

For example, a student reading, in geography, a case study of sanitation in India will create a mental model of the text that is informed by all their insights and conceptions (and misconceptions) about the culture, infrastructure, food and people (and so on) of the country, as well as the words on the page. If you have had the opportunity to visit India, or you have Indian extended family, that is likely to be beneficial for your attempt at understanding the given text.

As such, background knowledge in reading has come to the foreground as an integral piece of the reading big picture. Well-known researcher Daniel Willingham has popularised a seminal study from the 1980s on the “Effect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers’ memory of the text”.

In short, the study showed how those pupils who had better background about baseball remembered and understood more about the baseball texts than “good readers” who had less background knowledge. So far, so obvious.

However, a lot of practice in schools seems to ignore this: working towards Sats, for example, often means a focus on disembodied short texts propped up with acronyms and reading skills that pay scant attention to building up the background knowledge of our young readers.

So, what should we be doing? Perhaps it is a broader study of subjects like geography, history and RE that will boost reading scores more than adding yet more time to practising English language exercises and revising short passages of text with too little attention to the “what” of reading.

How we build a rich curriculum of reading materials should become a priority for teachers, with the current obsession with curriculum development proving an apt vehicle to concentrate on the means to access that world of knowledge.

Puzzle piece number 4: But what about reading strategies?

The above obsession with background knowledge has diminished the importance of reading comprehension strategies in the eyes of some experts. For example, Willingham claims that reading-comprehension strategies are a “bag of tricks” that can be quickly learned.

However, if we stick to the evidence on reading, there is long-standing support and robust evidence for the value of teaching our pupils to be strategic readers. We need to be very careful not to focus too much on any one piece of the puzzle at the risk of overlooking other vital pieces.

Indeed, being a skilled reader requires knowledge as well as an armoury of reading strategies.

Reading-strategy instruction is particularly important for weaker readers. Below-average readers don’t mobilise the most basic strategies for reading - such as rereading to check understanding, or skimming for the gist of the text - consistently. Therefore, being explicit with reading strategies helps.

The “reciprocal reading” approach has proved a popular and successful way to support our pupils as strategic, knowledgeable readers. Indeed, a large recent Education Endowment Foundation trial involving key stage 2 pupils showed that this approach to targeting reading strategies improved reading - especially for groups of struggling readers. Put simply, the “reciprocal reading” model scaffolds the strategies of prediction, summarising, questioning and clarifying, so that pupils are trained to take on these roles themselves as they move to reading collaboratively, then independently.

The strategic act of summarising may prove a central piece in the reading puzzle. It is described by literacy expert Tim Shanahan as “the most powerful” of literacy activities for pupils. Whether it is retelling stories, covering the three most important ideas from a GCSE geography case study or summarising a story in six words, that consolidation of knowledge and understanding matters.

It can be helpful to think, particularly for older pupils, how such strategies become subject-specific. In mathematics, rereading and questioning a complex word problem may be key, whereas in history you may deploy the strategy of “sourcing” - whereby you focus specifically on the author of the source and their reliability and message.

Puzzle piece 5: Fluency - the missing piece?

Even if you are getting phonics and reading comprehension right, how are you addressing that vital bridge between decoding - lifting words off the page - and reading fluency?

This can often be a marginal focus in primary school and then completely ignored by uninformed secondary school teachers.

Even when it is not ignored, too often, it is misunderstood. It can be viewed narrowly as merely the speed, or rate, of word reading. The Department for Education deems 90 words per minute as a benchmark for seven-year-olds. As such, speed has become an easy proxy for effective reading. Unsurprisingly, it isn’t that simple.

Reading fluency is best described as a combination of pace and also expression/volume, phrasing and smoothness. Tim Rasinski offers the excellent multidimensional fluency scale - which breaks down fluency in a handy assessment - that every teacher can pick up online and use with their pupils with ease (see bit.ly/FluencyScale).

Whether the pupils are in Year 1 or Year 11, the approaches can make a difference. For example, choral reading, echo reading (the teacher modelling the reading, before being echoed by pupils) or paired reading can explicitly enhance fluency.

At the same time as embracing these techniques, we should banish any limited notion of the benefits of encouraging speed reading: it is a fatuous myth.

So, how should all these pieces of the puzzle join together? The leadership challenge is clear: create a robust reading culture; promote reading every day; foster strategic readers; and train teachers to seize every opportunity to cultivate reading comprehension. With support, teachers will begin to see the big picture of reading with new eyes.

We need everyone to buy into this and for everyone to understand that they have responsibility to continue to develop readers right up to the age of 16 and in every subject.

The desire to simplify the process of reading, and to believe it to be finished at a certain point, is alluring. But as stated at the start: reading is hard. So we need to work hard to make sure every child can do it.

Alex Quigley is an experienced teacher, who works as national content manager at the Education Endowment Foundation. This article is based on his new book, Closing the Reading Gap, which shares practical strategies to help teachers to better understand the reading barriers of pupils, and to make challenging academic reading accessible

This article originally appeared in the 24 April 2020 issue under the headline “How to solve the reading puzzle”