In 2016, I was given a gift. It wasn’t the fresh slate of a new 14-19 studio school to get my teeth into (though I did have that), and it wasn’t having the opportunity to build up the English department from scratch (though I did do that) - it was something seemingly more mundane: 50 minutes on the timetable for all our Year 10 students to read for pleasure.

Admittedly, it did not feel like a gift at the time. We began life in temporary buildings and there we stayed for seven months. Any romantic notions of teenagers sitting quietly reading a book immediately dissipated. In reality, we endured a gruelling 50 minutes trying to get a rabble of unruly 14-year-olds to sit still and be quiet. No reading took place.

So, how could we continue to justify investing so heavily in resource and time for this 50-minute session without seeing any impact? It looked and felt very much like a filler, not a strategic curriculum decision.

Unwilling to admit defeat, we analysed the problem. We knew that any tokenistic attempt to get our students reading just wouldn’t cut it and that simply having this time on the timetable wouldn’t create the culture of reading that we wanted at our school. We also knew that poor reading had huge knock-on effects.

In Thinking Reading (2018), James and Dianne Murphy explain how poor readers are more likely to experience low self-esteem and poor mental health, as well as achieving much lower academic outcomes. Frighteningly, they also cite an estimate from the National Literacy Trust that by age 11, 20 per cent of children are not reading well enough to begin their secondary education and that slow academic progress is inevitable if robust interventions are not put in place.

As we explored further, it soon became clear that we needed to teach our students to read before they could read to learn - the latter ability being a dangerous assumption we sometimes make when students start secondary school.

We faced a number of different challenges in this respect: our students start with us in Year 10 and typically each new cohort is about 70 per cent boys; our school is in an area of high social deprivation with low levels of literacy; and we have high numbers of students with English as an additional language (EAL). The Department for Education report Research evidence on reading for pleasure states that students enjoy reading less as they get older; boys enjoy reading less than girls; and children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds read less for enjoyment than those from more privileged social classes.

Guide on the side

These challenges were reflected in our data. In 2017, 68 per cent of our Year 10 students had a reading age of below 13, 50 per cent were below the reading age of 12 and 23 per cent were under a reading age of 9. While reading ages alone don’t give the whole picture, and other measures such as reading fluency are important, these gave us an indication of how much work we had to do to get our students reading well.

So, what did we do?

I was not convinced that investing heavily in a licensed reading programme or adopting a DEAR (drop everything and read) strategy was right for us. From my observations of approaches like these, they rely too heavily on student compliance and staff buy-in. While students in Years 7 and 8 might engage positively, inevitably this will decrease as they get older, and we know that students who like reading will read - the rest won’t. But what if a teacher was reading with them?

In September 2018, we launched our guided reading programme, based on a primary school model, but adapted for our students and our context. In small groups, students would read together with a teacher and discuss what they were reading afterwards. This would happen in those 50 minutes we had each week on the timetable.

To make this work, we had to select the right books, and I am still not sure we have this absolutely correct. We consulted staff and we identified gaps in our students’ general knowledge and - dare I say - cultural capital. We wanted students to be able to respond emotionally to texts, to relate what they read to their own experience and to learn new things. With the increasing focus on the importance of knowledge acquisition, we also had an opportunity to complement what was happening in the classroom by choosing books that supported learning in other parts of the school.

The choices we made reflected all this, but we also deliberately chose texts that would require students to overcome the “hump” of the first 50 pages. So our choices so far include Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, Alex Wheatle’s Crongton Knights, Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Roald Dahl’s Skin and Other Stories.

The book choice was just one part of the process, of course. Students are often scared of reading aloud and have a fear of failure if they don’t recognise a word or they stumble over complex syntax or dialogue. So we set up the groups according to reading age, with seven to 10 students in each one. We were clear from that start that guided reading sessions were low threat and high challenge: there would be no testing, only an expectation that everyone read aloud every week, modelled by teachers.

Also key was how to teach reading. It was important for us to ensure that our students were becoming what American psychologist Hollis Scarborough calls “increasingly strategic” in their reading. At age 14, the large majority are skilled at the word recognition strands of Scarborough’s “reading rope”, but the strands that make up full language comprehension are often very patchy.

Alex Quigley, national content manager at the Education Endowment Foundation, recently wrote in Tes that word knowledge connects with knowledge of the world. Like many schools, we have also increased our focus on vocabulary, and our guided reading programme includes tier 2 vocabulary lists, which students use in their discussions at the end of each session, again modelled by teachers. So, the sessions have a clear three-part structure:

1. Recap from last lesson.

2. Read aloud.

3. Show understanding and use new vocabulary.

We believe that this structure fosters both reading enjoyment and increased comprehension and fluency.

We made it clear that these were not English lessons. I was fortunate to be in the position of making timetabling decisions; as such, I was able to staff the guided reading sessions with teachers from different disciplines, including from our personal coaching team. The message here was that all staff share the responsibility for getting our students to read, and that guided reading was an important part of this.

Taken as read

The teachers were all for it, but what about the students? On their induction day at the start of the year, we explain to Year 10 the reasons behind their guided reading lessons; we give them the statistics and we make our expectations clear. While the unfamiliarity is unsettling at first, weekly guided reading soon becomes part of the daily conversation and its importance is valued alongside GCSE and BTEC subjects.

And the results speak for themselves. Though it is important to note that guided reading was just one strand of the work we have done around literacy, reading age tests taken in June 2019 showed that, on average, students had made 20 months of progress, with the most pleasing results being for students with EAL or with reading ages of 12 or below on arrival the previous year. Perhaps even more importantly, student surveys revealed much more positive attitudes towards reading at the end of the year. It turns out that teenagers might not choose to read on their own but they actually quite like it when they do it in a group, when they are not examined on it and when they can see the benefits clearly.

Transforming 50 minutes of crowd control into 50 minutes of calm and considered reading for pleasure has started to feel like the gift this book-loving English teacher was given in September 2016.

Victoria Griffin is vice-principal at Logic Studio School in Feltham, south-west London

This article originally appeared in the 3 July 2020 issue under the headline “Struggling to get teens reading for fun? I’ll guide you through it”