I have long advocated for reading assessment in secondary schools to help teachers make the right decisions about who finds reading challenging and how to support them. 

Yet when I saw reports that the Department for Education plans to introduce a reading assessment in Year 8, certain questions immediately came to mind, the most important being: what is this assessment for?

My research with Dr Laura Shapiro has shown that reading is extremely variable in teenagers, reading engagement is low and that there are high levels of reading need. 

Whether a new Year 8 assessment would be useful depends on a number of things. 

How is reading defined?

The first question is how the assessment would define reading. Will it focus on proficiency? On reading engagement? On English as a discipline, or a curriculum subject? 

Determining this isn’t straightforward. For example, “reading proficiency” encompasses a complex set of knowledge skills that are needed to construct meaning from texts: reading words accurately and efficiently, understanding vocabulary, making inferences and so on. 

In my view, what we need to know is whether young people have the range of knowledge and skills that they need to access the curriculum.

Is the goal to identify low reading proficiency?

To ensure students have this level of reading proficiency, we need robust and precise data on whether there is a reading need and its nature, so that we can take a needs-based approach to deciding who needs what kind of support. 

To gather this information, we need norm-referenced assessments that determine where a pupil is in relation to their peers. Many secondary schools already buy in this kind of assessment to administer at secondary school entry, so if the government is planning to develop this kind of assessment, then this could actually save schools money.

But there are many challenges here. We would need to ensure that what is developed is at least as good as what schools are already doing. It is a huge undertaking to develop this kind of assessment, typically taking years and a big budget to ensure it is valid (aligned to the assessment goal), sensitive (able to distinguish between pupils across a huge range of ability) and reliable (consistent across pupils and time points). 

It’s also worth noting that if identifying reading needs is the aim, then Year 8 probably isn’t the right time to do this. Surely, it needs to happen as early as possible in secondary school so that support can be put in place as soon as possible.

Is the goal to track progress in English?

Tracking progress is also an important goal. However, in order to track progress we need to have a baseline. What would the baseline be here? 

One option would be Sats. Sats are criterion-referenced assessments, designed to indicate whether a pupil has met expected standards in the English curriculum at the end of primary school. They measure much more than reading and are not designed to measure whether pupils have the reading knowledge and skills that they need to access the secondary curriculum. 

To see progress, we would need the new assessment to be both aligned with Sats and to capture the secondary English curriculum. This would be complicated, as curriculum emphasis shifts from literacy (reading and writing) to English as a discipline as pupils move from primary to secondary school.

We also need to ask whether a new test is needed when schools are already tracking progress in English. And is Year 8 the right time to administer it? 

How will the data be used?

There is a reasonable concern that data from a new secondary assessment could be used to hold schools accountable. 

I would encourage extreme caution here. Shifting the dial on reading is not an easy task, especially once pupils get to secondary school. These are young people who have had a lot of reading instruction and who have been finding reading challenging for a long time. 

I work with so many schools where assessment data is effectively used to decide who needs reading support, what kind of support they need and whether that support is working. This depends on schools having the knowledge, capacity and resources to put in place appropriate support for students who perform poorly on any assessment that we administer. 

We know that the impact of this support can be transformative for young people and yet can look small in reading assessments. Evaluating schools on the basis of pupils’ reading scores is therefore likely to underestimate their hard work. 

Do we need a Year 8 reading assessment?

I do think that we need to make sure that we know who needs support with reading in secondary school. Primary schools are doing a fantastic job of teaching reading, identifying reading needs early and supporting those needs. 

However, this can never be enough for two reasons. First, early identified reading needs are often pervasive so we need to support these needs in primary school, secondary school and beyond. 

Second, some reading needs only emerge later when the challenge of reading changes. Primary-secondary transition marks a big shift in challenge. Reading must be used differently as students deepen their knowledge of curriculum subjects. A national test would help us to ensure that reading needs don’t go unnoticed and unsupported, though this would be most beneficial earlier in the secondary phase. 

It is also important to track progress and check that what we are doing is working in schools, but I’m not sure that a national assessment will help with this. 

In my experience, schools already do a fantastic job of identifying and supporting needs, monitoring progress and reflecting on their practices. If a new assessment is introduced, it must be focused and must build on what is already working well.

Professor Jessie Ricketts is director of the Language and Reading Acquisition (LARA) lab at Royal Holloway, University of London