London school shares how Reading Plus supports Ofsted requirements and SATs

Georgia Neath, Year 6 Class Teacher and Reading Subject Lead at Carpenters Primary School, shares all the ways Reading Plus has improved reading in her school – including inspiring individual stories, aiding SATs and meeting Ofsted’s expectations.

A reading programme that works

Reading Plus fits in with Ofsted’s focus on reading ages. The Lexiles Framework used by Reading Plus is a slightly more sophisticated way of analysing a child’s reading level and gives us the closest thing we have to a reading age with raw data.

It also produces SAT-style questions and hits all the core reading skills, like inference, summarising, retrieval, vocabulary, etc.

We knew that some children would fly through the programme without a problem. I’ve got some greater depth pupils who are now at Level J (Year 11), which I’d never seen before.

The fact that Reading Plus matches their age and ability has also really helped our lower-ability readers. The autonomy to choose what they want to read that day also helps to give children control over their own learning.

I don’t think we had a very clear understanding of the reading levels in Key Stage 2. In Key Stage 1, they’re very clear – with the phonics screening check, you’ve got that data. But, in KS2, all you have are termly tests and, obviously, for Year 6, that looks like SATs.

That’s been one of the benefits of Reading Plus – we can see that raw data for the children who engage.

Teacher enjoyment

I really like:

• The time it saves me as a full-time class teacher and also my colleagues as we no longer have to set and mark reading homework. Reading at home had always been a struggle – marking reading diaries, getting kids to write a decent comment, checking whether they’ve read was always quite tricky.
• We were able to scrap reading diaries in Key Stage 2, which also saved us money.
• That the data is there and detailed.
• That it’s an easy-to-use system.
• The certificates that we can print off. We really celebrate pupils’ receiving certificates, which they love. Anything we can do to highlight success and celebrate reading, we do.
• As the admin, I can oversee all of my Key Stage 2 classes, which enables me to have conversations with teachers about their pupils’ progression.
• That pupils get placed On Hold when they’re clicking too fast and not properly answering the questions. It forces children to slow down and think about what they’re reading. That’s been really helpful in developing their understanding.
• That pupils can choose their text – it’s been nice to give the children ownership over what they read.

Valuable reading data

Reading Plus’s data was very insightful for me. I used it to identify children for our volunteer partner organisation who come in to read one-on-one with children.

The Screening Report very easily gives an overview. For example, I know which children I need to focus on in my class core reading lessons. That was helpful, especially when you get a new class and don’t know them yet.