Improve reading outcomes for secondary students with Reading Plus

Are you concerned your students don’t have the vocabulary knowledge to access the KS3/4 curriculum?

You’re not alone. Many of our customers approach us because they’re challenged with:

Concerns that students reading below level on entry to secondary school will be unable to catch up.
Closing the reading gap with disadvantaged students.
Students who cannot comprehend complex language used in the KS3/KS4 texts.
Students don’t have the vocabulary knowledge to be able to focus on comprehension.
A high proportion of EAL students struggle to access the curriculum.
Understanding and differentiating instruction for each student’s reading ability (a cross-curricular issue).
Older students who have low levels of engagement.

How does Reading Plus match the curriculum?

The programme supports the English programmes of study for students to:

Read easily, fluently, and with a good understanding.
Develop the habit of reading widely and often – for pleasure and information.
Acquire a wide vocabulary.
Appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage.

Request a free four-week pilot

Improving students' fluency

Reading Plus uses the patented Reading Plus Guided Window to support the development of reading fluency. This scaffolds the reading experience by guiding the reader's eyes left-to-right across a page utilising a moving box. The speed is specific to each student and increases when the student demonstrates mastery.

This scaffold changes how students approach the text while gradually and effectively increasing the rate at which they can read it with good comprehension and stamina.

This feature helps secondary students with the transition to increased text complexity from KS2 to KS3/4, where language and vocabulary are more complex.

Informing strategies

Reading Plus supplies easy-to-access data-driven reports. From the dashboard on Reading Plus, leaders and teachers can access student and class analytics and reports that inform planning, grouping and reading progress. Our Customer Support Team provide additional free reports to support schools, making it easier to evidence impact and inform strategies. These include:

• Skills Reports.
• Periodic progress monitoring.

Transforming teacher workload

For teachers, time is saved assessing, planning, identifying where students need support, measuring progress, and researching and planning specific interventions.

Hear it from one of our teachers – Gaurav Dubay, Head of English at King Edwards VI Handsworth Grammar School and Evidence Lead in Education (ELE) with The EEF. He explains:

“Reading Plus helps us to focus on the components of reading rather than something arbitrary like reading age. It means we can intervene with authority at the classroom level – evidence suggests this has the greatest impact.

Several Year 8 students needed support in the skill of ‘reasoning and rhetoric’, and the interventions were helpful. We then adapted our internal assessments to reflect the need for additional teaching here.”

Impact on learning in the classroom

Reading Plus presents students with texts of between 500-2,500 words and tests their deeper understanding with ten questions after each completion. Each lesson can be completed in 15 minutes, and students can see their scores instantly. This immediacy in seeing their results, the engaging nature of the text, the choice and control over text selections, and the scaffolding for struggling readers all lead to students experiencing success and wanting to read.

Reading Plus prepares KS3 students for the more complex KS4 texts by improving reading fluency, stamina, and comprehension.

The students have all shown progress as the programme has progressed, and it has created a positive reading routine for participants. Improved reading skills will provide greater access to the KS4 curriculum.

Head of English, Lord Lawson of Beamish Academy.
Using Reading Plus has helped pupils be better prepared for KS4 because of the improvement in reading skills the programme has provided. The development of their skills will provide greater access to the KS4 curriculum. The programme makes it very easy to see just how each student is doing. Due to progress data being readily available on Reading Plus, it is easy to measure impact throughout the course. It provides very detailed group and student reports on progress.

Alison Jacobson, Transition, SEN and Literacy Teacher, Lord Lawson of Beamish Academy
All pupils between Year 3 and Year 7 were given access to Reading Plus during remote learning. It was timetabled regularly throughout the week, with children encouraged to do extra sessions when they could. The uptake was excellent, and engagement across the year groups was high. The children were and still are very enthusiastic about the programme and enjoy the sessions.

Vanessa Stewart, Assistant Principal, Kings Priory School
As an English Leader, one of the things I like the most about Reading Plus is the level of tailored and personalised data it provides for each student. Data from the reporting feature also meant that teachers could target students making. By using Reading Plus, we feel that students who transition into KS4 are better prepared in their increased fluency and the range of texts they can access.

Andrea Creegan, Curriculum Lead of English, Farringdon Community Academy