Are you looking for SATs preparation tips? Read below the highlights from our webinar where two experienced educators discussed real-life SATs concerns and tips to address these.
Year 6 teacher Jess Holstein discusses her current SATs practices and preparation with ex-educator of 10 years and Reading Development Consultant for DreamBox Reading Plus Lewis Crane – including where the online reading development programme Reading Plus fits within that provision.
Meet the speakers:
My name’s Lewis. I’m a Reading Development Consultant at Reading Solutions UK. I was a Key Stage 2 teacher for over a decade and a Year 6 teacher for about eight years.
I’m Jess Holstein. This is my 13th year of teaching. I am a current Year 6 teacher, but my experience is across both Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2. I’ve been lead on several subjects and I’m also the assessment coordinator for the school currently.
SATs challenges
LEWIS: What would you say the typical concerns for your pupils are in terms of the Reading paper?
JESS:
- Reading stamina and reading speed have always been a problem for us. We had quite a few children who weren’t able to complete the paper, particularly that third text, because they ran out of time.
- Equally, vocabulary. Our school is in an area that has a high deprivation index, so their entry points to EYFS are very low. The vocabulary gap is huge for a lot of our children.
- Third is their life experiences and background knowledge that they bring to reading. There have been some SATs papers, the 2016 paper, for example, about the dodo and last year’s tenrec. It hit us that they don’t have that experience.
SATs preparation
LEWIS: So, once you’ve identified these challenges, what things do you put in place?
JESS: We have a lot of different things that we do at the moment.
Quality first teaching: We make sure that we select challenging texts and always take time to pick apart vocabulary.
Targeted intervention: We look at their Reading Plus data to specifically see the percentage of comprehension in each Reading Content Domain and target the ones they struggle with. If there’s a general trend, the class teacher will run a whole class intervention. If it’s more bespoke, then we do some extra sessions in the afternoons or early morning boosters where we open our doors slightly earlier.
Oftentimes, pupils are working at 70%+ in some areas but have a specific area at 42% that is a real outlier, and you realise that is definitely going to be hindering their progress into that expected standard. It could be one strand that really is stopping them from being able to achieve that.
For those children who we’re concerned they’re not going to reach the expected standard or are significantly below age-related expectation, we implement targeted intervention in small group or one-to-one sessions.
That could be comprehension, or it could end up being fluency. Our children seem to really struggle with comparison, comparing within and across texts, so we often have several groups running for that skill.
Word of the day: To broaden vocabulary, we give children definitions of words and ask them to use them in sentences.
Regular independent study time: Reading Plus has really helped us facilitate this – because it’s pitched at their individual levels, everybody can be doing it simultaneously. Pupils can read independently, and we can monitor how they’re doing and what they’re achieving.
LEWIS: Would you be able to share how your past SATs results have compared to recent results?
JESS: In 2023, we were significantly below the national average, with:
- Around 56% EXS.
- Around 20% GD.
This was a year group where we’d only just started to pilot Reading Plus.
- 76% EXS – slightly above national, and we’re seeing that positive upward trend.
- 24% GD – again, this is an upward trend again for our school, so really positive.
LEWIS: Focusing on your SATs preparation as a whole, what strategies do you have in place to prepare your pupils for SATs?
JESS: We still focus on fluency in Year 6, which I know sometimes can be sort of left to the wayside – so things like echo reading and choral reading boost the speed at which they can scan a text.
We focus on reading domains with dedicated lessons to specific question types/domains. Sometimes, the answer isn’t what’s important to us; it’s how you would answer that question. If a question is asked in this specific way, what is it they’re asking us to look for? Where might we find that information? And then when we find it, what do we do with it?
Impact of Reading Plus
LEWIS: Can you tell us how you began to implement Reading Plus?
JESS: Our trust has a digital excellence strategy, so we’re always looking to enhance provision for our children across primaries and secondaries using digital technology.
Our Headteacher was introduced to Reading Plus and we tested it in Year 6 to see if its offering was appropriate for our children. And yes – it was exactly what we were looking for, so we rolled it out in Years 4 to 6. Partway through the year, Year 3 join in preparation for their movement into the upper years.
We’d used other reading programmes before with a great library of texts but they weren’t as structured as a SAT paper, for example. So, while they were getting a good breadth of reading lower down the school, once they reached Upper Key Stage 2, its effectiveness was much lower.
We’re now moving towards a trust-wide usage.
LEWIS: You guys have implemented Reading Plus so successfully – how have you managed to implement it to maximum effect?
JESS: I think we’re really lucky that our leaders champion it, first and foremost.
We have a dedicated Reading Plus lead – Karen, a HLTA in the Upper Years. She promotes the competitions Reading Solutions UK organise and is in charge of our weekly success display.
The attitude towards it is really positive – it’s a positive thing to do Reading Plus and the outcomes that we see are all positive.
LEWIS: We mentioned vocabulary, cultural capital and disciplinary knowledge. How has Reading Plus had an impact on these?
JESS: Understanding of vocabulary and context is improving. Instead of just working on words, your programme works on words in sentences, so context is key. They’re becoming actual useful things that children then use in their writing, for example.
There’s a lot more higher-level Tier Two and Tier Three vocabulary children are more confident at using, and more comfortable because they’ve been exposed to it.
The range of text topics Reading Plus provides is great. You’ve got it at your fingertips where they can choose by interest.
LEWIS: And the texts themselves are very context rich as well – new vocabulary is peppered in. Although it does have that separate side vocabulary lesson, the reading lessons alone are teaching a lot of vocabulary as well.
LEWIS: What impacts are you seeing in terms of automaticity and reading speed?
JESS: The speed children can complete a book has grown, definitely. The fact they’re skimming and scanning and text tracking better than they did before means they’re absorbing more material than they’ve ever read.
We’ve had a lot more children making it all the way to the end of the SATs paper, which was really great to see this year – and having time to go back and check their work.
We’re watching children in lessons able to keep the pace with each other – less children are being left behind.
LEWIS: And Reading Plus also gives you information about the children’s reading speed as well.
JESS: Yes – and information on who might need additional support. It’s a great tool for each class teacher to know who’s going to need that in the coming term.
LEWIS: The proficiency barrier obviously has a huge impact on engagement. How has Reading Plus helped with the reading motivation of those children?
JESS: For these children there is often the feeling of other children seeing what I’m doing and noticing my book looks different to somebody else’s. Reading Plus removes that element because what you are doing is so targeted to you. If you don’t want anybody to know what you’re doing, they won’t know.
It takes away that barrier of picking up a physical book. Some prefer that it’s tablet-based. But we make sure to keep that balance between physical books and accessing books through the tablet.
LEWIS: The fact that it is on a tablet or on a laptop can also be the initial engager.
JESS: Last year, one of our Year 3 parents came in and said, “I can’t believe it. My child put down his Xbox and chose to read Reading Plus on the tablet instead.” It was just incredible for somebody who would traditionally be not engaged in reading. That was a hook straight away, and it was something that he enjoyed doing.
LEWIS: What makes Reading Plus stand out from programmes you’ve tried in the past?
JESS: That free customer support is really important to us as professionals. The access to your team is really invaluable. Your support for us, whether it’s technical support or promoting the programme like the competitions that you run, is second to none.
The assessment data the programme provides is absolutely invaluable. We can see what our pupils are doing, how far they’ve come, the Lexile that they’re in, current reading speed – even this is how much time they’ve spent on the programme.
We see clear correlations between who’s completed their weekly tasks and their scaled scores in practice papers. There’s a direct positive correlation. And if they’ve not done as well as we thought, we look at Reading Plus data in pupil progress meetings to get to the crux of what is holding that person back.
We’ve got a wealth of evidence without the workload. I can see what they’ve achieved without having to mark anything. It frees me to then think about other things.
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When used as recommended, we expect students will:
- Make six months’ progress in comprehension.
- Increase their reading speed by 20 words per minute.