Thought Leadership Roundtables

At the first Transforming Education Alliance roundtable event in Birmingham, educators and literacy specialists gathered to discuss urgent issues surrounding literacy across Midlands schools. Attendees explored the complexities impacting learners’ reading abilities - from challenges caused by COVID-19 disruptions, to the lack of a unified literacy approach in schools. This article highlights the main obstacles and highlights ten ways that schools can support literacy improvement.

Key challenges identified

Limited responsibility beyond the English department - Literacy needs to be a priority across all subjects. Other departments, like science, often lack guidance on how to incorporate literacy into their curriculum.

No consistent literacy structure - Unlike other subjects, literacy lacks a standard, mastery-based framework. A structured approach would help students build a strong foundation as they progress from primary to secondary school.

COVID-19's impact on literacy levels - COVID-19 disruptions left significant gaps in literacy skills, especially in reading comprehension, as students spent less time in classrooms and literacy wasn’t always prioritised during remote learning.

Phonics vs. comprehension challenges - Students may pass phonics tests but still struggle with comprehension. It’s essential to continue phonics support in KS2 and KS3 while providing strategies to build understanding.

Wide range of literacy levels in each cohort - Secondary teachers face the challenge of supporting students with varied literacy levels within the same classroom, requiring adaptable resources and structured interventions.

Teachers unprepared as literacy specialists - Resources and training for literacy support are limited, and many materials aren’t well-suited to students who struggle the most with reading.

Limited parental support for reading - Parents who had negative school experiences often don’t encourage reading at home, leaving a crucial gap in support outside the classroom.

Lack of exposure to diverse reading materials - Students need access to a variety of text types and perspectives to improve vocabulary and comprehension, yet exposure to diverse materials is limited.

Inadequate diversity in teaching texts - Texts in the curriculum don’t always reflect the diversity of the student population, making it harder for some students to engage and relate.

Focus on testing over comprehension - Reading is often presented as an exam-focused task rather than an enjoyable activity. This limits students’ experience of reading for pleasure and may deter a lifelong love of reading.

The group also discussed the idea of ‘reading for pleasure’ and whether this terminology was constructive or useful in today’s classroom.

Ten key takeaways for supporting literacy in the Midlands

1. Create a school-wide culture of literacy

Literacy should be a priority across the school. Engaging every department, not just English, helps reinforce vocabulary and comprehension within each subject area. Departments need to work together on vocabulary, as the words students learn in one subject could have a very different meaning in another.

2. Expand the literacy team beyond English teachers

Creating a literacy team that includes teachers from multiple departments, not just English, can help embed literacy skills across subjects. This approach allows science, history, and other teachers to actively reinforce reading and vocabulary within their subjects, making literacy truly school-wide.

3. Build a structured literacy curriculum

Schools need a structured approach that emphasises literacy mastery from primary to secondary levels. Bridging this gap will help students build essential reading skills. Pedagogy is vital to this. Learning needs to be embedded and scaffolded, continually asking questions to ensure understanding. Bedrock provides such a curriculum, taking a significant amount of pressure off schools to develop their own.

4. Connect primary and secondary schools

To address the challenge of year 7s coming into secondary schools with a huge difference in ability, secondary schools should be engaging feeder schools on literacy. This relationship works both ways. Extending phonics support beyond primary school can help secondary schools, especially for learners who struggle with fluency and understanding.

5. Interventions need to be longer term

Prioritise proven literacy interventions that provide consistent, ongoing support. Many strategies fall down as they don’t have the consistency and longevity needed to build stronger readers.

6. Engage parents in the literacy journey

Schools should offer workshops and resources to help parents support reading at home, reframing it as a positive activity rather than a chore. To engage parents, schools need to realise that many parents have not had a good experience with their schooling. Breaking this down is critical to effectively engaging them.

7. Introduce more diverse reading materials

Texts that reflect a wide range of perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences can help engage students from different cultural backgrounds and make literacy feel more relevant. We need to ensure learners feel immersed in literacy and diverse non-fictional and fictional characters are key to this. Ensuring we have literature with characters and authors from many perspectives and backgrounds is vital to supporting a love of reading.

8. Encourage active literacy through oracy

Literacy can be improved by fostering discussion and oracy. Creating opportunities for students to speak about texts and use academic vocabulary in conversation can deepen comprehension. As one attendee said, to improve literacy “the classroom cannot be a place of silence”.

9. Prioritise tier 2 vocabulary across subjects

Emphasising tier 2 words—high-frequency academic vocabulary that appears across subjects—can significantly improve comprehension and exam performance. By integrating these words consistently across the curriculum, schools can build students’ understanding and usage of essential vocabulary, creating a stronger foundation for literacy across all subjects.

10. Bring joy back to reading

Above all, it’s crucial to make reading enjoyable again. As one speaker noted, “We need to bring the joy back to reading.” By making reading a pleasurable experience, we can encourage students to explore texts with curiosity and enthusiasm, setting them up for lifelong literacy success.

We dive deeper into these themes and many more in our best practice whitepaper, scheduled for release in February 2025.

Keen to be part of the community driving transformational educational outcomes through language? Join the Transforming Education Alliance today. We hope to see you at our next event.