How we inspire teenagers to read
Rosie Whitham, our Director of Literacy, on the three strands of our secondary reading strategy and what has changed since it launched.
Reading has a problem in secondary schools. Some students arrive in Year 7 with a reading age well below where it needs to be, and many more have decided somewhere along the way that reading is not for them.
Rosie Whitham teaches English at The Brooksbank School and leads literacy across our secondary schools. In 2024 she built a three strand strategy to tackle both halves of that problem: students who cannot yet read fluently, students who can but do not want to, and the reading that every subject asks of them in the classroom.
The first strand was phonics, launched in September 2024 using Read Write Inc Fresh Start. Fifty-nine students arrived in our three secondary schools that year unable to read. Eighty-eight per cent of them went into Year 8 able to.
The second was Reading Routes, a reading for pleasure programme that sets students in Years 7, 8 and 9 a challenge of fifty-four books across nine genres, six a term. What makes it work is that it does not sit with the English department. PE teachers, mathematicians, scientists and historians all teach Reading Routes lessons, and senior leaders read the books too, so a conversation about a novel can happen with anyone in the corridor.
The third strand is disciplinary literacy: giving every subject its own set of strategies for handling the texts students meet in that classroom, because reading a source in history asks something different from reading a method in science.
“Literacy for me unlocks the doors for our young people. The ability to read something, understand something, and then take something individually out of that text is something that spans outside of education but undoubtedly has an impact on their outcomes in school.”
The thing that brings home to Rosie the impact of the strategies is not that eighty-eight per cent. It is the girl who had been through the phonics programme, had decided reading was not for her, and was then given a book pitched at her reading age. She started finding Rosie in the corridor each morning to report on the page she had read the night before, until the morning she came to say she had finished the whole thing.
