A new “common approach” to raise national reading and writing skills for students transitioning into Secondary schools will be based on research informed good practice and training led by a Psychology academic from Royal Holloway.

The UK Government’s Department for Education has just announced that £2 million in funding will be spent on increasing support for a "common approach" to reading and writing, with half of the money available for secondary schools “in the greatest need” to buy programmes to support struggling readers, and the other half will be spent on secondary and primary teacher training.

For secondary schools, training for secondary schools has been developed by Professor Jessie Ricketts from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London, who commented,

“We have worked closely with the Department for Education and a group of secondary teachers and school leaders to develop a short training programme of guidance and videos for all secondary staff so that they can support reading in their students for all subject areas. Our research underlines the importance of supporting teenage reading and we know from pilot work that this training is effective in promoting teacher confidence and knowledge, and is feasible and acceptable to teachers. The training will be made freely available to all secondary schools later this year.”

According to the DfE, currently a third of children leave primary school without fundamental reading, writing and maths skills. More training for secondary schools will be commissioned.

The government announcement on supporting literacy in schools is included in an article in TES  and in Schools Week

Professor Ricketts has previously published findings from two longitudinal studies funded by the ESRC and Nuffield Foundation. In collaboration with Dr Laura Shapiro from Aston University, this work shows that reading and vocabulary knowledge are extremely variable in upper primary and secondary and that there are high levels of need. These findings motivate professional development for teachers and increased monitoring and support to ensure that young people can access the curriculum.

The findings, and recommendations are published in a report that cites the underpinning empirical articles.

Professor Jessie Ricketts leads the Language and Reading Acquisition (LARA) research lab at Royal Holloway, which has a focus on the role of language in reading and spoken language development in childhood and adolescence. The studies involve children with and without reading and language difficulties and use longitudinal and experimental designs. Find out more on LARA here