When thinking about developing a reading culture in your school it’s important to remember that there are no ‘quick fixes’ or ‘miracle solutions.’ Creating a culture takes time, lots of work and lots of people working together towards it. A culture isn’t created overnight, but it is also fluid, ever changing and needs to react to changes, especially in schools where there are plenty; teachers, curriculum, priorities, new cohorts each year, all of these impact on what you are trying to create.
A key part of creating this culture will be to link as many things together, especially linking reading to the core values at the heart of your school but also to areas that already exist such as the curriculum, whole school reward systems and parental engagement amongst others. Where reading is seen as a part of all the fabric of the school and exists in everything that happens, rather than lots of unconnected, individual ideas that is where a culture is born.
1. Be aware of what the research says around reading and what the priorities are in school.
It’s really important to be up to date with what the current research is saying around reading and also what aspects of reading are required in school. Luckily in terms of research we are in a better position than we’ve ever been and this is being echoed by what Ofsted are asking of schools. There are a lot of elements concerning reading mentioned in the Ofsted Handbook for all phases, setting out exactly what they would like to see in schools. Alongside this are a number of extra guidance reports such as Now the Whole School is Reading, Ofsted, 2022, and Telling the Story, Ofsted, 2024. But there are also lots of educators and other organisations offering support too. The Education Endowment Fund has a large array of reading toolkits for all phases, and people like Alex Quigley have helped to interpret the Ofsted framework around reading through a number of different publications. There is also a lot of research around the importance of fluency and reading for pleasure instead of just a focus on the mechanics of reading.
Interdisciplinary approach
2. Highlight the areas where reading already exists in the curriculum
There will be lots of reading already going on through the curriculum and in your classrooms, so a real worthwhile task is mapping all of this, where the opportunities lie, the type of texts being used and the reason for them. This will allow you to highlight how much reading is happening but also where there are potential gaps where more could be done. It might be that a specific department could increase the amount of reading, or a year group where there are fewer opportunities. By undertaking an audit in this way, it allows you to see this and target the areas where there might be improvements. It also allows you to celebrate all the things that are happening, to share ideas between departments on how they utilise reading and to make reading more explicit to the students.
3. Empower teachers as experts of reading in their own subjects
In your journey towards creating a reading culture you’re going to need to empower your teachers as experts of reading in their own subjects. For reading to be part of the fabric of the school it has to exist consistently throughout the taught curriculum and so it’s going to be your teachers who deliver this. Involving them in your audits, mentioned earlier, asking them for their ideas and opinions on how to best use reading in their subjects positions them as the experts that they are. It will allow you to understand better how each department differs slightly in their disciplines but also the key skills that flow through departments too.
4. Link ideas and approaches together
It’s important, as previously mentioned that all the efforts work in tandem with the core parts of your school. Highlight what these are and see how reading can fit into them. One of our best ideas came from our audit where we highlighted the types of texts that were being used across the curriculum from each department and created booklists from these, which then became part of a reading challenge for students to undertake and appeared in the pastoral program, linking to our efforts to read aloud to students more, with the first chapter of each book being read every week. One idea encompassed the curriculum, the pastoral program, each department and extra-curricular too.
Skills Development
5. Allow departments to set their own reading skills
The idea of disciplinary literacy is that each subject (discipline) requires a slightly different set of skills from students. Students need to see and understand this so when they walk out of a science lesson and into a geography lesson, they know they are going to need to be reading in slightly different ways. Again, by positioning teachers as the reading experts in their subjects and asking them to create an idea of what these key reading skills are means they are more likely to follow them, to make them explicit to the students and to include it in their teaching.
6. Share information on weaker readers with teachers and give strategies
The more a teacher knows about their students, the better equipped they are to support them in the lessons. If there is a student who particularly struggles with their reading it's important that the classroom teacher is aware of this. Even better if they are provided with a strategy to support the student to access the reading in the lesson. For instance, if a student is slow at processing, giving them extra time to complete any reading in the class is going to be useful in allowing the student to access the reading and learning and to empower the student by removing any barriers to reading for them.
7. Create a set of core reading skills running through all lessons
Having a few core reading skills that you want all students to be proficient in is a good way to showcase reading as important to place it at the heart of learning. These can work well if you’re also looking to have departments create their own specific ones as there may be key skills that run through a number of departments that you can utilise. Encouraging teachers to model these skills when they are introducing reading in the classroom will help students to have a consistent approach to reading across the whole school.
Engagement and Motivation
8. Encourage parents to see and value reading
It’s important to share all the work you have completed in mapping reading across your curriculum, highlighting key reading skills and developing department led skills with parents to allow them to see how much reading is part of your school’s core values. Utilise opportunities that already exist for parental involvement and include reading in this. If your school has social media, or newsletters, have reading seen in these - not as a separate entity but as part of what departments are doing. Use your school website to set out the opportunities that exist, within reports to parents include information on students’ reading abilities, and in information sent out to parents about the curriculum or the school embed reading throughout.
9. Increase the volume of reading in the curriculum
One of the ultimate goals of creating a reading culture in your school is to create students who read a lot. Along with being proficient in reading, reading for learning and pleasure, we want students to have a good diet of lots of different types of reading. By having access to more reading students will ‘see’ reading everywhere and understand when books are selected, they are picked for specific reasons, to showcase topics or to engage learning. By increasing the volume of reading that students are accessing throughout school they will become more proficient and are more likely to see reading as something they can, and want to, do.
10. Utilise technology
There are so many advantages to using technology around reading it would be silly to not investigate how you can make the most of it in your schools. If you use MS Teams there is a great option on there to set reading fluency work, allowing students to read texts you have set. With AI, teachers are provided with the knowledge that students have read the text, but they can also get a list of common mistakes in the reading, allowing them to target specific teaching to address this. AI will also create questions based on the text to help students with their comprehension of what they are reading.
There are opportunities to use text-to-voice or voice-to-text technology to help students access more difficult pieces or to allow them to listen to their writing being read out loud. Encouraging teachers to put subtitles or closed captions on any videos they show, or using visualisers to put the text they are reading onto the screen involves the students in reading more, making them active in their learning rather than passively listening to the learning given to them.
Want to know more about creating a reading culture?
This blog was written by literacy expert Adam Lancaster, if you'd like to find out more about creating a reading culture in your school or trust, take a look at our recent webinar with Adam.