Sunderland pupils make outstanding reading progress thanks to Reading Plus

Heather March, Assistant Headteacher at Dubmire Primary Academy, and her pupils share their school’s positive response to using Reading Plus.

Heather March is a long-time supporter of Reading Plus and is confident in the progress she knows it can provide. She told us:

School requirements

To improve:

• Reading fluency.
• Reading comprehension.

Why Reading Plus?

From my experience with the programme at my previous school, I knew that, if implemented well, Reading Plus could significantly impact reading, accelerating fluency progress and engagement levels, particularly for reluctant readers.

What was reading like before Reading Plus?

Covid had an impact on both our progress and attainment.

Before Reading Plus, engagement was varied. We found that for our lower-attaining pupils, progress was also low. We wanted to implement Reading Plus to accelerate this.

The positive impact of Reading Plus

Our children have increased their reading speed by an average of 32 words per minute in just two terms. Also, on average, our Year 5 children have made 1.8 levels of progress in less than one term. Two of our children have made more than four levels of gains and are now reading 70+ words per minute more.

Not only are we now seeing an impact on fluency and overall comprehension, but we can also see how this has enhanced our reading-for-pleasure culture.

Engagement is high, and children confidently talk about the texts they have read. Our children are also reading a greater range of cross-curricular texts they wouldn’t have previously accessed and can now make links between subjects and across their reading.

Do pupils enjoy using Reading Plus?

Our children enjoy using Reading Plus. Engagement is excellent, and the children are motivated.

They love that they can clearly see their own progress.

All children answered yes when asked if Reading Plus was easy to use. Some of the factors they enjoyed the most include:

• “I like getting combos and seeing how this makes me move on.”
• “I like the guided window. It makes me concentrate.”
• “The different texts I can choose. There are plenty of things I like and am interested in.”

Teacher enjoyment

My favourite thing about Reading Plus is the selection of texts – there is always something for everyone, and the children never run out of choices.

Also, the leaderboard and progress sections of the dashboards are very informative. I love that you can see at a glance how children are performing.

Reading Plus also merged seamlessly with our well-established Reading Curriculum. We use the programme three times a week. On these days, when the staff use Reading Plus, no planning is required for these sessions, which helps teachers save a lot of time. Staff simply log on and can see where their focus needs to be and with which children. The usability of the site is a huge bonus.

Reliable support

I have always found the support to be excellent. Any queries are answered very quickly, and the training was thorough and easy to follow.

Furthermore, the implementation process was very easy and went smoothly. Our staff have been supported at every step and can confidently use the programme to track and target individuals.

We were up and running with the programme very quickly.

Benefits of Reading Plus’s comprehensive reporting

The Insight Assessment (initial baseline) feature has been very valuable – we can see exactly where the children are, and teachers can clearly identify target children.

Reading Plus’s reporting data is very useful. As a school, we receive both a Lexile report, which measures a pupil’s gains in their ability to read more complicated texts, and a Skills report, which groups pupils who are struggling with the same comprehension subskills and links to Teaching Tools that can be used for remediation. These allow us to see how pupils are doing quickly, meaning we can easily identify those who are off-track and in which areas they are struggling.

Teachers use these reports to target individuals and inform the class guided reading lessons. Also, I have used these reports to report to governors during our curriculum challenge meetings to illustrate the progress made and the areas we want to prioritise.

How Reading Plus helps children reach their potential

Reading Plus is an extremely effective teaching tool for fluency and reading comprehension. Our children have developed their reading stamina alongside their reading rate. We can clearly see the impact this will have in accessing the end-of-year KS2 tests.

For the children using the programme in Year 5, we now have 14% achieving Greater Depth scores in our standardised end-of-year assessments. This is also backed up by teacher assessment judgements. In this year group, we had only 2 children (5%) working at Greater Depth in Reading when they initially started the programme.

When we asked the pupils if they felt they had improved by using Reading Plus, they replied:

• “I’ve got three certificates now. My reading speed is faster, and I can get over 80% in my reading.”
• “Yes. I’ve gone up four levels since starting. The texts I have to read now are much longer, and I have to really think hard.”
• “If I try hard, I know I can get over 80% on stories and that makes me improve.”