Research School Network: Developing a Reading Culture to Support Disadvantaged Children to Thrive Scott Berry, Assistant Principal of Macaulay Primary Academy, takes a local perspective on disadvantage

Disadvantaged – a term thrown around a lot in education but with such varying contexts around the country. As practitioners, we all want to maximise each individual child’s potential, and to do this we have to understand disadvantaged. Understand each child’s needs, next steps and barriers for learning. And when we begin to understand disadvantaged as it is in our context, we can really begin to make the difference that these pupils deserve.

If your background in education is similar to mine, then this will be a familiar world for you. After over a decade of working within schools in what is statistically one of the most disadvantaged areas of the country – an old fishing town with high levels of unemployment and deprivation– we see educational disadvantage before the children even enter the classroom, and the evidence suggests that for many children this gap continues to grow right up until they leave secondary school.

The first step to understanding disadvantaged is understanding what that means in your setting. At our school in Grimsby 42% of children are pupil premium and our cohorts often start school with speech, language and communication needs that we need to ensure are addressed from the Eary Years onwards. At our school when we Looked at the research, we could see that parental engagement and reading comprehension strategies were going to strongly support our disadvantaged pupils in these areas.

So then comes the seemingly age-old question about taking children out for intervention. First of all, let’s dispel the myth that disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged pupils learn differently. What research has shown is strategies implemented to support disadvantaged pupils can benefit all pupils, so rather than initially considering evidence-based interventions, we looked to improve whole class, whole school approaches to learning and teaching. We supported our staff to understand how to structure and support reading comprehension strategies, for example how to summarise using tools such as graphic organisers.

If we flashed back to 5 years ago pupil voice would regularly show that our children did not enjoy reading – particularly those disadvantaged pupils whose only experience with a book was in comprehension lessons in class. We understood that we had to foster a love of reading in our children. We made access to books much easier – our school became the library. Bookshelves colourfully decorated to different genres outside of classrooms created such a buzz and excitement as children walked past – they often helped themselves to books to take home. Classroom doors were decorated to different book covers to create inspiring ​‘book talk’ between children and adults. Assemblies were used as opportunities for adults to share their favourite books with children and hand out copies for them to take home and share. We constructed a climate of socio-cultural dialogue about books and shared reading.

Our nursery children participate in the Dolly Parton Imagination Library, so they are receiving books as gifts as soon as they join us – we know the evidence is mixed about book gifting, but we created a culture around talk around books which supported our culture of reading. Our reading and curriculum sessions became book based from nursery to Y6, and now in our school the culture of reading has taken a tremendous shift and my goodness has it shown! Our below national results for reading have now turned into above national every year since the pandemic. And reading, being the gateway for so much learning, has seen our pupils begin to thrive across all areas of our curriculum. Children’s vocabulary, speech and communication has progressed as a result of children reading more and loving to read more. We understood our context, and provided our children with what they needed based on trends that we had identified. After using a rigorous and in-depth PP strategy which we produced and measured half termly we began to see the effects. By understanding our disadvantaged pupils, we are making the difference they deserve.

Scott Berry – Assistant Principal
Macaulay Primary Academy