: Harnessing Emerging Technologies Without Losing the Power of Text Using challenging texts in foundation subjects as gateways to deeper knowledge, engagement and disciplinary thinking development
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Harnessing Emerging Technologies Without Losing the Power of Text
Using challenging texts in foundation subjects as gateways to deeper knowledge, engagement and disciplinary thinking development
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by North London Alliance Research School
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Abigail Faik
Abigail Faik is the Team leader of History and Politics and an Associate Lead Practitioner at a North London comprehensive school.
This blog looks at the way foundation subjects can harness the power of challenging texts, choosing to use them as a gateway to an engaging and intriguing narrative, rather than something to be simplified beyond recognition by the quick use of an AI bot.
The start of a new calendar year was marked for many teachers with the presentation of 2026 as the National year of Reading, with the strap line “Go all in.” (National Literacy Trust, 2026). This campaign has been launched amid the stark reality that as a nation we are not reading as much as we used to and that this is ultimately leading to poorer outcomes for our youth. The Annual Literacy Survey published in June 2025, revealed that only 32.7% of 8 – 18-year olds said they enjoy reading in their free time (about 1 in 3). This is reported as the lowest level in 20 years. Daily reading dropped sharply to around 18.7%. The decline was especially steep for boys aged 11 – 16 and shows a widening gap around those in receipt of Free School Meals reading 3.6% less than their counterparts (National Literacy Trust, 2025). These figures are unsurprising when cross-referenced with the 2025 HarperCollins / Nielsen survey that revealed the percentage of young children being read to frequently, fell from 64% in 2012 to 41% in 2024. And that only 40% of parents said reading aloud to their children is “enjoyable” (The Guardian, 2025). A Guardian article in 2025 went further in an article titled “It’s so boring: gen Z parents don’t like reading to their kids”. In the article they referenced the previous survey highlighting that “fewer than half of gen Z parents called reading to their children ‘fun for me’, and almost one in three saw reading as ‘more of a subject to learn’ than something to be enjoyed – significantly more than their gen X counterparts.” (The Guardian, 2025). This view held by parents is being shared by their children too.
With students reading less their confidence, fluency and ability is naturally going to suffer when entering the classroom. With this context and the rise of Large Language Models (more commonly known as AI chat bots) the temptation for many of us professionals is to reduce the complexity of the text, to strip out the additional detail, to simplify the text, to reduce it to the bare essentials of what is needed to teach a topic. I myself a History teacher have reduced a complex story or source on many occasions to a simple chronology of factual events in order to “save time” to spend on the teaching the historical concepts. I know I am not alone in this, reflective discussions in professional development sessions and the casual conversations in the humanities office would suggest that we all do it from time to time. However, by simplifying the text we are often deleting its richness and getting rid of the very thing that might encourage students to fall in love with reading and fall in love with how they can learn about our subjects beyond the walls of our classrooms.
The EEF’s guidance on improving literacy in secondary schools makes clear that struggling readers benefit from explicit support with academic vocabulary, structured opportunities to read complex texts, and modelling of how to make meaning. In history, this means we can keep the richness of disciplinary texts without leaving pupils to sink or swim, by anticipating where they will struggle and planning scaffolds that help them access the narrative, language and ideas.
The National Literacy Trust report of 2025 when discussing how to problem solve falling rates of reading, shared that “2 in 5 children and young people were motivated to read when material related to a favourite film or TV series.” This for me struck a chord and reminded me of the work of to the educationalist and History teacher Christine Counsell. In her presentation to ResearchEd National Conference in September of 2025, Counsell spoke of the “power of stories to place students in a state of heightened attention.” That stories are “world building” and by teaching through detailed complex stories we are “planting seeds that will flower later” that “stories make promises to the reader.” This supports the link mentioned above between student’s enjoyment of TV and film narratives and motivation to read. With this research in mind as a history department, we have focused on how we can be giving students the raw unvarnished sources of the past with all their complexity and richness of language without losing their interest and instead peaking it and developing their reading skills.
The specific case study for this was our year 8 unit on Tudor connections across the world using Miranda Kaufmann’s book “Black Tudors.” The unit explicitly gave students excerpts from the book including the original primary sources that Kaufmann used to inform her writing. We deliberately planned scaffolds from whole school professional development sessions, EEF guidance and the Walkthrus series to remove predictable barriers while keeping the text challenging and authentic.
We identified the barriers that made historical reading hard for our students as the following:
Complexity of vocabulary (tier 2 + tier 3, archaic terms, named individuals/places
Background knowledge gaps (pupils can decode but can’t make sense/meaning of key ideas and themes)
Once we named these barriers, we could choose scaffolds that matched the problem, not just ‘simplify the text.’
The planned scaffolds we focused on putting in place across the unit of 6 lessons were:
1) Prepare the ground (before reading)
Pre-teach tier 3 vocabulary using a dual-coded knowledge organiser
Deepen meaning with the Frayer model (examples/non-examples in historical context)
Use a carefully chosen image to build curiosity and activate background knowledge
2) Make meaning (during reading)
Model expert reading through teacher think-alouds (predicting, questioning, clarifying)
Use the visualiser to model text marking during short guided reading
Pause for quick meaning checks: “Which word is doing the work in this sentence?”
3) Transfer and independence (after reading)
Pupils choose and apply a strategy from a small ‘menu’ of dual-coded reading approaches
Test transfer with an unseen source plus unseen interpretation in the final assessment
Examples of what these methods have looked like in History lessons
Throughout the teaching of the unit, we were open with students about our dual goal of studying the diversity of Tudor England and studying an approach to reading complex texts. With the careful scaffolding and use of metacognitive discussions about best approach, students enjoyed comparing and contrasting what methods they were going to use and became more confident over the unit with approaching these somewhat daunting and unfamiliar texts. This was tested through their engagement with an unseen source and an unseen historical interpretation in their end-of-topic assessment. In the past, without this focus on reading approaches to complex texts earlier in the unit students across the spectrum of grades would often fail to attempt the tasks independently, asking for help or, if told to attempt it by themselves refusing to engage with those tasks.
The biggest shift was not just in attainment, but in stamina and self-efficacy. By lesson 5, pupils were reading longer extracts with fewer ‘I don’t get it’ interruptions, and their annotations increasingly focused on meaning (purpose, viewpoint, key phrases) rather than isolated word-spotting. In the final assessment, every pupil attempted the unseen interpretation question, and many referenced the author’s argument using evidence from the extract. We subsequently built on this work with transferring these practices into our next unit on Stuart Britain entitled “The World Tuned up-side down.” We have found that students continue to grow in confidence in responding to complicated unseen texts and benefit from a continued focus on scaffolding rather than simplifying texts.
An example of the dual coded knowledge organisers for each unit.
A student responding to an unseen source from the National Archives.
An example of a student responding to extracts from Miranda Kaufman’s book.
Christine Counsell spoke at ResearchEd about a common justification of teachers for reducing the complexity of texts being ‘but I just don’t have time to spend on the reading’. We can all empathise with this feeling of being time poor and teaching to an exam. However, certainly in the case of English and humanities subjects, this is a very short-sighted approach that means that students are unable to cope with the rigours posed by unseen texts in GCSE papers. Research in NEA’s at A level are lacking the curiosity and joy of reading that would enable students to fully develop their love of learning. If pupils cannot read the texts of history, they cannot truly access the curriculum of history. Reading is not an ‘extra’, it is the gateway to knowledge, interpretation and disciplinary thinking, and it is also bound up with future pathways and opportunities. The answer is not to reduce historical texts into simplified summaries, but to plan intelligent scaffolds that anticipate where pupils will struggle and teach them how to overcome those barriers. A practical next step is to choose one upcoming unit, identify the likely vocabulary, knowledge and sentence-level hurdles in a short extract, and plan a consistent routine of pre-teaching, modelling and guided practice. Over time, that routine builds something far more valuable than short-term comprehension: pupils who believe they can read, who know how to read, and who are increasingly able to do it independently.
References
Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), (2018). Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools
HarperCollins UK, (2025). New research reveals that parents are losing the love of reading aloud. https://corporate.harpercollin…
