Tyler* was a non-reader - one of those children who would robustly decline even the most innovative appeals to pick up a book. So when he started not just reading, but asking to read, and enjoying that reading, staff at Bo’ness Academy knew they were onto something special. A whole-school approach to literacy with the emphasis not on skills but on the pure pleasure of the written word, had, it appeared, worked.

Every secondary school has a Tyler, and more like him. The research literature is full of investigations into how to get children like him to read: pupils with no specific learning barrier that makes reading impossible, but who have emotional, mental health or learning difficulties that make it a challenge.

Some studies focus on the identification of specific issues with reading and subsequent interventions; sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. Other studies look at how we structure early intervention to prevent long-term issues - but that tends not to be much use to the likes of Tyler, though there is some benefit to the next Tyler coming through (again, not always).

Another field of inquiry is comprehension: perhaps the reason that the pupil is not reading is because their understanding of it is a barrier. But as Jessie Ricketts and Megan Dixon pointed out in Tes in October, there is a lack of research into this.

Then you also have studies to do with reading motivation and what makes children read. This approach tends to be a favourite in schools - the promotion of reading for pleasure tops most teachers’ agendas as a way to get the reluctant reader reading. But Sarah McGeown, a developmental psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, says there is little evidence to prove that it actually works.

“Research has consistently shown that intrinsic reading motivation is much more important for children’s reading engagement and attainment than extrinsic reading motivation,” she told Tes in January. McGeown is cautious about initiatives such as “everybody reading in class” (Eric) and “drop everything and read” (Dear) in particular.

“The idea behind Eric and Dear is that children aren’t going to be tested on what they’re reading - it’s purely about giving children time to read for pleasure during class,” she says. “While it’s a good idea, there’s no research evidence to demonstrate that it leads to more positive reading motivation or attainment, or that it encourages children to read more outside of class. We really need to understand what effect, if any, and for whom, approaches such as these are having on children’s motivation, engagement and attainment so that we can advise teachers appropriately.”

The truth is that so much current reading research explores decoding or special educational needs, which has left us to play catch-up in other areas. In that gap, teachers have had to innovate. And it appears Bo’ness Academy has done so with some success.

Source of comfort

At Bo’ness, literacy is treated as more than a narrow set of competencies, and responsibility for it stretches far beyond English classrooms: in recent times, the whole school has bought into an approach that insists good literacy is as much about winning hearts and minds as it is about building up skills.

Tyler was a canary in a mine: if it worked for him, the teachers knew they would be on to something. He had long struggled to suppress his anger and got into a lot of trouble in class when he became irate and lost control. When the idea of a reading programme was broached with him, the drawbridge came up: “I hate reading - you won’t make me read.”

But a year later, Tyler was requesting books, seeing them as a way to regulate his own behaviour.

“One day he went crazy in my class - he was red raw, crying his wee heart out,” recalls modern languages teacher Sam Phillips, the “reading-for-pleasure coordinator” of the school’s literacy drive. “I asked him, ‘What’s going to make you feel better?’ And he said, ‘Can I go and get out of my own brain and read my book?’ I thought, ‘Oh my God, yes!’”

Both teacher and pupil agreed that Tyler would be given 10 minutes to read before rejoining his Spanish class. He returned in a calm state thanks to a book: something that once repelled him was now a powerful source of comfort and motivation.

So what specifically has happened at Bo’ness? For the past three years or so, staff have fought hard to overcome powerful beliefs among children about reading that often take root from a young age: that books are malign creations designed to expose your ignorance; that reading is fundamentally boring; that literacy is something only the “brainy” kids need to worry about.

One of the key principles in action when I visit is whole-school involvement; staff share an unstinting desire to create a palpable excitement around books.

It might not always be easy to persuade a maths or business teacher to accept that literacy is also their responsibility. But at Bo’ness in 2019, staff from across the curriculum have ownership of literacy initiatives and every teacher has a poster on their door displaying what they are reading.

Sue Ellis, a literacy expert at the University of Strathclyde, says clear evidence exists to support the cross-curricular approach (see box, page 19). “Secondary schools actually need to teach a whole set of different literacies,” she explains. “Physics teachers, for example, must teach young people how to read like a physicist; history teachers must show what it means to read like a historian; art and design teachers, geographers, mathematicians - each have distinct ways of thinking, engage with distinct kinds of text and use distinct vocabularies. It all relates to how knowledge is structured and interrogated in the discipline.”

She adds: “When teachers clearly signal the differences, it helps all pupils, but it particularly helps less experienced readers and writers.”

Jamie Crawford - faculty head of English, literacy and modern languages at Bo’ness - says the school tackled it in exactly this way: not flashy initiatives in each department, but a growing mindfulness about literacy where it was natural to highlight it.

As he says, “start where literacy naturally appears anyway”, then build from there.

It was not too hard, say senior staff, to make the case for literacy across the curriculum. In National 5 PE, for example, an essay is a big part of assessment, but many students struggled with it in the past. Now, the reading-for-pleasure initiative is driven by teachers of business, technical and religious, moral and philosophical studies under the leadership of modern languages teacher Sam Phillips.

Dedicated curriculum time is blended with voluntary reading initiatives in breaktimes and after school. Every S1-3 now has an extra literacy period in their timetable. There’s a Monday lunchtime reading club run by a probationer teacher, and the library now opens during some lunchtimes - short lunchbreaks meant that it was closed in the past, as pupils used it to rush through their packed lunches and create an almighty mess. Excitement is fuelled by quizzes on books chosen by pupils, using a system that allows them to see the progress they are making, book by book, quiz by quiz.

The library has been a key tool in the move to promote reading for pleasure. Librarian Susan Paterson welcomes students in and her objective is to “make it easy to pick a book”.

For pupils not used to having books around at home, a roomful of them can be daunting. So the books in the library have been reorganised into genres - with accompanying colourful designs by pupils adorning the shelves - and by numbers that reflect their difficulty, making it easier for pupils to find titles they might enjoy.

There is also a “mystery box”, packed with books on a genre that is intermittently changed; pupils take their chances and see what they pull out.

And if a particular book isn’t available, pupils can ask the school to buy it - the piles of shiny new books awaiting collection on a shelf behind Paterson attest to that.

“Kids are at my door - I’m not kidding - ordering books from me,” says Phillips. When the books don’t arrive in time, they demand to know what’s happened, and when they eventually do arrive, the anticipation and excitement is “a bit like Christmas”.

Bo’ness Academy’s book collection has been overhauled recently - Pete Johnson and Liz Pichon are two of the most in-demand authors (see box, page 17), and now feature prominently. Staff say that teachers should get out of the habit of unthinkingly insisting that pupils read books that they may have enjoyed at school several decades previously. It makes no sense, they believe, for a school to have multiple tatty copies of Stig of the Dump or Tom’s Midnight Garden, but nothing by David Walliams or Jeff Kinney, author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series.

Big strides

Phillips says it’s important that pupils are free to choose books on topics that are interesting and relevant to them: gangs, terrorism, war, football, celebrity biographies, YouTubers, make-up and online dating are all favourites at Bo’ness.

“Choice is crucial,” insists McGeown. “Ensuring children have access to interesting and enjoyable texts - ideally books, but comics and magazines, too - is important. Children need to find reading rewarding and draw meaning from what they read. Relevance is important. It can be helpful for children to make connections between texts and their own lives, for example, by recognising the thoughts or feelings of a character in their book.”

Has all this effort worked beyond turning around Tyler’s anti-book stance? It turns out that the focus on literacy is part of a larger narrative at Bo’ness Academy following a less-than-sparkling Education Scotland inspection report in 2015, which marked a turning point. The school was not failing, but as one senior member of staff tells me, it was “moseying along”: the school had a good “ethos”, cared for its pupils and parents were generally “happy enough”, but attainment was “not what it should be”.

Things have since changed. The key statistic cited by the school is that, in 2014-15, only 34 per cent of S4s got a National 5 in English; in 2017-18, it was 69 per cent.

The emphasis on literacy - praised in Education Scotland’s latest inspection report in December - has been a central part of the school’s drive for better attainment, and pupils are making big strides in their reading ages.

Aside from the encouraging data, headteacher Steve Dougan also talks of a culture change. He cites an S4 girl shortlisted for a writing award, for which most of the other nominees were from independent schools. Pupils, he says, are “taking more risks, putting themselves forward for things”. It’s not “uncool” to do that anymore, adds Dougan.

The plan is to keep building on this momentum with literacy, both in the school and beyond. A joint project with Polmont Young Offenders Institution, for example, will see S3 pupils at Bo’ness work through the First Minister’s Reading Challenge - Nicola Sturgeon’s own attempt to encourage reading for pleasure - at the same time as inmates a few miles along the road, introducing a competitive element between the two groups.

The school, mindful that a reluctance to read can be hardened long before a child starts secondary school, is also working closely with local primary schools on a project that, as well as building literacy skills, is attempting to smooth the ever-difficult move from P7 to S1. Last year, P7s worked on a “transition novel”. Sputnik’s Guide to Life on Earth by Frank Cottrell-Boyce was chosen because it seemed suitable for all levels and had not been read by many pupils.

Meanwhile, their teachers have collaborated on resources with Bo’ness staff. They have worked on critical writing, for example, so that the primary teachers could prepare pupils for the type of critical essay that would be expected of them in secondary. And by studying half the book in their primary and half in their new secondary, the hope was that this continuity would help pupils to adapt to their new surroundings, as well as getting them into the same reading groove as older Bo’ness students.

So how would the school sum up the changed attitudes to reading, especially among pupils who used to kick back against the very idea of opening a book? For Dougan, it’s about how books help shift pupils into a another frame of mind: “They now see that the world is different when you read a book - some of these guys, they’re seeing a completely different perspective on life.”

English teacher Jacqui McIntyre concurs. She talks of a frequently heard refrain among pupils who are tense or pent up about something, but who know what will soothe them. Time and again, with mild irritation, they will say: “Can I just read my book?”

Henry Hepburn is news editor for Tes Scotland. He tweets @Henry_Hepburn

*Name has been changed

This article originally appeared in the 8 March 2019 issue under the headline “‘Kids are at my door - I’m not kidding - ordering books from me’”