When Ms Thomas waves goodbye to her Year 6 class at the end of July, there are some pupils she is more concerned about than others: namely, those who didn’t reach the expected standard in the reading and grammar, punctuation and spelling tests. She knows that they will find secondary school tough, may struggle to access the curriculum and are less likely to pass their English and maths GCSEs.

Ms Thomas worries about this every year - despite her best efforts, some children always leave her class with low levels of literacy. She’s not the only one to be concerned. Pupils transitioning up to secondary school with poor reading and writing skills is a problem that has long plagued education - and now it has caught the attention of the education secretary.

In his maiden speech in his new role at the Conservative Party conference in October, Nadhim Zahawi pledged to bring forward a schools White Paper in the new year outlining plans to tackle “illiteracy”, along with “innumeracy”. We don’t know what the paper will set out in terms of addressing illiteracy, but a solution would be welcomed by Ms Thomas and her teaching colleagues.

They’ve tried all the evidence-based solutions available, so how, exactly, are we supposed to fix this long-standing problem?

First, we have to define the problem. According to the Department for Education, in 2019, almost a third (27 per cent) of students - or 173,556 children - left primary school below the expected standard for reading. In grammar, punctuation and spelling (GPS), 22 per cent were below the expected standard - 142,681 students.

Does that mean that almost 174,000 children should be grouped under Nadhim Zahawi’s banner of “illiteracy”? No, says Alex Quigley, national content manager at the Education Endowment Foundation and author of Closing the Reading Gap. “Schools - and society - use ‘meeting expected standards’ in Sats as being literate. These are proxy measures and problematic,” he says.

Being illiterate means not being able to read and write at all, but the children below the expected standard will have varying levels of literacy.

Laura Shapiro is an expert on literacy at Aston University, and she agrees that the term “illiteracy” is unhelpful in this context. “It is more accurate to describe literacy skills as falling into a continuum, and the challenge is to raise children’s reading skills to the appropriate level so that they can access the secondary curriculum,” she says.

When discussing literacy levels, we also need to consider that a proportion of those not reaching the “expected standard” will have some form of special educational need. Indeed, according to the DfE, in 2019, of the 115,199 pupils in Year 6 who were identified as having a special educational need or disability (SEND), just 36 per cent reached the expected standard in reading, and 37 per cent in GPS.

Functional illiteracy

So, rather than talking about illiteracy, we should, says Quigley, be talking about “functional illiteracy” - being unable to manage daily living and employment tasks that require reading skills beyond a basic level. “Functional illiteracy is when pupils can’t read exam papers, read confidently for pleasure or read and write job applications with skill,” he explains.

How many of those children under the expected standard at Sats are functionally illiterate is difficult to pinpoint. According to the National Literacy Trust, around 7 million adults in England are functionally illiterate; we don’t have an exact number for children. What we do know, anecdotally at least, is that the pandemic has exacerbated the problem.

“The impact has differed from child to child,” says Rachel Ward, a reading lead at Moston Fields Primary School in Manchester. “For affluent children, who had families on hand to support them with literacy, the impact hasn’t been that bad. But for vulnerable children, whose parents have little time to spend with them or who have potentially lost work, it’s made things worse.”

From Ward’s perspective, while the pandemic hasn’t increased the number of children with low literacy, it has widened the gap between those who were struggling before and those who weren’t.

Plenty of research backs her up. For example, the Education Policy Institute found that relative learning loss for disadvantaged pupils over the autumn term 2020 and the spring term 2021 was the equivalent of losing between a third and two-thirds of the progress made over the past decade in closing the primary school disadvantage gap.

The impact extends to the youngest children, too. Researchers at Oxford Brookes University found that because children under the age of 2 in more affluent families spent more time with their parents as a result of lockdown, they had stronger language acquisition, while the language of those from disadvantaged backgrounds was weaker as a result of lockdown.

With children who were babies during lockdown yet to start school, it seems likely that the Covid effect on literacy could be felt for years to come.

So, we know there was an issue before the pandemic, and we know that the situation is probably worse now than it was then. But just how much harder will school be for those pupils who struggle with literacy?

Claire Heald, executive head at Academies Enterprise Trust, says that children who struggle with low literacy at the end of primary school are more likely to develop a range of issues over the course of their secondary education.

“It can be the root of behaviour problems, poor attendance [and difficulty with] accessing the curriculum. Children feel embarrassed and they disengage with education. A child who’s not attending is then marginalised socially, which leads to other problems. There’s a complex mix of things which go wrong, often stemming back to low literacy ability,” she explains.

As those children enter adulthood, poor literacy skills continue to have an impact. Not only are their everyday lives affected - they may struggle to make sense of transport information, read instructions or use the internet - but their employment and lifetime earnings also take a hit.

The economic consequences of poor literacy are felt by the wider economy, too. The National Literacy Trust estimates that low levels of literacy can cost the country up to £327 million per cohort of three-year-olds (see box, below).

Root of the problem

This is a persistent and far-reaching problem, then. But what’s causing it? It has become fashionable to blame teachers, but Heald says teachers themselves aren’t the problem: it’s that teaching is restrained owing to a lack of government investment.

“Schools are limited by the resource and staffing capacity, which often means they are using the same programmes they have always used,” she says. “It’s not that they don’t want the best for their children, but they can only do so much with the resources at their disposal.”

Ward, too, recognises this. “The literacy gap is there when [pupils] start school, but it widens because teachers and support staff are spreading themselves so thin, and don’t always have the time to spend on early intervention,” she says.

Ward is a Reading Recovery teacher, which means she has specifically been trained to deliver a literacy programme for children aged 5 and 6 with reading difficulties. The programme is used worldwide, and has brilliant outcomes: eight out of every 10 children catch up with their classmates.

However, training isn’t free, and often Reading Recovery teachers don’t have their own class, instead spending their time on specific interventions. This, of course, increases staffing costs. Indeed, in the past decade, the number of these teachers has decreased sharply in England: from 2,943 “active” Reading Recovery teachers in 2010 to just 184 in 2020.

It’s not just investment in teacher expertise that is lacking, though, but investment for SEND education - and considering the proportion of pupils with SEND not reaching expected standards in literacy, that is worth taking note of.

The government recently announced some £280 million in funding for SEND school places and building improvements, but critics have called for the money to be spent instead on Sendcos in mainstream provision, and speech and language therapists, which, in turn, would support children to better levels of literacy.

A lack of funding for SEND provision and issues with resource in schools are two factors contributing to low levels of literacy, but there’s another huge driving factor here: the link between poverty and generational illiteracy.

At Hollymount School, a primary in Worcester, for instance, 43 per cent of children are in receipt of pupil premium, and around 20 per cent arrive with low levels of literacy. Emma Train, an English lead at the school, says that this is often because their families struggle with literacy, too. “We only have them in school seven hours a day, and parents play a big part in developing a love of reading from an early age,” she says. “But a lot of our parents didn’t have positive school experiences, and don’t have the confidence to share literacy with their children.”

Jonathan Douglas, chief executive of the National Literacy Trust, agrees that this is a big part of the problem.

“Low levels of literacy are inextricably linked with inequality, and in the UK that inequality is predominantly socioeconomic,” he says. “We can see from early childhood that development of language is stronger in more affluent groups of society than in less.”

On average, there’s a 4.6-month gap in language development between children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and their peers when they start school, says Douglas - the very poorest children can be up to 19 months behind, and around one in 11 children from disadvantaged backgrounds don’t own a single book.

“The truth is material poverty impacts on the home learning environment, which is one of the strongest determinants of language and literacy development,” says Douglas.

A lack of community support for parents is also exacerbating the problem, says Ward. For example, the number of families accessing Sure Start centres, which historically have upskilled parents in educational techniques, has decreased massively in the past decade (see box, below).

Improving outcomes

These three areas of funding, Send expertise and poverty are just some of the myriad factors that feed into functional illiteracy and they demonstrate just how difficult a job Zahawi has given himself. With societal factors in particular, the solutions will go far beyond what a school - or an education secretary - can reasonably be expected to influence.

Within this challenging context, though, there are things schools have done that may not have fixed the issue completely, but that have hugely improved outcomes.

For instance, Train’s school runs a whole-school intervention to bridge the so-called “language gap”. We know that this gap is a widespread problem: research from Oxford University Press shows that more than half of primary teachers believed that at least 40 per cent of their pupils lacked the vocabulary to access their learning, while 69 per cent felt that the “word gap” was increasing.

“Language feeds into reading, which feeds into writing,” Train says. “If children don’t come into school with a breadth of vocabulary, they struggle to learn to read and write.”

Train’s pedagogy is centred on a progressive word bank containing “the language of education”; for example, words like “predict”, “infer”, “compare” and “analyse”. Each of these words has an image that children can relate to, which are shown when a new word is introduced. Three slots of 15 minutes a week are ringfenced to explicitly teach these words, with one word taught per week. Each session has a “review, teach, apply” structure, and subject-specific language is introduced as children progress through school.

The outcomes are clear. In 2017, 67 per cent of children in Year 6 at the school reached the expected standard in reading, with 5 per cent reaching greater depth. In 2018, the first year the pedagogy was introduced, this rose to 78 per cent, and 16 per cent for greater depth. Scores have remained consistent: in 2020, teacher assessment showed 80 per cent of children reached the expected standard and 29 per cent reached greater depth.

So, targeting vocabulary can be useful. And, according to Shapiro, schools should also focus on building phonological awareness.

Her research shows that up to 25 per cent of children begin school with very poor phonological awareness, which means, for example, that they don’t understand that the word “train” breaks down into four sounds: t-r-ai-n. These children struggle with phonics and, as an extension, wider literacy - and therefore need specialist support.

“If not, it can become a big problem,” Shapiro explains. “They might know the letter sounds but can’t blend them together to make a word, which is fundamental to reading. We can reduce the number of children ending primary school below expectations if we take a bit more time to support their phonological awareness.”

She has been working with schools, and encouraging them to complete simple phonological awareness checks with children when they first start school. Teachers play games with children in which they are encouraged to break a word into individual sounds, and say these sounds out loud: saying the first sound in a word; saying each sound in a word. If the child struggles with this, time is then spent on building up the awareness before moving on to printed words.

Support for parents

Such interventions can help, but running alongside them there must also be support for parents, argues Douglas.

That support needs to start as early as possible. According to the National Literacy Trust, doing two additional home-learning activities (such as reading, playing with letters or singing songs) per day with a three-year-old “at risk” of vulnerable language skills can be sufficient to lift them out of the at-risk group altogether.

Engagement with parents in the early years is crucial, then. Guidance from the Education Endowment Foundation suggests four evidence-based steps that early years foundation stage providers can use here.

The first step is to critically review how you work with parents; teachers should ask parents what support they would find helpful. Next, schools should provide practical strategies to support learning at home. This involves inviting parents into school, teaching them specific activities and encouraging them to create a regular literacy routine.

The third recommendation is about sending out school communication to parents - ie, weekly texts and termly letters - to prompt wider engagement. Finally, schools should offer sustained and intensive support; for example, informal and welcoming group-based parenting initiatives at a convenient time and location.

Primary and early years teachers can’t be expected to solve this problem alone - secondary schools also have a role to play, too, Quigley points out. Currently, he says, the teaching of reading and writing is not joined up across primary and secondary, and this needs to change.

“The nature of reading and writing changes as the curriculum changes, assessment types change and literacy becomes more subject-specific. Because of all these differences, and the lack of time to coordinate curriculum transition, opportunities are missed,” he says. “In all honesty, literacy in secondary school is really tricky and can be too often piecemeal and quickly run into issues.”

There are, of course, examples of good practice at secondary level as well - and despite the scale and complexity of the problem, many in the education community are already dedicated to tackling it. For example, a group of academics and teachers from across the UK are collaborating to find out more about children’s motivation to read.

Research shows that children who read for pleasure progress in vocabulary and spelling more than those who don’t - and the Love to Read project has identified six evidence-based principles to encourage this (see the Nuffield Foundation’s website for more information). These principles are being embedded into the curriculum in participating schools, and the impact that they have on children’s desire to read will be assessed. The findings are due out next year.

Meanwhile, the Academies Enterprise Trust is also investing heavily in literacy. Since September, every single student from Year 2-11 sits reading tests every year. While this work is still very new, the trust hopes that the insights will reveal where specific interventions are most needed, and measure their effectiveness.

Ward, too, is leading the way on practitioner-led research: she won a £25,000 grant from the SHINE Trust to implement a specific group intervention for Reception children aimed at tackling the barriers they face in literacy.

And, of course, there’s the government’s White Paper expected in the new year.

So yes, low literacy as children leave primary schools is a problem. It has been exacerbated by the pandemic - and teachers will feel the consequences of that for years to come.

The power to fix the problem might ultimately lie beyond the classroom. But with so many within the system aware of the issue, determined to find solutions and already sharing best practice, perhaps we’re collectively getting a little closer to solving it.

Kate Parker is schools and colleges content producer at Tes

This article originally appeared in the 5 November 2021 issue under the headline “How do we solve the literacy problem?”