Nowadays, primary schools are very aware of children who find it hard to learn to read in the first years of school. It is easy to identify a child who struggles to read aloud, stumbling over words and finding phonics lessons challenging. 

The phonics screening check can help identify children with reading difficulties and a range of assessments and interventions are available to support the development of spoken language skills in the early years and key stage 1. 

It is tempting to think that once these initial bumps in the journey of learning to read are overcome, it is all plain sailing, as long as we provide lots of texts for children to enjoy. 

However, research suggests there are a group of children whose reading problems are not apparent until later on. These so-called “late-emerging” poor readers get off to a good start in learning to read but have significant problems as they move into key stage 2. 

These are not late-identified issues - that is, early reading problems that had been missed. These are children whose difficulties in learning to read develop at a later stage. And they are far more common than you might expect.

In fact, a 2013 longitudinal study by Hugh Catts and colleagues in the USA estimated that around 13 per cent of school-aged readers may be late-emerging poor readers. In this study, 493 participants were followed from kindergarten (Reception) through until the 10th grade (Year 11). A wide range of assessments were collected, measuring the children’s language development, word reading skills and reading comprehension skills over time. 

Nearly half of the children who were identified as being poor readers at some point in their school career (having reading test scores well below average) were identified in key stage 2. 

It has been suggested that these problems may arise as a result of changes in the nature of the words that children meet in this key stage, and as they transition into key stage 3. As they encounter more complex multisyllabic words, they need to use more advanced skills.

The limitations of using individual grapheme-phoneme correspondences to read unknown words quickly become evident; longer words are overwhelming if you do not have strategies to work them out. Suddenly, children need the flexibility to use syllables, rhymes, chunks of meaning (morphology) or spelling patterns (orthography) to make sense of words.

As a result, some children who have had no problems when they first started learning to read may begin to encounter difficulties. 

Alternatively, as texts become more complex, children may not possess the linguistic skills to comprehend the text as a whole and generate the inferences that are demanded, as Jane Oakhill and colleagues have suggested. Or, as Jeanne Chall has proposed, they may lack fluency in word reading and this, in turn, affects their comprehension.

The implications for schools are obvious. We need to be open to the fact that children may start to find reading hard at any point in their school career, not just in the first few years. We must be serious about developing effective ways of spotting these children and supporting them, by devoting the time and resources needed at every stage of schooling. 

Learning to read might not always be plain sailing, but with the right strategies and support, schools can help all pupils to chart a path through their own reading journey.