Primary literacy is under pressure.

This year, the government announced new targets: by 2030, the Department for Education wants 90 per cent of primary school children to achieve the expected standard in key stage 2 reading and writing, and want the national average GCSE grade in English language to increase from 4.5 in 2019 to 5 by 2030.

And according to Professor Jessie Ricketts, head of the Language and Reading Acquisition (LARA) research lab at Royal Holloway university, to improve literacy at all ages, teachers need to “stop playing the blame game”. It is unfair and unhelpful when literacy issues in secondary are blamed on primary schools, she explains. 

In this week’s Tes Podagogy, we revisit an episode recorded with Ricketts in 2018 to explore what she thinks is the key to improving students’ attainment in English throughout their school journey.

“For any teacher, in any classroom, unless they have a selected class, you are likely to have an almost impossible range of knowledge and skills,” she says. 

“What you have to do is do the best with what you have got. I think it is a really tall order to expect every child to leave primary school with all of the knowledge and skills they need to enter secondary schools.

“Teachers are incredibly hard-working and care about what they do, and they are doing their best with the time and resources they have.”
 

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Part of the problem, she says, is that, as you move through school, the focus of literacy shifts from everyday vocabulary acquisition and phonics in early years to general comprehension, and then to academic and subject-specific language.

She explains that problems may not necessarily emerge early on, but can become apparent at any one of these stages, and adds that pupils get very good at hiding problems.

What is clear, she says, is that secondary teachers need help: they tell her this constantly during her research.

“From talking to secondary teachers, I realised that secondary schools were faced with a group of children who did not have functional reading abilities and they did not know what to do about it because, in their [initial teacher training] and CPD, they did not get much information on the science of reading, how children read or what you might do to improve reading skills,” she explains. “It is not really seen as the job of secondary.”

In the podcast, she talks about how literacy at secondary might be tackled and also covers the role of oral vocabulary in early reading, the impact of reading on spoken language and the need to help students independently broaden their vocabulary.