The Cambridge Primary Review Trust

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Bumps, birth and beyond

‘Good news; bad news’ on the educational front this term. Good news: extra funding to ensure that more 3 and 4 year olds can access 30 hours of provision a week. Bad news: the pot of £50m will create only 9,000 places across a possible 200 settings, initially in just six areas of ‘social mobility’. Even worse news: in my humble opinion, it’s all too little and too late.  By which I do not mean that the government’s response is untimely: I mean that additional educational provision for children at the age of 4 or even 3 is rather too late for those most at risk from the impact of poverty.

It’s simple. For children to do well at school, to gain good qualifications and to succeed as socially and economically competent adults, we need to support them before they arrive at school. One of the most predictive factors in a child’s likelihood of educational success is the quality of their first 1001 days of life: from bump to birth to beyond. Skills development during the first three years of a child’s life happen at an accelerated rate – lots going on, lots to learn.

Children who routinely share books at home are far more likely to come to school with ‘age-related’ reading behaviours; children who don’t, quite obviously, won’t. Nor will they come with all the other skills supported by simple, book-sharing routines: a range of vocabulary; social and emotional skills developed by empathising with characters in a book; the ability to listen and respond, to consider and articulate their own opinions (‘How do you think Max felt when he saw his supper was still hot?’ ‘Which one of the wild things did you like the look of most?’). All of this undercover learning, from the rich brain-growing loam of a simple 15 minute story, gives our toddlers the best chance to succeed once they arrive at ‘big’ school. Imagine the even greater benefits if said child toddles off with their grown-up to the local library once a week and chooses some of these books for him/herself: independence of choice; articulation of selection; physical development in negotiating the different textures of pavement/path/library steps; chances to interact with other children. So much learning from a simple library visit with the benefits of a book to share too.

But it is not all about books: physical development is also key to life-long learning. Toddlers who are physically active have brains far better developed for learning than those who have been kept inert but safe, inside, coddled in a world of iPads and Kiddie-vision.  Brains that have enjoyed a visit to the park and had to work out how to climb the steps of the slide without falling off; how to use arms/legs as props/stabilisers to ensure that rolling down a grassy bank is a brilliant, rather than bruising, experience; how to jump safely across the gap in the little park wall, where the bin used to be, to demonstrate super-heroic powers worthy of Spiderman – all these brains will be ready to access more structured learning required when they arrive at school at 3 or 4. If their early experiences, both inside and outside, have not helped the synaptic development of their neural pathways then they will be playing catch-up to close the gaps from the minute they put on their first school jumper.

I am much exercised by this topic of pre-school-school this week, as we celebrate the first anniversary of the Children’s Centre at school, working with parents in our neighbourhood to support their children’s learning from bump to birth. We also welcomed our second cohort of two year olds into the nursery. There we read books together, we went to the library, and came back via the park – parents, toddlers, babies and all.  For more than half of the group this was the first time they had undertaken such an epic outing (the library is an eight-minute walk away; the park a scant five-minute stroll).  Our families are not neglectful, but they are cautious; they are not forgetful about reading, but need to know that sharing a book with a child who cannot yet read is not a ‘silly thing to do’; they are not anti-open air activities but they need to understand that rolling down a grassy slope is not necessarily dangerous and dirty but actually fodder for the brain.

The sort of ordinary activities that many children and families consider to be part of family life are, quite simply, extraordinary for others. These are the families with gaps to be closed from the outset and who require more than the option (where it exists) of extra hours of provision at the age of 3.   As a headteacher who is passionate about the underlying principles of CPRT, I believe it is our moral and educational duty to support these children before school, if we are to avoid handing out a multiplicity of labels stating ‘well below age-related’ when they arrive in nursery.  As a Leeds headteacher, I am fortunate to work for a local authority which actively promotes the importance of ‘babies, brains and bonding’ as part of a city-wide Best Start plan for our families. A core part of the training for practitioners from a range of sectors is research around infant brain development, with the stark reminder that we must create opportunities for our babies and toddlers to learn.

N.B. If somebody at the back just muttered ‘Surestart’ please could they come and wait outside my office at lunchtime? ‘Use it or lose it’ indeed…

Sarah Rutty is Head Teacher of Bankside Primary School in Leeds, part-time Adviser for Leeds City Council Children’s Services, a member of CPRT’s Schools Alliance, and Co-ordinator of CPRT’s Leeds/West Yorkshire network. Read her previous blogs here.

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Reading for pleasure: just window dressing?

Since reading for pleasure was mandated in the national curriculum, its profile has risen exponentially. This is assuredly good news, and many schools are seeking ways to demonstrate their commitment to this agenda. But as the pressure to raise reading scores persists, there is surely a danger that schools will only find the time to pay lip service to reading for pleasure, constructing it as little more than an act of institutional window dressing in our highly performative culture.

The requirement that children should be ‘taught to find pleasure in reading’ appears to have prompted many schools to refurbish/reclaim their libraries and buy new books. Some have even purchased double decker buses, tents, tree houses and caravans to deck out as school libraries, as well as garden sheds, boats, baths and sofas to enrich classroom reading areas. These physical spaces overtly indicate to parents, governors, Ofsted inspectors and the children that the school values reading, but is this institutional demonstration enough?

In other ways too, with the best of intentions, schools can be sucked into performing reading for pleasure. Institution-wide competitions exist aplenty, including for example: extravagant dressing-up competitions on World Book Day, and competitions to read books for the school. There are also class awards (for example Reader of the Week), and inter-class competitions such as the number of books reviewed each month. In one school I know the children’s home-reading records are turned into class percentages each week and the winning class, announced in assembly, is rewarded with extra break time. Such competitions act as extrinsic motivators – encouraging children to read for recognition, for reward, for their parents, their teachers and/or the school, but not perhaps for themselves. Yet we know that reading for pleasure is more closely associated with intrinsic motivation and some research suggests extrinsic motivation has a detrimental effect on children’s comprehension.

Physically attractive reading environments can be enticing to children and are part of the reading for pleasure pedagogy described by the UKLA Teachers as Readers study, alongside reading aloud, own reading time, and informal book talk. However their ability to influence the dispositions and engagement of young readers cannot be guaranteed. Much will depend on the quality and diversity of the texts available, the degree of choice and agency offered, and the time set aside for informal talk and interaction. Many classrooms, responding to children’s 21st century reading preferences and practices, now have comics, magazines, newspapers and digital books readily available. Some schools also annually order the children’s literature shortlisted for the UKLA Children’s Book Awards or the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Awards to ensure new books are encountered by staff and children. Such texts can unquestionably make a difference, as can the nature of the physical space, but if the reading environment is not inherently social, reciprocal and interactive, then the cost and labour involved in showcasing the school’s commitment to reading surely has to be questioned.

How reading spaces are used, who owns them, who made them and who has access to them, (when and how frequently), are all questions worth asking and monitoring over time. The kinds of opportunities these spaces afford for conversations and book recommendations are also worth documenting. It is all too easy to assume reading environments represent an institutional ‘good’ and are being fully used, but the intense pressure of the standards agenda tends to reduce the time teachers feel they can set aside for children’s volitional reading practices.

In recent research undertaken in areas of social and economic disadvantage, in schools renowned locally for their work on reading for pleasure, the OU team found that the class reading areas and the sometimes fabulous school libraries were, in all but one of the four schools, simply used as text repositories. While children did borrow books from their class reading areas, predominantly they were used for ‘time out’ and as additional work spaces. No text related talk was heard in them. No browsing or relaxed reading was observed within them. Furthermore, the displays in these areas tended to represent reading as a technical skill; showcasing comprehension strategies and reading domains, and displaying proficiency ladders denoting the children’s ‘abilities’ as readers.

In other classrooms and schools, reading displays may be interactive, profiling particular texts, authors, genres, questions, artefacts and children’s work, all of which can serve to trigger text talk.  Displays that feature personal, home and community aspects of reading (e.g. through photos of ‘who reads at home, where and what we read at home’) can also enrich reading areas and libraries. These carry significant messages about actual readers, not reading, and position children, teachers, teaching assistants and parents as members of the community of readers.

To be effective, reading environments need to be much more than physically appealing. Critically they need to be socially inviting, foregrounding the role of dialogue, and offering a myriad of opportunities to talk about texts, to hear books read aloud, to develop class ‘texts in common’ and to read alone and with others. As the Cambridge Primary Review final report highlighted six years ago, ‘talking must be part of reading and writing rather than an optional extra’ (p. 269). Indeed reading, like learning, is a social and collaborative act of participation, as well as an individual one, a point which Goswami also underscores in the CPRT research review into Children’s Cognitive Development and Learning.

In order to avoid reading for pleasure becoming little more than a colourful visual laid across the landscape of schools, we must ensure the social environment receives more attention, but not through more high profile competitions. Talking about texts, their possible meanings and interpretations, and informal conversations about reading and oneself as a reader deserve to be placed at the very heart of the reading curriculum. Such talk brings the landscape to life and helps to build communities of engaged readers.

For other CPRT blogs by Teresa Cremin click here and/or download CPRT’s book Primary Colours.

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Reading: re-asserting the potency of the personal

In countries where the language of schooling predominantly focuses on measurable and often oversimplified notions of attainment, children can come to be viewed and discussed in relation to their current standards of performance, rather than as unique individuals.  In such audit-driven cultures the vital personal and affective dimensions of teaching reading and of being a reader can easily become obscured, and the potential for richly reciprocal reader relationships between children and children and between children and teachers reduces.

Yet it is possible to build human connections between readers and texts and to make the life-to-text and text-to-life moves which are core to reading in the real world. A balance needs to be wrought between teaching the skills of decoding and comprehension and fostering reading for pleasure. Such reading is essentially volitional, intrinsically motivated, child-directed and choice-led. It has making meaning at its heart.

In order to build reciprocal communities of readers who can and do choose to read and who think and talk about what they are reading, I believe we need to re-assert the potency of the personal in reading. Personal emotional responses include care, concern, sympathy, sadness, excitement, exhilaration, fear, boredom, anger and indifference, to name but a few.  Our responses motivate us as readers to persevere and to read on, or to exercise our rights as readers and step away. Either way our responses often prompt us to talk to others about our reading, whether it’s a worrying news item, an amusing text message, a surprising Facebook entry, or an unnerving novel. Reading opens up conversations between readers about their views and values, lives and experiences, it enables us as humans to consider who we are, what we and others stand for and what we feel about personal, social and cultural issues.

Such conversations cannot be left to chance. They are a crucial element in a rigorously planned and responsively executed reading for pleasure pedagogy that creates communities of readers. Pedagogy is one of CPRT’s eight priorities. Indeed as CPRT asserts, teachers need to

Develop a pedagogy of repertoire, rigour, evidence and principle, rather than mere compliance, with a particular emphasis on fostering the high quality classroom talk which children’s development, learning and attainment require.

But how is the profession to develop such a pedagogy for volitional child-led reading? And how can this be planned for and integrated into the daily fabric of school life when, as a deputy head told me this week ‘It’s not assessed, so frankly we find it hard to give any time to it’. While the profession undoubtedly wants to avoid ‘measuring the pleasure’, volitional reading demands careful nurturing, ongoing invitations to engage, imagine and be inspired. A planned reading for pleasure pedagogy is needed, based on evidence and principle. The UKLA research project Teachers as Readers suggests that this encompasses four core elements:  enticing reading environments (physically and socially), a rich read aloud programme, the provision of quality time for independent choice-led reading, and space and time for informal talk about texts .

In the UKLA study, many of the teachers (from 27 English schools) started by conducting an audit to determine the opportunities currently on offer for children to read for pleasure and the space made available to talk about their choices with one another and with teachers.  Most found that adults were the ones controlling the reading on offer to children. In particular, talk about texts was confined to the official literacy curriculum, to guided and shared reading where children’s responses were commented upon and evaluated according to the daily learning objectives. There were few real spaces for non-assessed relaxed reading conversations (in pairs or small groups), and few opportunities to talk informally about children’s responses (to literature or non-fiction), to discuss personal preferences, home practices or what being a 21st century reader might involve.

I fear this is still the case in many schools where literature is seen as a resource for literacy, staff are not encouraged to widen their pedagogic reading for pleasure repertoires and lip service is paid to children’s intrinsic motivation as readers. Too often extrinsic motivation rules. This may be evidenced through ongoing and high profile tests and targets, school-wide competitions about reading at home, and awards for those children who read higher numbers of books.  In such schools limited talk and creative interaction around texts is likely to be heard, constraining personal responses to reading.

In the Teachers as Readers project, teachers’ talk about self-chosen children’s books was initially dominated by a professional focus: they concentrated on what literacy objectives the book was good for (e.g. teaching character, plot, setting and specific language and literary devices) and often talked about how long the book would sustain a literacy focus and the amount of work it could generate. This talk was largely at the expense of mentioning the content or meaning of the narrative, or of how individual books affected them personally or might affect children.

In complete contrast, when the teachers discussed their self-chosen adult books, meaning and affect were foregrounded; personal views and emotional responses were voiced about both fiction and non-fiction and emerging social, cultural or moral issues were spontaneously discussed.  The teachers shared myriad connections to their own lives and in the process got to know more about one another – their values, families and life histories for example. This disconnect between talking about children’s texts and their own adult reading material was significant. It was fed back to the teachers, who began to re-consider what counts as reading in their homes and schools. Gradually, as they began to  read much more children’s literature, they came to talk about it as worth reading for its own sake – to be experienced, enjoyed (or not) and debated. Recognising that affect and engagement were crucial in motivating their reading, the practitioners began to share their own responses to texts in class and gave increased attention to children’s personal and emotional responses. They also set considerably more time aside for reading aloud.

Reading aloud offers an invitation to children to engage, imagine, predict and participate in the classroom community of readers; though much will depend on the quality of the text, who chose it, and the teacher’s capacity to bring it vividly to life, as well as whether it is read as a precursor to related writing activities.  It is not an ‘extra’ to be included if time allows or the children’s behaviour is deemed satisfactory.

This crucial pedagogic practice has personal, social and cognitive benefits and offers an externalised model for silent, independent reading, enabling children to experience the patterns, language and tunes of texts which they could not yet read independently.Significantly, the shared experience of being read to draws the class together in a kind of bonding time and establishes ‘texts-in-common’ whichprompt interaction. Other ‘texts-in-common’ emerge when teachers and children and children and children recommend reading material to each other; such two-way recommendations also trigger conversations and connections. Whilst these chats may happen in the interstices of the school day, making time to touch base with others and voice your thoughts and feelings about a text helps build connections between readers. These opportunities for personal interaction, reader to reader, offer invaluable support and help create a reading culture.

Reading Teachers – teachers who read and readers who teach – can often draw on a wide repertoire of children’s literature and other texts and their knowledge of the young people as readers. They are better positioned to reach out to individual learners and share texts that will interest and intrigue them, this is a much underrated professional skill which can make a profound contribution to the development of individual readers. Their classrooms are often characterised by informal text talk and book gossip as readers swap, recommend, debate and discuss their reading. Additionally Reading Teachers may foster wider human connections and empathetic responses to the plight of others. As Neil Gaiman, the children’s writer, notes:

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

EmpathyLab, an exciting new social action start-up led by Miranda McKearney (ex CEO of the Reading Agency), is exploring ways to nurture children’s empathetic innerstanding through words and stories. As the team argue, children’s social and emotional skills are increasingly recognised as vitally important for their wellbeing; they represent the basis of sound relationships and a trusting classroom ethos and can be fostered through talk and interaction about texts, potentially leading to social action. Their team’s work with schools has myriad connections to CPRT’s aims for primary education. As Robin Alexander’s recent CPRT submission to the House of Commons Education Committee reminded us, these aims focus on the individual – their wellbeing, engagement and autonomy, and on the relationship between self, others and the wider world – in particular encouraging respect and reciprocity and foregrounding the role of dialogue in learning.

Reciprocity and interaction are key markers of reading communities. In these, teachers share something of themselves as readers and as humans and make the time to find out more about the children and their everyday reading lives. They might do this through undertaking Reading Rivers (where children and teachers create collages of their recent reading in all its diversity), and build upon the variety documented by widening the range of reading material welcomed in class.  When children are invited to bring something of their reading selves to school, are offered engaging spaces and dedicated time to read their self-chosen texts, and experience texts read aloud evocatively, then the boundaries between reading in school and beyond begin to blur and reading discussions become more shared. In such communities there is a high degree of informal interaction around reading and a sense of reciprocity – of giving and receiving as readers, and as individuals.

We need to re-assert the potency of the personal, the essential reciprocity of human relations and the significance of affect and interaction in reading and in learning.

If you are interested in these issues, do consider joining UKLA’s research symposium Reading for Pleasure: What next? at the OU Camden, London, on March 23rd 2016. Cutting-edge research will be shared from colleagues in Oslo, Sheffield, Nottingham and Manchester, and there will be opportunities to debate research, policy and practice with the CEOs of BookTrust, the Reading Agency, the Reader Organisation and the NLT.

For other CPRT blogs by Teresa Cremin click here and or/download CPRT’s book Primary Colours.

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Requiring reading for pleasure

Having worked with a few schools recently on reading for pleasure, I’m beginning to wonder whether its inclusion in the national curriculum is a mixed blessing.  As one teacher explained it, ‘We’ve got to do it now haven’t we? Make them read for pleasure – make them love literature’.  Another observed she’d re-established SQUIRT (Sustained, Quiet, Uninterrupted, Individualised Reading Time) in her classroom and renamed it SQUIRP (Sustained, Quiet, Uninterrupted, Individualised Reading for Pleasure). But we cannot require children to read with or for pleasure, nor can we oblige them to engage positively in words and worlds. We can, however, invite and entice children to find enjoyment in reading, share our own pleasures (and dissatisfactions) as readers, and work to build communities of engaged readers.

In any case reading time doesn’t necessarily need to be a silent or solitary activity. What of sharing a Simpsons Comic with a friend, pouring over the visuals in the National Geographic Kids or debating a rugby review in First News? What of reading poetry in the online Poetry Archive and wanting to voice it aloud and drum the beat? Reading, like learning, is socially mediated, as Usha Goswami reminded us in the recent CPRT report on Children’s Cognitive Development and Learning, it is a social and collaborative act of participation, as well as an individual one. In order to nurture children’s enjoyment teachers need to build communities of engaged readers who can and do choose to read, and create rich and inventive reading environments – both physically and socially – like those at Fulbridge Academy (CPRT Alliance School) for instance.

In the glaring absence of attention to digital texts in the national curriculum, there is a real danger that the profession will equate reading for pleasure with reading fiction, thus reifying this albeit highly potent form. If the profession becomes book-bound, this is likely to hold back the development of children’s wider reading repertoires and may reduce the potential for pleasurable engagement in reading. As the EU Expert Panel on Literacy states:

There should not be a hierarchical ranking of reading material. Books, comic books, newspapers, magazines and online reading materials are equally valid and important entry points to reading for children and adults alike. …Books and other printed texts are important. But in recognition of the digital opportunities, people should be encouraged to read what they enjoy reading, in whatever format is most pleasurable and convenient for them.

Is the profession failing to recognise and build upon the every day reading practices and preferences of the young? Driven by their personal interests and popular culture children read a wide range of texts, in print and on-line, at home and in school, but they may not recognise this as reading. School reading books, assigned to readers in various ways through colour-coding and/or graded and levelled schemes, represent only a small part of their reading diet. Perhaps through undertaking 24-Hour Reads (where children and teachers record everything they read over 24 hours and make posters/ scrap books/diary entries to demonstrate this), practitioners may begin to credit this diversity and widen the range of material that is welcomed in their classrooms. This idea was one of many developed by the creative practitioners in UKLA’s Teachers as Readers project. Through their involvement in such activities, the teachers began to reconceptualise reading in the 21st century and question what counts as reading in school. In this study 43 teachers from five local authorities engaged in considerable reflection on their own as well as children’s reading practices and preferences, and some developed as ‘Reading Teachers: teachers who read and readers who teach’. These teachers made more of a difference to children’s attitudes and enjoyment in reading.

In nurturing young readers and learners, volition and agency are crucial. Adult readers exercise their rights daily: the right to choose what to read and when, where and why, the right not to write a review after finishing each book and the right not to be quizzed on the content/characters/theme or plot. Many will also exercise the right not to finish a book, but do we offer such rights to younger readers? Daniel Pennac’s Rights of a Reader (wonderfully illustrated by Quentin Blake), are worth exploring with children in this regard since intrinsic motivation is key – reading for its own sake rather than reading for rewards such as recognition, grades and competition. As schools across the country pick up the mantle of inviting and enticing children to read for pleasure, teachers may need to loosen the reading reins and hand more control over to them. Are only those deemed ‘free readers’ able to make choices? What are the consequences of having your ‘school reading book’ imposed upon you? Reading for pleasure has to be child-owned and directed, oriented towards reading for oneself, not for teachers or parents, the school or the system.

Much depends however on our long terms aims. Do we want to develop readers for life (the maximum entitlement) or are we satisfied with the ‘expected standard’ (the minimum)? And why has children’s pleasure become a statutory requirement now? It has never before been authorised in England. In the prescriptive remit of the original National Literacy Strategy back in 1998, whilst there were more than 55 verbs to describe reading: ‘enjoy’ was not one of them. The reason for the current attention on this issue lies of course, at least in part, in PISA and PIRLS results and established international evidence that reading for pleasure – independent choice led reading – is a strong predictor of reading attainment. These large-scale surveys also assert that the relationship between reading achievement and positive attitudes to reading is bi-directional: the will influences the skill and vice versa. Hardly surprising at one level, but it seems to have been enough, alongside concerted campaigning by literacy organisations, (and perhaps some awareness of research evidence), to influence government.

I am uncomfortable however with harnessing children’s reading for pleasure, even implicitly to the standards agenda.  If standards fail to rise and children’s engagement in reading (as measured in PISA and PIRLS) refuses to shift, will the profession be offered technocratic ‘guidance’ in this regard; lists of required practices which will apparently deliver the golden goose, but may also serve to limit children’s lived experience of reading. The imposed emphasis on policy-endorsed phonic schemes in the early years and the accompanying Year 1 Phonics Check suggests the profession needs to mindful of the challenging imperative to ‘teach’ reading for pleasure. Creating an effective balance between teaching reading, and fostering readers’ pleasurable engagement through building communities of readers characterised by reciprocity and interaction, is genuinely challenging. The assessment of the former tends to sideline the latter.  Again our aims need to guide us. Indeed in re-reading the Cambridge Primary Review Trust’s 12 aims for primary education, I was struck by how many resonate with the reading for pleasure agenda. Aims one and two focus on ‘wellbeing’ and ‘engagement’ as both preconditions and outcomes of successful education,  aim four profiles children’s ‘autonomy and sense of self’ and aims five and ten, which focus on ‘respect and reciprocity’ and fostering ‘skill development’ respectively,are also feasible through developing communities of engaged readers. But it is the 11th aim ‘exciting the imagination’ that underscores why reading for pleasure must be seen as a worthwhile activity in its own terms.

To excite children’s imagination in order that they can advance beyond present understanding, extend the boundaries of their lives, contemplate worlds possible as well as actual, understand cause and consequence, develop the capacity for empathy, and reflect on and regulate their behaviour; to explore and test language, ideas and arguments in every activity and form of thought … We assert the need to emphasise the intrinsic value of exciting children’s imagination. To experience the delights – and pains – of imagining, and of entering into the imaginative worlds of others, is to become a more rounded and capable person.

Reading literature, in particular, can distinctively excite and develop the imagination and whilst children’s textual choices and interests are important, reading (and hearing, inhabiting and discussing) literature must retain a central role. It can support children’s personal, social, moral and cultural education, and can, as CPRT asserts, strengthen, challenge or alter the ways in which they see the world and engage with it. So as schools respond to the requirement to develop reading for pleasure, they would be well served by revisiting these aims in order to avoid implementing practice that leans towards ‘demanding’ or ‘requiring’  demonstrations of apparently positive attitudes or compliant dispositions on the part of young readers.

Reading for pleasure and reader engagement cannot be mandated.

www.open.ac.uk/people/tmc242

For other blogs by Teresa Cremin click here and/or download CPRT’s book Primary Colours.

 

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