Siobhan Whittaker, Assistant Headteacher (Teaching and Learning), Greenbank High School

In the pace of a busy school day, the final minutes of a lesson can easily slip away. Yet these moments are some of the most powerful in shaping learning. A strong finish is not simply a tidy conclusion; it is a crucial opportunity to reinforce understanding, assess progress, and prepare students for what comes next. When used intentionally, these closing moments can transform the effectiveness of a lesson and significantly improve long term retention.

Cognitive science highlights the primacy–recency effect, which shows that students remember the beginning and end of a learning episode more vividly than the middle. This means that the final minutes of a lesson are prime real estate for learning. When these moments are rushed or lost to packing away, transitions, or low level disruption, we miss a vital opportunity to consolidate knowledge. Just five minutes lost at the end of each lesson equates to 25 minutes a week – the equivalent of an entire lesson every fortnight.

Memory research reinforces this point, demonstrating how easily learning fades without structured consolidation. Strong finishes help students reflect, retain, and transfer knowledge into long term memory. They also provide teachers with essential formative assessment opportunities, enabling responsive planning and targeted intervention.

Effective end of lesson routines are not simply organisational tools; they are pedagogical tools. Predictable structures reduce anxiety, support emotional regulation, and help students focus. When students know what to expect, they can transition smoothly into reflection and retrieval. Routines also reduce cognitive load by automating procedural tasks, freeing up mental space for learning. This is particularly important for students with SEND, who benefit from clarity, consistency, and reduced ambiguity.

As Tom Bennett reminds us, behaviour must be taught, not assumed. Routines explicitly teach students how to behave and engage, minimising disruption and supporting inclusion. A well designed ending signals that learning matters right up to the final second. It reinforces that the classroom is a purposeful space where expectations are upheld consistently.

Reflecting on our own practice is key.

• How do we end our lessons?
• Are routines embedded and understood by all?
• Do they support students with early passes, sensory needs, or additional vulnerabilities?
• Do they reinforce our school values and expectations?

Strong finishes are not optional extras. They are essential tools for effective teaching and learning. By embedding purposeful routines and designing meaningful closing tasks, we can maximise the impact of every lesson and support our students in becoming confident, reflective learners.

Designing purposeful endings

A strong finish is more than a wrap up. It is a strategic moment that can deepen understanding, correct misconceptions, and prepare students for future learning. Thoughtful planning of these final minutes can transform classroom practice and boost student outcomes.

There are four key components to a strong finish:

1. Progress and application of learning
   
2. Addressing misconceptions
   
3. Resetting the classroom space
   
4. Managing dismissal
   

Each plays a vital role in reinforcing learning and setting the tone for what comes next.

1. Progress and application of learning

Progress tasks allow students to reflect on what they’ve learned. These can be independent or collaborative and should extend thinking rather than simply summarise content. Examples include:

• A short retrieval question
  
• A “one thing I learned today” reflection
  
• A mini whiteboard response
  
• A quick application task or hinge question.
  

Teachers can use this time to circulate, observe, and respond to student needs. This helps identify what has been understood and what requires further attention. It also builds metacognitive awareness, helping students recognise their own progress.

2. Addressing misconceptions

Misconceptions often surface at the end of a lesson. Targeted questions or quick assessments can uncover misunderstandings. Daisy Christodoulou’s approach of asking one key question is a simple yet powerful way to check comprehension and inform future planning. This ensures that gaps are addressed promptly rather than carried into the next lesson.

3. Resetting the classroom space

The physical environment matters. Resetting the space reinforces respect for the learning environment and prepares it for the next group. It provides a clear routine that students can follow, promoting calm and order. Delegating responsibilities to students can build ownership, develop leadership skills, and reward positive behaviour.

4. Managing dismissal

Dismissal routines are crucial for safety and control. A structured exit signals the end of the lesson and ensures that students leave calmly and purposefully. It also allows the teacher to maintain control of the space and prepare for the next class. Students should not be queuing at the door or wandering corridors before the bell. A calm dismissal sets the tone for the next transition and supports whole school behaviour expectations.
Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion offers practical strategies for strong finishes, including summarising key points, previewing the next lesson, using exit tickets, and incorporating reflection. Each strategy helps students consolidate learning and stay engaged.

Aligning with Greenbank’s classroom principles

At Greenbank High School, our classroom principles emphasise engagement, inclusion, and respect. A strong finish aligns with these values by:

• Promoting student agency
  
• Supporting diverse needs
  
• Reinforcing high expectations
  
• Embedding routines that create calm, purposeful learning environments.
  

Retrieval practice, responsive feedback, and digital competencies all play a role in making the end of a lesson meaningful. Strong finishes also support our wider curriculum intent by ensuring that learning is coherent, cumulative, and connected.

Conclusion

Designing purposeful endings is a powerful way to enhance teaching and learning. By focusing on progress, addressing misconceptions, managing the classroom space, and ensuring smooth dismissal, teachers can make every minute count. Strong finishes are not just about ending well – they are about preparing students to begin again with confidence, clarity, and curiosity.

Additional resources

We shared many of the ideas discussed in this blog post in a series of staff CPD sessions – available to explore below (NACE member login required):

• Strong finishes – session 1
  
• Strong finishes – session 2
  

Research base

• Ebbinghaus (1885) – The forgetting curve demonstrates how quickly information decays without structured review, reinforcing the need for purposeful end‑of‑lesson consolidation.
• Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968) – The multi‑store model of memory highlights the importance of rehearsal and retrieval in transferring learning to long‑term memory.
• Murdock (1962) – Research on the primacy–recency effect shows that students remember the beginning and end of learning episodes most clearly.
• Sweller (1988) – Cognitive Load Theory emphasises the need for predictable routines to reduce unnecessary cognitive strain and support working memory.

Formative assessment & misconceptions

• Daisy Christodoulou – Advocates for precise, well‑designed questions to identify misconceptions and strengthen understanding.
  
• Black & Wiliam (1998) – Formative assessment research shows that timely checks for understanding significantly improve learning outcomes.
  

Behaviour, routines & classroom culture

• Tom Bennett: Running the Room – Argues that routines must be explicitly taught and consistently reinforced to create calm, predictable learning environments.
• Doug Lemov: Teach Like a Champion – Provides practical strategies such as exit tickets, lesson previews, and structured dismissals to strengthen lesson endings.
• Rosenshine (2012) – Principles of Instruction highlight the importance of reviewing learning, checking for understanding, and providing guided practice.

How can we support more able learners in the English classroom?

English teachers must move beyond superficial forms of challenge and devise sequences of lessons that genuinely push, inspire and develop more able learners – says Anthony Cockerill, Director of the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE).

Teachers often rely on strategies that appear to support our most able learners but in reality do little to deepen their thinking. Giving students ‘extra work’ or ‘extension tasks’ can create the comforting illusion of challenge while preventing them from reaching their potential.

These surface-level approaches might tick boxes or keep students busy, but they fail to offer the intellectual stretch and rigour that truly cultivates high attainment. It’s helpful to think more carefully about how we can support more able students at each stage of the learning process.

What are our students learning?

Expose learners to ambitious, complex texts and concepts.

Choose material that stretches students beyond the typical diet of set texts – and this doesn’t necessarily mean totems of the literary canon – so they wrestle with sophisticated ideas, unfamiliar structures and rich language that demands sustained intellectual effort.

Build deep disciplinary knowledge.

Expose students to the debates, contexts and theoretical lenses that shape the discipline of English. By introducing ideas from literary criticism, history, philosophy and politics, we enable learners to see themselves as active participants in wider conversations about texts and culture.

Teach sophisticated language, stylistic and rhetorical devices.

Develop students’ ability to speak and write with precision, control and flair, explicitly teaching the stylistic tools, rhetorical techniques and academic vocabulary used by expert writers so that students can communicate nuanced thinking with confidence and authority.

How are our students learning?

Offer open-ended, creative and evaluative tasks.

Plan learning activities that require students to make choices, experiment with ideas and justify their thinking – for example, writing pastiches, crafting alternative interpretations, or expressing a point of view in an engaging and original way.

Integrate reading, writing, speaking and listening.

Ensure students encounter concepts through an equity of exposure to the traditional four modalities of the English classroom. They might debate an idea orally, explore it through analytical writing, respond creatively, and then listen to expert voices – each mode strengthening and expanding their conceptual understanding.

Provide deliberate practice using style models, exemplars and scaffolds.

Use carefully chosen examples of excellent writing to unpick what makes it effective, draw attention to the writer’s craft, and then ask students to imitate and adapt high-level techniques before gradually removing support as their proficiency grows.

How can we support learning?

Model strategies, vocabulary and thought processes.

Make your own thinking explicit by narrating how you approach a complex task – selecting vocabulary, crafting sentences, making inferences, evaluating interpretations – so that students can internalise and practise the habits that underpin successful creative and analytical work.

Differentiate by depth, not volume.

Plan challenge through increased complexity – such as tackling ambiguous ideas, experimenting with form, or synthesising multiple viewpoints – rather than through additional tasks that may simply consume time without enhancing cognitive demand.

Develop agency and structures for independence, rather than relying on PEE paragraphs and similar mnemonics.

Provide high-challenge frameworks, sentence stems or structural guides that encourage students to construct thoughtful, original arguments; over time, weaning them off reductive formulae like PEE so that their writing becomes flexible, mature and authentic.

What do our students do to show progress?

Encourage them to produce work that reflects increasing sophistication, originality and nuance.
Look for growing control, creativity and ambition in how students communicate ideas – for example, through more daring interpretations, subtle shifts in tone, or inventive stylistic choices that show ownership over their writing and thinking.

Help them to demonstrate critical, evaluative thinking through discussion and writing.

Encourage students to interrogate texts and ideas actively – weighing evidence, questioning assumptions, and problematising simplistic readings – so that their viewpoints become more layered, exploratory and confident over time.

Let them articulate and use knowledge verbally.

Give students frequent opportunities to articulate their thinking out loud – in classroom discussion, debates or hot-seating – enabling them to develop academic and creative oracy, rehearse complex ideas and strengthen their command of subject-specific language.

How should our students receive feedback?

Give precise, personalised formative feedback focusing on stretch and refinement.

Rather than merely correcting mistakes, feedback should target what a student needs to do to move forward – pointing towards greater complexity, precision, or stylistic control.

Use dialogue – verbal questioning, conferencing, and live marking.

Respond in real time wherever possible, using probing questions and quick conversations to deepen understanding, unsettle complacency and move learners forward while they are still ‘in the zone’ of thinking.

Facilitate critique of models and peer feedback.

Train students to evaluate work (their own and others’) against ambitious, explicit criteria that has even been agreed in advance as part of the learning process – so that they come to understand effective writing and so they can engage critically and constructively in the improvement process.

Final thoughts

Ultimately, supporting more able learners in English is not about doing more, but doing more thoughtfully. Many of these suggestions reflect effective teaching for learners of all abilities. But by embedding genuine challenge into our curriculum, pedagogy and feedback, we can offer our students the chance to think deeply, work independently and engage with rich ideas.

Find out more…

Join us on Tuesday 17th March 2026 for a free live webinar with the author of this blog post, Anthony Cockerill, Director of the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE). During the session, Anthony will share examples of how the strategies discussed above can be implemented in practice, with opportunity for Q&A. Read more and register.

AI and adaptive teaching: embracing the challenge

Matt Kingston, Curriculum Innovation Lead, Holme Grange School

Holme Grange’s teaching and learning focus this year has been adaptive teaching, a priority that brings with it many of the same challenges faced by schools nationwide. One of the most significant barriers has been the time required to create adapted resources that meet individual pupil needs. 

Most teachers can recall spending hours preparing resources, only for unexpected issues such as IT failures, printer jams, or a difficult lesson to undermine the best of intentions. As a result, many teachers have relied heavily on in-class adaptations to ensure accessibility – inevitably an uphill struggle. 

However, the emergence of new technologies has begun to shift this balance, offering teachers ways to maintain both their wellbeing and their ability to provide accessible, high-quality resources for all pupils.

This year, we have undertaken a focused exploration of how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to support adaptive teaching, enabling all pupils to access the curriculum and work towards shared learning goals across a range of subjects. We began on a small scale, working within departments to adapt resources efficiently for diverse learners. This approach demonstrated a clear positive impact, giving us the confidence to begin rolling it out across the whole school.

Our starting point was a staff audit designed to understand how AI was already being used and how it was perceived. The overall response was positive, but three key concerns emerged. Only 11% of staff were using AI to adapt resources; there were significant worries about its impact on pupils’ critical thinking; and concerns around cheating were widespread.

The latter two concerns are being addressed through careful task design. If a task can be easily completed using AI and is difficult to detect, then it is worth questioning its educational value. As AI becomes harder to identify and increasingly difficult to restrict, particularly in homework settings, we have shifted our focus towards designing AI-resistant tasks. These include activities where pupils must defend their opinions, record voice notes to explain their thinking, or engage in flipped learning that is assessed in class using mini-whiteboards. By requiring pupils to articulate and justify their ideas, we strengthen critical thinking while making it harder to outsource learning to AI. Rather than viewing AI as a barrier, we are using it as an opportunity to refine our curriculum and teaching approaches.

In line with our school learning policy on adaptive teaching, it quickly became clear that there was a skills gap among staff when it came to using AI effectively. Our first step was raising awareness of how AI could be used safely and purposefully. This was introduced during an INSET session, where staff were presented with three practical strategies for using AI to support adaptive teaching. Each strategy included guidance on accessibility and impact, strengths and limitations, and example prompts tailored to specific learning needs.

For many staff, this session served as a reminder of AI’s potential. For others who had previously been hesitant, it provided the confidence to begin experimenting with new approaches. This was followed by a second session aimed at beginners, covering the fundamentals of prompt writing, data protection, and key risks such as GDPR breaches and AI ‘hallucinations’. The response was again very positive. While a full staff audit will be conducted later in the year, early indicators suggest a noticeable increase in staff using AI to support resource adaptation. This work will be reinforced through fortnightly ‘quick wins’ shared during staff briefings and in the weekly bulletin.

One of the most significant challenges AI has introduced relates to student use. Concerns around cheating were not unfounded, with pupils openly discussing their use of AI tools to complete notes and homework tasks. However, as AI will inevitably form part of students’ future lives, a blanket ban would do little to prepare them for what lies ahead.

Instead, we are focusing on educating pupils about appropriate and effective use. We are currently trialling a Year 9 tutor programme to explore how structured guidance impacts students’ understanding and use of AI. This programme covers how AI works, the risks it poses to learning, how it can be used positively, and what the future of AI may look like. Alongside this, we are piloting small-scale projects such as subject-specific GPTs that pupils are permitted to use independently. These tools are designed to guide thinking rather than provide answers, helping pupils to use AI as a learning aid rather than a shortcut.

Ultimately, this approach relies on pupils choosing to use AI responsibly. Developing this mindset will take time and ongoing dialogue. To support this, we will continue gathering feedback through staff audits, research, and CPD, while also establishing a digital student council to give pupils a voice in shaping how AI is used within the school.

We are still at the very beginning of a long journey with AI. However, the willingness of both staff and pupils to engage thoughtfully with this challenge has been encouraging, making what could be a daunting task an exciting opportunity for meaningful change.

Holme Grange School, Wokingham, has been accredited with the NACE Challenge Award since 2013, and is a NACE Challenge Ambassador School.

Roger Sutcliffe, Director of DialogueWorks and Creator of the Thinking Moves A-Z

As Kate Hosey said in her blog post in 2022, some students – perhaps many – can “find it hard to motivate themselves to be more active in their learning”.

There may be various reasons for this, some of which may be related to social trends beyond the classroom. This blog post is not intended to offer a cure for all of those!

What it offers is a simple suggestion, that students might be more engaged with their learning if they saw it as a way of developing skills for life – followed by another, as to how that desired outcome might be reached.

What do we mean by ‘learning’?

The word ‘learning’ is ambiguous between content – what is learnt – which is typically ‘subject’-based, and process – the daily slog, and sometimes satisfaction, of ‘studying’.

Many students, if not most, see learning predominantly as the former – the acquisition of stipulated knowledge, rather than the development of smart skills for life.

But what could be smarter than cognitive – essentially, thinking – skills? (Well, perhaps metacognitive ones – but watch this space!)

If only the teaching and learning process explicitly promoted and practised such skills, then maybe, just maybe, more students would value and engage with the process.

How could this ideal be reached? The key is in the word ‘explicitly’. Any taught lesson, at any level and in any subject, demands of the students a variety of thinking skills. (If not, it cannot be worth its salt!)

How often are these demands spelled out? To be fair, the best teachers will do this, if not in advance of a learning task, then afterwards, by way of explaining how it could have been done better.

But there are still two challenges to be overcome.

Developing a shared language for thinking skills

I recognised the first of these challenges about 15 years ago, when I was commissioned to teach some teachers (more) about thinking skills. It is that there is no common language for teachers and learners to talk about thinking skills, nor indeed any appreciation of the full range of such skills.

That was when I set about creating Thinking Moves A-Z, a list of the 26 most fundamental cognitive skills – which has the further merit of being easy to learn and use.

This scheme enables teachers to be clear what sorts of thinking they are expecting students to practise in any given lesson. Typically, they might highlight two or three metacognitive ‘moves’ per lesson for the students to focus on, but over a term or year they might aim to cover as full a range as possible.

The second challenge is that, ultimately, the aim is for students not only to be more aware of their capacity for different sorts of thinking – what I sometimes call their ‘brain powers’ – but to practise those skills independently: to see themselves as, and indeed to be, ‘good thinkers’.

That, of course, is the point at which those skills can properly be called ‘metacognitive’ – when students are not just thinking about their thinking, but doing so with purpose and with proficiency.

Inspiration, aspiration, and commitment

But I must return to the main question of this blog, namely how to get students to appreciate this ultimate aim, and to engage with it.

As to the appreciation, I have already hinted that simply providing students with a common and complete vocabulary for thinking about thinking is likely to be interesting, if not inspiring, to them.
What student would not be impressed to be told that their brain/mind is capable of 26 different ‘moves’, and indeed has been making them daily – but without their even realising it?

And then what student would not aspire to become better at some, if not all, of these moves – to become ‘good’ at thinking AHEAD (predicting or aiming), for example, or thinking BACK (remembering or reflecting)?

Of course, some students will still need to be encouraged – motivated – to commit themselves to this aspiration, and to the journey involved.

Getting better at EXPLAINING, for example, involves long-term commitment to expanding one’s vocabulary, and to deploying words with care.

Getting better at WEIGHING UP (evaluating) involves deep commitment to open-mindedness and fairness.

And getting better at balancing ZOOMING OUT and ZOOMING IN involves commitment to the move most fundamental for metacognition – being able to step back from time to time and look at the whole picture, before deciding which aspect to focus on next – a balancing cycle we all repeat all the time, again usually without realising it.

Unlocking the full benefits of metacognition

Metacognition is not just the ability to manage your thinking better in various ways. It is the ability, I maintain, to manage your whole self – your feelings and actions as well as your thinking.

That includes the ability to recognise what is in your interest as well as what you are interested in, and to commit to some actions that might not be as appealing as others.

I realise that it is asking a lot of young people to reach the level of self-awareness where they are completely self-motivated in this way. So, I repeat that young people need steady encouragement from their teachers to be better thinkers, as well as just better learners.

But I think that there is an even greater intrinsic value to becoming more metacognitive – more self-aware and more self-managing.

To sum up, then, I am saying that part of motivating students to become metacognitive is to spell out to them what metacognition is, so that they know how they could actively develop that capacity in themselves.

In my next blog post, I will do a bit more explaining of metacognition, since I think it is not as well understood, even by educationalists, as it might be. ‘Thinking about your thinking’ is a good starting explanation, but it lacks some vital ingredients. Other accounts are similarly too narrow, and rather formulaic.

Metacognition is potentially a key to fuller and richer living, not just more proficient learning. It should, then, be a driving concept for all schools and teachers.

Roger Sutcliffe is Director of DialogueWorks and Creator of the Thinking Moves A-Z. He taught at both junior and senior level (English and Maths) for over 25 years, and has been an independent educational consultant, specialising in Philosophy for Children and Teaching Thinking, for the last 25 years. He is a Fellow of the Chartered College of Teaching.

Roger is currently collaborating with NACE on a four-part course based on the Thinking Moves A-Z, open to schools across all phases and contexts. If you missed the first session, it’s not too late to join! Contact us to arrange access to the recording of Session 1, and live participation in the remaining three sessions.

Anjali Patel, Lead Advisory Teacher, Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE)

The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) is an independent UK charity, and English Association, dedicated to raising the literacy achievement of children by putting quality literature at the heart of all learning. 

It is a charity with a national and international reputation for providing excellent literacy training and resources for primary schools, based on extensive research and best practice.

CLPE’s core beliefs and mission align with those of NACE in that we believe it is every child’s right to achieve and to be given the opportunities and experiences necessary to thrive.

What is Power of Reading?

CLPE’s research around the importance of using quality texts as the basis for English planning and quality teaching, and to provide reflective professional development, is embodied in our flagship training programme: the Power of Reading. 

Built on 50 years of CLPE’s research, the Power of Reading explores the impact high-quality literature has on children’s engagement and attainment as readers and the link between reading and children’s writing development, supported by creative teaching approaches to develop a whole-school curriculum, which fosters a love of reading and writing to raise achievement in literacy. 

In short, we recommend the kinds of books that provide challenge and opportunity for sustained shared study in whole-class English lessons with detailed teaching sequences that enable teachers across all primary Key Stages to work in depth with the best children’s literature being published today. 

When ‘broad and balanced’ became overloaded and surface-level

So why do we believe should Power of Reading be at the heart of any English curriculum? 

At CLPE, our school members are integral to our work. We benefit from thousands of schools and teachers being part of that CLPE community and this means we can draw on our relationship with and research in these schools to design professional development programmes and teaching resources that remain relevant.

The Power of Reading programme is refined each year, informed by the evaluations of participants and to take into account new research or statutory guidance or developments from the DfE and Ofsted and to support our schools to interpret and implement policy and guidance with confidence and integrity to what we know works.

In recent years, the issues raised with us by teachers and leaders on our INSETs and training sessions has been overridingly related to concerns around understanding how to use language to communicate meaning and for effect, both orally and in writing; and in editing, refining and response to writing. Perhaps their views resonate with you?

“Children are not motivated to edit their work beyond proofreading for spelling or other ‘surface features’.”

“There is so much curriculum content, we are teaching too much at a surface level rather than teaching at depth, particularly in writing.”

“The EYFS curriculum is too constrained for periods of sustained shared thinking to happen. Reduced time is spent at play, with more carpet time ‘sitting and listening’.”

“Responses to texts don’t have depth, children aren’t able to go below the surface and be reflective and evaluative.”

“Some set structures and routines, e.g. ‘we have to do writing every day’, ‘we have to do grammar on a Wednesday’ are barriers to developing effective practice, particularly in writing.” 

“Not enough time and expertise in how to respond to writing as readers (teachers and children) – text references are features-based, not drawing on language and composition for effect.”

Providing depth to close the disadvantage gap

It is interesting to explore these commonly shared views through the lens of inclusion and to make the connection between being ‘more able’ and the kinds of experiences that lead to this opportunity to thrive and become highly literate.

Children from privileged backgrounds are more likely to experience the kinds of book ownership and book sharing experiences that support them to deepen their reader response and understanding of the world so that – in school – they can begin to explore how authors, illustrators or poets can achieve this response and how they themselves can make meaning for a reader in their own writing.

Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are more reliant on classroom routines and resources to be able to access and make connections with high-quality, representative children’s literature; to engage in daily book sharing experiences; develop deeper reader response through sustained book talk; and, as Frank Smith (1982) put it, ‘join the literacy club’ (1).

If teachers are saying they are constrained by an overloaded curriculum or lack opportunity to develop subject knowledge through quality professional development (2), the English curriculum will become increasingly disjointed and ‘surface’ level with a disadvantage gap that grows ever wider. When what all teachers want is to give every child the opportunity to work at greater depth whatever their starting point. 

The last thing we want is for only privileged children to be afforded the benefits of challenge and so we must provide an equitable curriculum that enables all children to be motivated to make and create meaning with rich texts through non-reductive teaching approaches and with expert teachers.

And this is why we believe at CLPE that the Power of Reading is as necessary today as it was 20 years ago, if not more so.

The impact of a reading-rich English curriculum

The Power of Reading programme stems from CLPE’s seminal research publication The Reader in the Writer (3). This research aimed to investigate how children's writing might be influenced by studying challenging literary texts in the classroom. 

The findings from that research serve as the backbone to CLPE’s training programme and they are at the heart of the Power of Reading teaching sequences that support our members to develop an evidence-led literacy curriculum in their own classrooms. 

After 20 years, and with thousands of teachers trained across the UK and internationally, the programme continues to evidence impact on teachers and children whose schools have participated in the training. All the evidence we collect to measure impact continues to teach us how powerful reading can be for both children’s academic attainment and wider learning and development.

An independent evaluation by Leeds Trinity University reported on the impact of using Power of Reading in 11 Bradford schools from Autumn 2018 to Spring 2019 (4). The report shows that children in these schools made accelerated progress and the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils was significantly narrowed.

 
More recently, in evaluating the impact of Power of Reading on children in the Early Years (5), the gap between disadvantaged children and their peers was smaller in research schools compared to all pupils within the local area. And when we compared the engagement and attainment of project children at the start and end of their Reception year, the findings were significant with double the number of children working at age-related expectations in Language and Literacy Areas of Learning.

Key recommendations for a challenging English curriculum

So what can we learn from this research to support classroom practice? 

If we can create an English curriculum that is evidenced to close the disadvantage gap through exposure to and engagement in high-quality texts leading to increased world and vocabulary knowledge and writing outcomes in which children make deliberate choices for their own readers, we are creating a curriculum in which all children have access to experiences that increase their self-efficacy and the chance to be more able.

Our Associate Schools – in some of the most disadvantaged communities in England – observe children working at and achieving greater depth and this is articulated beautifully in a recent case study from the team at Miriam Lord Community Primary School in Bradford. 

The Power of Reading practice and provision at Miriam Lord – and the outcomes observed – connect deeply with NACE’s core principles and can be framed as key recommendations for a challenging English curriculum:

• Ensure teachers have strong subject knowledge of high-quality children’s literature so they can give children access to a range of literary forms within and across all year groups.

“[The children] can talk with a greater depth of knowledge of authors… so their ability to compare themes, characters, likes, dislikes is so much better than it ever was and then that communicates into the writing.”

Find out more about our Power of Reading English curriculum maps.

• Choose books in which they see their own and other realities represented so that you can build authentic reader and writer identities in all children which allow them to develop and demonstrate their abilities. 

“The children need to see themselves in books – or at least an element of their lives – in books. They need access to books that they can connect to and that will draw them in and I think the book choices we give them here give them a bigger hook, certainly than the book choices I had when I was growing up.”

Find out more about CLPE’s Reflecting Realities Research.

• Use a range of non-reductive, social and creative teaching approaches to deepen children’s understanding and broaden their experiences, including drama, artwork and storytelling.

“It provides lots of opportunities for immersion and exploration which is really important for a number of children that come to our school because they’ve got deprivation of experience so they don’t get to have those exciting days out or lots of real-world experiences so the books give them that and then they get to participate in role play and activities which enthuse them which then feeds into their writing process.”

Find out about CLPE’s recommended teaching approaches.

• Follow an authentic writing process in which children are making meaning from well-crafted written language, then engage in making conscious choices with their own writing. Focus not on the ‘what’ but the ‘why’ when making such choices, within a community of readers and writers. 

“It puts children’s enjoyment at the centre of everything. It’s not focused solely on the final written output and the success criteria which was the case for a number of years and it made the whole writing process quite onerous and quite boring for children.” 

Find out more about CLPE’s reader into writing research.

• Make explicit the connections children can make between growing literacy knowledge and skills and in wider curriculum work so that children have opportunity to thrive across a range of contexts and throughout the curriculum. 

“It has wider themes threaded through it like geography, history, citizenship so it’s not just English as a stand-alone subject.”

Find out more about the Power of Reading books recommended for each Key Stage.

References
(1) Joining the Literacy Club. Further Essays into Education, Frank Smith (Heinemann, 1987)
(2) Independent review of teachers’ professional development in schools: phase 2 findings (Ofsted, May 2024)
(3) The Reader in the Writer, Myra Barrs and Valerie Cork (CLPE, 2000)
(4) Leeds Trinity University report on the impact of Power of Reading in the Exceed Academies Trust, Bradford (2019)
(5) The Power of Reading in the Early Years (CLPE, 2023)

Additional resources and support

• Find out how you can get involved in CLPE’s Power of Reading programme
• Join NACE and CLPE for a free live webinar on Tuesday 17th June

Plus: save the date! On Friday 3rd October NACE and CLPE are collaborating on a “member meetup” event (free for staff at NACE member schools) exploring approaches to sustain pleasure and challenge in reading and literacy across Key Stages 2 and 3. Details coming soon to the NACE community calendar.