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
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.
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