The 2016 reading test data shows that the test was tough. How can we help to promote good reading skills (and social and emotional skills, too, maybe)?
The Department for Education recently released measures showing how children have progressed from Key Stage 1 to Key Stage 2. Expected progress is zero, with anything above that being better than expected and negative numbers showing less than expected progress. Overall, we’re happy that Moortown’s progress remains better than many schools. In Writing and in Maths, the progress measure is 1.4 and 2.0 – this is really quite secure progress.
In Reading this year, progress was also positive, but by less than Writing and Maths: 0.3 – a little above the expected level. We’d like it to be higher. We think the Reading test was extremely hard this year – something widely reported and commented on in the media and social media. It also raises the importance of reading and discussing what is being read at home. Some of our children struggled for three main reasons:
Some children struggled to read the whole text. This flags up how important regular reading at home is to build up fluency.
Others struggled with how difficult the texts were to read. One was an extract from a newspaper, whose intended audience is adults, not 11 year olds! This flags up the importance of encouraging your child to read often, and to read a variety of texts, from fiction to non-fiction, comics to newspapers (but always prioritise reading for pleasure – far more important than a snapshot of reading skills that is the SATs test).
Third, the actual test questions were tough. They testing children’s knowledge of quite tricky words and ability to infer ‘impressions’, a word used more than once in the test. Teachers always encourage parents and carers to be listening to their child read and talking about what is being read, even when a child is quite a fluent reader.
For your awareness, here are a couple of questions from the test, about warthogs and dodos:
“…milled around in bewilderment” (page 8) Explain what this description suggests about the baby warthogs.
What does “rehabilitate the image of the dodo” mean? Tick one. a) restore a painting of the dodo b) rebuild the reputation of the dodo c) repair a model of the dodo d) review accounts of the dodo
Some of the words and phrases used in the texts included ancestors, impressions, inscription, ‘parted company’, ‘offered themselves up’, oasis and parched – not impossibly hard to work out, but perhaps a step up from what your child might be reading at home.
(It’s not all about a Year 6 test, though! Previous news posts have noted that research shows children who read lots develop into adults with greater social and emotional skills.)
