Primary school books – tips for a reading audit
You’ve got your clipboard and newly sharpened pencil ready. But what exactly should you look for when you audit your school’s reading provision?
Audits can seem daunting, but I hope the below advice will help you feel more prepared and confident for undertaking an audit of all things reading.
In the first instance you need to feel assured that you have robust approaches in place to teach reading. This means looking at how your school teaches phonics and comprehension.
Phonics
The Deep Dive into Early Reading is a good place to start with your audit into phonics. This statutory aspect of the Ofsted inspection asks you to consider the suitability and effectiveness of your phonics programme, whether you have a range of decodable books, the nature of your ongoing pupil assessment, and the provision of staff training.
If you’re not teaching in England or are in an independent school (and so not subject to Ofsted inspections) these are key aspects of what you do in phonics and should still be at the heart of your audit.
Comprehension
There are myriad ways to teach reading comprehension. Some schools favour whole-class approaches; some small, guided groups; others use a combination of methods.
Whichever approach you use, ensure that continuity is included in your audit. After all, do you really want one class in Year 3 using whole-class guided reading and the other class using written comprehension tests?
In addition, you should also find out how confident teachers in your school are about using your preferred teaching methods and how effectively they use them.
If you find there is a lack of confidence or expertise, seek training so that everyone, including yourself, has the best knowledge of how to teach comprehension effectively.
Assessment
Think about how you assess reading, and how you use those assessments to shape future teaching and learning. Reading ages, test scores and numerical data all have their place.
But finding that teachers in Year 4 have discovered most children are struggling to summarise and so are shaping their teaching and learning based on this data will give you the assurance that comprehension teaching is data-driven and responsive to the needs of the children.
Book stock
Take a look at your book stock with critical eyes. I’ve already mentioned the all-important decodable books for the fledgling readers, but you also need engaging, relevant and representative texts within your daily reading, take-home and library stocks.
An often-overlooked question to add to your audit is, ‘How much of the book stock is replaced each year?’ According to the Primary School Library Guidelines, you should replace 10% of your book stock each year.
You should also take account of the age of your stock too – you’ve only got limited shelf space, so make sure the books earn their place on it. Between you and me, I’ve never quite recovered from the book I found in one school that proudly announced, ‘one day man may even walk on the moon’.
Reading for pleasure
Do ensure that reading for pleasure has a place in your reading audit. Find out if all teachers ring-fence time for children to read for pleasure in school – sadly, not all children have the time, space or support to read for pleasure at home.
Also explore when and for how long teachers are reading aloud to their classes (yes, I know the timetable is full but the evidence in favour of reading for pleasure is compelling).
If your teachers are struggling, a super deputy head I know uses one of his whole-school assemblies to read to every class.
Consequently, he delivers an assembly of only modest preparation, the children hear compelling expressive reading, and the rest of the staff have the assurance that for one day of the week they don’t have to find time to read to the children: win: win: win.
Celebrate the wins
Once you’ve completed your audit, take time to analyse what you’ve found. Celebrate what’s going well and make sure everyone involved receives praise for their successes. Next identify those areas of provision that are satisfactory but not yet solidly good.
For example, practice that is not consistently good – such as teachers in some year groups not feeling confident to use your preferred method for reading comprehension, or having sufficient decodable readers for children in Reception but not enough for children in Year 1.
Finally, if you have any areas of weakness, such as finding that large numbers of staff need phonics training, work to put them right immediately by working with colleagues or drawing on subject experts from outside the school.
Do keep your audit and its findings so that you can repeat the process further down the line as you work to provide the best reading outcomes for your children that you can.
Rachel Clarke is a freelance education consultant and writer, and edits the Scholastic Reading Audit which you can complete FREE of charge by visiting shop.scholastic.co.uk/reading-audit. Follow Rachel on Twitter at @PrimaryEnglish and see more of her work at primaryenglished.co.uk.
