The children on your ‘radar’: Why the same gaps appear in Year 1 and Year 7

You know a lot about the children on your ‘radar’. Whether you are watching them in Year 1 or welcoming them into Year 7 in September, they are the same children, and the gap between them and their peers is still growing.

They started Year 1 unable to perceive all of the sounds of language. With expert teaching and excellent phonics materials, they have grasped many but not all of the sounds. It’s the same pattern every year, but with different children: children who lipread for clarification and then guess the answers. They want to keep up with the class, but no matter how hard they try, they do not perceive the differences between certain sounds. For example, ‘fr’ and ‘thr’ seem to merge into one vague sound, and confusion between the higher pitched sounds ‘shr’ and ‘tr’ or very similar sounds ‘pr’ and ‘br’ appear to be impossible to distinguish.

SENCOs have told me about these children who can hear, but cannot perceive. In other words, they pass a hearing test, but they do not discern between phonemes such as 'tr', 'thr', 'f'r' and 'cr' or 'br', 'pr' and 'dr'. The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that the examples I have included are consonant blends. This was deliberate. Adding the ‘r’ is what makes detection of the initial sound more challenging for some children - such as when they confuse 'tree' with 'three', or 'free' with 'three'. When children focus their attention at the onset of the consonant (the front edge of the sound), detection is more efficient, immediate and leads to automaticity in a direct and straightforward way.

The solution is to move their attention onto the onset of the sound, but in practice this is something of a 'red-herring'. Slowing the sounds down makes them unrelatable. Using repetition on a one-to-one basis is resource heavy, and, as there is a window of heightened sensitivity for language acquisition in early childhood, there’s an argument that the wiring of ‘bottom-up’ language-related perception is unlikely to change much, but read on because there is a (‘top-down’) workaround.

If you are a secondary leader, the season of transfer is approaching fast. As a researcher on a project studying attitudes to the music curriculum across school transition, funded by The Paul Hamlyn Foundation called ‘Changing Key’, I collected interview data from adolescents to map out their experience of school transition at four points in time: July in Year 6 and in each term of Year 7.

I visited very different types of schools situated in Devon, Lancashire, and Greater London. We learned from these data about the exceptional social adjustments that adolescents make during this time and how they reevaluate their position relative to their peer group, academically and in relation to the social and cultural influences in the school community and also the local environment.

The role of pop music in building new social bonds was remarkable, and we also found interesting commonalities such as the importance of family tastes in music, with rappers and opera singers (the three tenors) overlapping in the lives of the Year 7s who were falling behind on academic attainment.

I know from working in many secondary schools that the new Year 7 intake includes a relatively large proportion who are not reading fluently, do not see themselves as readers, and in terms of data have reading ages between seven and nine years of age. For them comprehension has always involved guessing or finding the ‘key word’ in the question. Reading comprehension feels more like a word search than engagement with connected text. When I work with secondary schools in the Autumn term with Year 7, I know that this is the perfect time window for the students, because by January their social pecking order will have been established, such that they will be more cautious about trying something new in front of their peers.

The same children on the radar in Year 1 are still on the radar in Year 7. The gap in attainment is wider, and continues to grow unless something changes. It’s important to honour all the dedicated work that is poured into these students. But if there are gaps in phonemic awareness, we are pouring into a leaking bucket. The repetition is unhelpful, because it leads to learned helplessness. So, what can we do differently?

The Phonics Screening Check: What it measures and what is neglected

According to Ofsted (2024) the phonics screening check has been something of a triumph. It has ‘moved the needle’ as the number of children passing the check is rising. It was controversial when it was introduced because of the inclusion of pseudowords. Non-words are a staple of phonological processing tests because they offer a ‘pure’ way to measure perception of phonemes rather than perception of familiar sounds of language. The lack of what we could term ‘ecological validity’ (relevance to actual language use) was a concern.

Continuing this theme of low ecological validity, there are many things that the check does not measure, that are essential building blocks of reading. A body of research has established a positive correlation between sensitivity to rhythm and sensitivity to phonemes, and there are also longitudinal studies that have found this correlation shows up in children who are reading well at age ten. These data point to a missed opportunity to check sensitivity to rhythm in Year One.

Teachers witness every day the difficulties that children experience with inhibitory control, timing and focusing in general, yet these are aspects of development that are not measured by the check. These wider influences on reading development are likely to shine a light on weaknesses that limit the development of reading comprehension and fluency later on. Without these data, we are likely to continue to see a widening gap in reading attainment. More phonics appears necessary but does not provide a sufficient resolution.

Catch-up programmes and school transition: Why the gap keeps growing without a different approach

I have met secondary school leaders who have told me that their school transition programme was transformed when they hired a primary school teacher to support curriculum planning and delivery. This is important because many have pitched the level a little low, having underestimated what the Year 7s are capable of. At the same time, I know from my interviews of Year 7s that their experience of school transfer was challenging. They were not able to follow instructions, organise themselves around homework, and had been in detention every week since they started their secondary school. There’s plenty of data telling us that if an adolescent has a difficult transition, they are more at risk of academic failure. Of course, their access to their executive functions determines what is happening.

Now that a new Year 8 reading assessment is being introduced, the Year 7 intake this September will, in the near future shed light onto what is happening to reading development during school transition. Given the insights I gained from the research project I mentioned earlier, I would expect adolescents who did not experience a smooth transition to become even more withdrawn or disruptive or anxious as they begin Year 8, making it likely that they become educationally disaffected.

In my opinion, if their attention is already set to vigilant mode, and they are taught every day to focus on small discrete units such as phonemes in isolation, their attention most likely remains locked into that same pattern, with limited access to executive functions, such as working memory, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility.

According to psychologist Paul Fraisse, the baseline psychological present spans approximately 2-3 seconds (Fraisse, 1963). In musical rhythm, patterns typically extend across 2-5 seconds (Fraisse, 1982), building a working memory span that exceeds what reading requires.

Rhythm-based intervention, then, builds a working memory window that exceeds what reading requires. The child is no longer operating at the limit. They have room to experience connected text for the first time.

But how do we achieve this if the students are locked in vigilant attention?

The answer is hiding in plain sight. If the brain had a currency for regulating state and integrating sensory information, it would be rhythm. The nervous system uses the rhythm of breath, heart rate, and physical movement to increase or decrease alertness. When we apply rhythm-based intervention, we can move the students from vigilant mode to rhythmic mode and access future-oriented attention, and with it, the executive functions that make learning possible. This may explain why the entire Rhythm for Reading programme takes only ten minutes a week for ten weeks, that’s only 100 minutes out of the classroom.

People have used rhythm to alter brain state for thousands of years. Ethnography shows that extant hunter-gatherer societies use rhythm-based practices such as drumming, dancing, chanting or singing to reconnect themselves with their natural home, be that the forest, the land, or the close to a body of water. Today, young people face a new set of stressors, and in my opinion, it’s time to widen the educational lens to consider rhythm-based approaches.

What’s actually going on: Vigilance, executive function and why more phonics cannot solve the problem

My first encounter with a group of children who could not learn from conventional teaching was life-changing for them and for me. They were in Year 5 and a long way behind their classmates. Holding information in mind was impossible for them, but even more obvious was their restlessness and sudden surges of energy. They attended an oversubscribed ‘outstanding’ school and had been taught well, but they were in a state of vigilance and not able to learn alongside their peers. I've written about the remarkable change in their learning here and here.

Since then I’ve worked with many children displaying similar behaviour, withdrawn, restless, disruptive. They are not lazy. At some point they’d wanted to be just like all the other children in the class, but their attention is set to vigilance rather than to rhythm. This means they dedicate their energy and focus to the environment rather than the task. As soon as they realise that they have been identified as falling behind, the vigilance compounds and time is perceived even more intensely as small, disconnected intervals of ‘now’.

These children need rhythm to help them move out of this state into a rhythm-oriented form of attention (in which time is experienced as flowing, connected and forward-facing). Children in this state are able to predict what is coming up next in their reading, and school leaders have told me that this is the clearest signal that the children’s reading has fundamentally changed. Reading well for its own sake is wonderful, but reading is actually the key that unlocks the key stage two and secondary curriculum and the life chances of the child.

Inhibitory control is one of three core executive functions, which are now recognised for their role in underpinning access to the curriculum at all levels. Inhibitory control supports working memory, another core executive function. When inhibitory control is strong, working memory capacity expands and learners find that they are able to hold more information in mind.

The third core executive function is cognitive flexibility. In any situation we process information by creating hypotheses about what is most likely to happen next. Sometimes we have fixed expectations because of our experiences - morning follows night, but in social encounters, those with cognitive flexibility fare better. Being able to respond ‘in the moment’ is key to thriving in the classroom, the workplace, driving a car on the road, or problem solving. When inhibitory control is working well, attention is primed to predict new scenarios, explore subtle details and capacity in cognitive flexibility is set to expand.

Without inhibitory control, working memory is limited to short intermittent bursts of effort. The cognitive flexibility that supports curiosity and engagement remains shut down. All three core executive functions are required to support reading of connected text. When attention is future-oriented, children are able to form multiple hypotheses about the text they are reading and to enjoy the ‘satisfaction’ that follows as the passage they are reading unfolds in real time. Working memory is the container that holds space and time for this vibrant experience.

Phonics teaching alone does not address these deeper layers of attention. In fact, if phonics teaching involves repeated ‘drilling’ short, rapid-fire responses, then the attention system is literally being trained to stay locked in the vigilant state. Addressing this imbalance is not optional. The attention system needs to be trained towards rhythm, not locked into further vigilance by the very teaching designed to help.

What the music does that dedicated teaching cannot.

In all the years I have spent teaching and researching and talking in depth with young people about their experiences of school transition and their musical preferences, it was clear that to support their attention they needed resources that provided moderate interest and would become a ‘container’ for learning. This is why the music in the programme has been specifically written for intervention purposes by Eric Crees and how it differs from music that you might dance to, party to, or sing to.

At the same time, the music has also been written to be immediately attractive to younger and older students alike. Each piece of music has its own unique character and follows popular rhythmic patterns that are repetitive and provide a powerful anchor for the students’ attention, making it easy for teachers to deliver the intervention. The dinosaur themed music is so convincing that younger children have told me they thought the dinosaur was real. Something Funky, for older children sounds so familiar that they say it is just like the music in their video games. The Gladiator music for KS3 is cinematic and gives secondary pupils a huge sense of musical accomplishment when they read the notes in time with the bold, heroic characterisation. This post covers the creation of these resources in detail.

A note on the research

A recent peer-reviewed article (Dees and Cooper, 2025) cited Rhythm for Reading in their literature review, drawing a comparison between their whole-class study and my research on lower attaining readers. The comparison is not valid. Rhythm for Reading was developed specifically for children who are falling behind their peers and not for children who are already reading at expectation. From the first three experiments of my doctoral research it was clear that children reading at or above expectation did not respond to the intervention in the same way. They were already in the future-oriented attention state that the programme builds toward. Applying a whole-class study design to evaluate an intervention designed for a specific sub-group, and then suggesting that the absence of a whole-class effect casts doubt on the intervention’s claims, is a methodological error. It is the equivalent of testing a targeted medical treatment on a general population and concluding the treatment does not work.

Having established who this is for, we can also ask why rhythm is effective for the lower attaining readers. If we think about the units of time that are involved in language and music, we have a scale of 30 milliseconds for the briefest discernible sounds to 2 seconds for meaningful utterances that may connect a few words together.

Musical rhythm works with precision at the level of microseconds, and at the same time extends attention into longer units of 5 seconds. Music is also known to promote social bonding, down-regulating the nervous system and releasing endorphins. In Rhythm for Reading students report feeling ‘happy’ and describing the sessions as ‘fun’ whilst reading music fluently and working very hard to accomplish each task in time with the background music resources.

Thinking ahead to September: What changes in ten weeks

For the children who did not meet the required level on the phonics screening check, there is another way in. The gaps in their phonological awareness still need to be addressed, but when progress plateaus, rhythm is the supplementary approach that changes what happens next, at any point in KS1 or KS2..

For the Year 7 intake arriving in September with low KS2 data, the reading data can improve within ten weeks. This means that students’ trajectories can change quickly. The social benefits of music ease the strain of transition, precisely when it matters most - before January, before the social pecking order becomes more established, and resistance to trying something new can be problematic.

A different route in

Rhythm for Reading is not an alternative to phonics. It is a supplement for the children for whom phonics is not enough. I have built online resources so that teachers can deliver the programme alongside me. The children on your radar in Year 1 and the students arriving in Year 7 in September need not be defined by where they are now. Ten weeks of rhythm-based intervention can reset their attention. If this has made you curious about these children, I would love to continue this conversation.

Join me at my next webinar where I explore how the programme works in practice and what it can do for the children in your school.

REFERENCES

Dee, L. & Cooper, P.K. (2025). Effects of a Phonics-Integrated Music Rhythm Intervention on Reading Fluency and Accuracy with Children. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12325194/

Fraisse, P. (1963). The Psychology of Time. New York: Harper & Row.

Fraisse, P. (1984). Perception and estimation of time. Annual Review of Psychology, 35, 1–36. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ps.35.020184.000245

Ofsted (2024) Telling the story: the English education subject report. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/subject-report-series-english/telling-the-story-the-english-education-subject-report accessed 10/05/26