Schools already know which children are behind

We have been educating all children in the UK for about 150 years. Bedfordshire was one of the last counties in England to form a local Education Authority towards the end of the nineteenth century. I was lucky enough to have access to the earliest log books in the village schools. The greatest struggle facing the school teachers was attendance. The entries for every month of the year documented an empty schoolroom due to festivals, funerals, feast days and farm work. These were followed by a final entry stating that the inspector had removed the teacher’s licence.

Today, schools are good at driving school attendance up and tracking student progress. They are careful, consistent, and understand where each child is in relation to expectation. This is the starting point for this post and it’s one of clarity and strength.

Amber, three terms in a row

When a child begins the school year on amber everyone speaks about the importance of reading at home, reading regularly with an adult and reading every day with a teacher in school. Is this enough to boost their reading? The thing is, their accuracy is pretty good. They are getting through the passage, but it’s an effort. It’s a heavy process that requires huge focus and they approach the task with reluctance.

Why is reading so effortful for this child? It’s as if each word is a concrete slab that they pick up and put down again as they meet the next word and the next. The proficient readers do not do this heavy work. They meet each word by flowing with a stream of language that already carries its own momentum and buoyancy. Their enjoyment of reading is matched by the feather-lightness of the experience.

Proficient children complete book after book, whilst children who are falling behind are the donkeys in the steeplechase. The difference polarises the classroom. Those who read well are accessing the curriculum and the ‘amber’ children do not follow the flow of the lessons. Is it a language problem? It might be. It might also be a problem with fluency. The tracking data do not diagnose. People do that. After three terms of amber, a child’s likely educational outcome points towards a different future from that of the proficient readers in their class.

If we understood what is happening when this child reads, perhaps these educational outcomes could look quite different.

What you hear in five minutes

Accuracy without expression

When a child reads word by word, they may stop and want to give up or they may sound out the word. Either way, fluency is not even on their horizon. Each word obliterates any sense of flow. At best, all they have is a single word in their mind.

With encouragement and practice, the single words may take on a sequence and like a string of pearls are joined one after the other on the decoding conveyor belt. Each one has a uniform shape and size. Accuracy is not a problem. The words are almost gleaming with correctness.

And still, this child is not fluent. Reading has become a polished performance. The words can ricochet forth with energy, but without meaning, engagement, expression or flow. The pace of their performance is not the same as the expansive, flexible pulse of fluent reading. The difference is audible and holds implications for these children’s educational outcomes.

Pace or pulse?

In five minutes of reading, which do you hear? There are many children on the list every single day. If they keep going, read further and faster, there’s a metric for that. The reading record shows that they are improving, that reading with an adult every day has worked in the sense that the needle moved. In research, when we check-in with ‘face validity’, we ask this question: have we measured what we intended to measure?

Timing and rhythm are different. Timing, measured as words per minute is an objective and convenient metric. It’s a blunt tool with weak face validity and low reliability. A child will read different texts at different speeds depending on the level of difficulty. Timing therefore tells us more about the level of difficulty of the text, than the child’s reading. Rhythm on the other hand, is sensitive to an infinite degree, and allows the syntactic relationships between the words to drop into position. As this happens (in real time), meaning can be processed while the child reads.

Rhythm is not an objective metric and this is its strength. Rhythm is felt and sensitivity to rhythm allows children to perceive feeling and form during reading. Teachers say, “they know what is coming next in their reading”. Rhythm invites us to think in terms of ratio, shape and relatedness. When a child reads with rhythm, expression and meaning fall into place.

Why reading fluency stays stuck

Today, online communities are the more important influences in many young people’s lives, and they access these via mobile devices. Given that learning is a socially-mediated endeavour, there’s been a change in the way that children and young people interact with each other and with reading.

But, aside from all of these variables, there is one that is less-well understood. If children begin school reading the room, looking out for potential threat (just in case), startled by the opening of the classroom door, they are vigilant and not ready to learn. A child who feels safe can settle as they know there is no need to keep an eye on the door of the classroom, or to watch (while everyone else seems oblivious) for some imagined danger.

This vigilance is one reason why fluency stays stuck, why children withhold their attention and fail to immerse themselves in the flow of the words in the way their classmates can. Holding back is not a choice but a habit that is reinforced by repetition.

Let’s consider early reading development in the context of a vigilant lower-attaining reader. The smallest units of language are accessible and take up little time and space in the child’s mind, but strung together into words, the phonemes absorb all the capacity there is for reading in the mind of a vigilant child. This might be the only aspect of reading that appears to ‘work’. Repeating this early phase is probably not going to change the vigilance of the child, but repetition as we know reinforces habits and short, sharp sounds become short, sharp habits of mind. This is not a criticism, because schools are teaching phonics very well.

However, as educators there’s a risk that we reinforce the behaviour we do not want. We want children to read with ease, fluency and understanding. Repeating what works (establishing grapheme to phoneme correspondence) also reinforces a relatively short attention span. This abrupt, concise response is already characterised by vigilant attention.

A complementary supplement to phonics is needed: one that

• offers a more sustained way of working,

• scaffolds their attention, not by using words but by using musical rhythm,

• isn't delivered to one child at a time, but to a small group.

Music draws people out of themselves - think of the soundtrack of a movie - it is powerful enough to invite us to suspend the mundane day-to-day experiences of our lives, and to enter something new and different. For lower-attaining readers, this is an opportunity for them to approach learning in a new way.

The sensitivity to rhythm can be cultivated because learning is socially mediated. Teachers are the means of transformation. No amount of artificial intelligence or a digital metronome can induce the far-reaching effect of rhythm on the human mind. Rhythm is relational and human ears are built to detect it, and to organise what is heard accordingly. It’s part of our natural inheritance, herds of sheep, birds flying in formation or murmuration, mackerel in a boil: the collective rhythm of ‘safety in numbers’ was built into us way back, and is available when we lean into this aspect of group learning.

A rhythm-based approach is not only cognitive, but also affective, and because we weave physical activities in, the child is invited to reshape their own attention to an even greater extent. It’s not a question of inviting them to ‘dance it out’ - that would be performative and would amplify rather than release vigilance, but a careful layering process can guide children to the point of a deeper release that does make a difference to reading fluency.

How I came to know this

I’ve worked in many schools as a music teacher, where I've listened to children’s responses to rhythm and built the safety for them to feel the freedom required to move freely with the flow of the music. As a SENDCo in schools, I’ve supported the children for whom there were barriers to reading fluency and set up systems to support colleagues who wanted to know what they needed to do in the classroom. Listening to children read aloud in the classroom was the teachers’ greatest concern, followed by a worry that these children were not accessing the curriculum and were not able to assimilate specialist vocabulary, particularly in science subjects.

My research and rhythm-based work in schools shows that many children do not need a great deal of support, so much as a different kind of attention. They do need the capacity to process meaning as they listen to teachers, and as they read texts. A rhythm-based intervention supplements and extends the conventions of the teaching of reading. It’s a subtle adjustment that can make a significant difference in the classroom and change the trajectory that points to a different destination and educational outcome.

Listening costs nothing

If once a week we are willing to park the stopwatch and pick up a fluency tracker we might listen for the child’s relationship with reading. The extent to which the child braces, hesitates, substitutes, loses their place and halts are the hallmarks of vigilant reading. It’s a behaviour that builds layers of coping strategies and performative skills, all of which can be replaced by ease and understanding.

So even when the objective measures of time appear to show progress, the fluency tracker may show little change. A child building coping strategies is creating an edifice. No one intended for this to happen, but unless we ask questions about face validity, and ask what we are listening for, we may arrive at the destination we did not want.

Reading is a social encounter between the mind of the reader and the voice of the author and the socially-mediated relatedness of reading is always rhythm-based.

A small next step

If you are curious about what sits beneath a child's reading data, you may find my free reading fluency tracker useful. It is designed to support a five-minute listen, helping you notice patterns that a score alone may not reveal, such as bracing, hesitating, losing their place or reading accurately without coherence.

There is nothing to prepare and no training required. You can simply use it alongside the reading observations you are already making.

Download a free reading fluency tracker.

FAQs

How is this different from what our tracking already tells us?

The tracking tells you whether the child is reading at the expected level. The reading fluency tracker monitors the way they are reading and the extent to which they are reading with coherence. Lower-attaining readers do not read with coherence, even if their pace of reading appears fine.

Do I need training to use it?

No, as it is very intuitive, but if you would like to try the tracker out in a supportive environment then you are welcome to join my live workshop.

What if I hear bracing - what then?

Bracing means that the child is feeling sensitive and may be unable to tackle a tricky word without first holding themselves steady as a defensive coping strategy. This involves considerable bodily tension and is not something they can control. Asking them to relax may work in the short term, but in a different context, they may still brace.

How often should we do it?

I would recommend using the fluency tracker on a week by week basis. This way, it’s possible to identify the child’s usual way of reading and then, if there is a set-back, this will register in the child’s ability to read in their usual way. Similarly, it is also possible to track the positive effects of a rhythm-based intervention on reading fluency.