Monteagle Primary school used to teach reading using the same methods as schools up and down the country.

Children were taught reading and writing in their normal classes. So a year 3 teacher would have a class of twenty eight children age 7 and 8 and would be expected to teach them all together for the daily literacy hour.

Typically at Monteagle that class would have seven non-readers – children who could do little more than write their name. Six children would be competent readers and a couple of them would be capable of tackling difficult books written for older children. The fifteen children in the middle would be of various abilities including some who were really struggling with their reading. The year 3 teacher, supported by an assistant, would be expected to teach these twenty eight children in a way that was relevant to them all – it's known as differentiation.

This meant they could not give struggling readers the regular attention they needed to master the mechanics of reading. Some older non-readers would be given extra one-to-one help occasionally but there were so many struggling readers at Monteagle that this would be a very expensive way to help them all.

As the non-readers became older some of them start to disrupt lessons making life difficult for the whole class.

Every year around a third of children left Monteagle primary at age 11 having failed to reach the standard of literacy they would need for secondary school.

Different approach

Head teacher Lynna Thompson decided that something had to be done and she asked senior teacher Joy Whitehouse to investigate other ways of teaching reading. Joy read Ruth Miskin's Read Write Inc synthetic phonics handbook and the school bought the basic teaching materials and reading books.

They were going to try out this scheme for a group of older poor readers. In academic year 2005-2006 they regrouped the children in year 5 (9 and 10 year olds) into three new classes and put all the children who could not read or who were severely behind with their reading in one class. Some of the parents were unhappy about this – children were split from classmates they had been with since reception.

Miss Whitehouse taught the children using Ruth Miskin's scheme every day, going right back to the beginning. She soon split them into three groups according to their reading level and Special Support Assistants, Sue Gunn and Elaine Bates, took two of the groups. The children made amazing progress; most of them learning the basics of reading for the first time and parents were reassured that the upheaval had been worthwhile.

Lynna was convinced that this scheme should be rolled out across the whole school. She could fund it from her existing budget.

Joy Whitehouse had previous experience of teaching synthetic phonics but many of the staff did not – different methods of teaching reading have gone in and out of fashion over the years and most of the staff had no experience of this method so training was going to be required.

At this point Channel 4 heard about Monteagle and Lynna agreed that the school's efforts to get every child reading could be filmed.

The start

Just after autumn term 2006 had begun the children were all sent home for two days and the staff were shown how to teach reading the Ruth Miskin way. All staff attended the training including teaching assistants, special support assistants and sports coaches.

With training completed Lynna and Mark Austin, her deputy, organised the assessment of every child from year 1 to year 6 to see what level they were reading at and their phonic knowledge. Four of the staff were shown how to carry out the assessments. Teaching materials for every classroom were ordered and scheme books started to arrive. The children were organised into 16 groups at various levels of the scheme.

Everyone from year 1 to year 3 would be doing the Read Write Inc scheme. Ninety eight struggling readers from years 4 to 6 would also be doing the scheme whilst their classmates – who were already fluent readers – would stay with their class teachers for the literacy hour (the school uses the Barking and Dagenham project).

At 9.25am every morning children went to their literacy groups ready to start at 9.30am for an hour. There are more groups than class rooms so every available bit of space was used for teaching including halls, offices and a section of corridor. The groups with the neediest children were small – around eight children to a teacher and other groups had up to 25 children.

There were more groups than teachers and several teaching assistants and special support assistants – who usually work with a single child – took groups. Lynna opted to make upgrade payments for this extra responsibility to the TA's and SSA's but many schools don't. So running the scheme the school did not mean having to take on extra staff – it just involved a reorganisation of existing staff for an hour each day.

Every child was regularly assessed to make sure that they were making the quickest possible progress. Children who weren't making progress or who needed extra help are given an extra ten minutes of one-to-one with an SSA every afternoon. There were usually around 12 slots available for this. Lynna regularly saw three children herself for one-to-one.

The reception children had their literacy hour later in the day but it worked in much the same way with the children from the three reception classes going to five groups.

The first few weeks were the hardest. There were few complaints from the children, none from the parents but for the staff it was tough – for most of them it was a totally new way of teaching and took some getting used to.

For the first few weeks of the scheme Lynna and Mark managed it but Ruth was keen for there to be one person in charge who could devote at least an hour a day to it. Kirstin Mackie took over the job.

By the Christmas holiday the children were taking just a couple of minutes to get to their reading classes and the scheme ran like clockwork.

Partners

If you walk around the corridors of Monteagle at 9.35am each morning everything is amazingly calm. You will see classroom after classroom of children working with their partners sounding out words or writing in their workbooks.

The partner work is a very important part of the scheme. The teacher asks a question and the children turn to their partners and work out an answer. Then the teacher chooses a child to give the answer – but there are no hands up. The idea is that instead of just a handful of children at the front answering all the questions every child answers every question because they have worked with their partner. This means that there is a lot of talking happening in the reading groups and every child is involved. The partner work also works well because children read to their partner and the partner corrects or helps them. This means that every child is daily reading out loud and that the children also have regular experience of teaching their partners.

The children are very proud of their achievements and excitedly cannot wait to tell you that they have finished green books or that they have just three more books to go before they are on grey. The scheme books are carefully graded so that the children are only going to come across words that they are able to sound out for themselves. This rapidly builds their confidence which is important because many of these children have years of reading failure behind them and at the start just assume that they will not be able to read a new word.

NB the scheme and books are called Read Write Inc but everyone at the school refers to it as Ruth Miskin and the scheme books as their "Ruth Miskin's".

So how much has the introduction and running of the scheme cost?

The initial two day training of all staff at Monteagle cost £1,800. Many schools also pay for one or two days of support from Ruth Miskin Literacy at £450 per day.

The materials cost Monteagle £4,200 – most of this is a one off payment for flashcards, sound freezes, wall charts, spelling pockets and scheme reading books. There are workbooks for writing that will need to be renewed.

Monteagle made upgrade payments to Teaching Assistants and Special Support Assistants. There was also additional payment to the scheme manager. These payments were necessary because of the circumstances at Monteagle which is a very large school with a high turnover of pupils. The head was keen to recognise the considerable contribution that the teaching assistants made to the running of the scheme. Many schools do not find that these payments are necessary. Total cost £19,000.

Payments were necessary for extra hours for some of the special support assistants. This was to make it possible to keep the groups with the neediest children – e.g many non-readers who arrived during the course of the school year – as small as possible. Total £2,500

Total cost of the scheme for the first year at Monteagle Primary £27,000.

The total cost without upgrade payments and extra hours payments but with a days support would be £6,450.

Lynna found all the money from their existing budget e.g. from books and furniture, SEN funding and the personalised learning budget.

How long will Monteagle have to run the mixed age classes for?

The idea is that in future all children will be learning to read properly in reception and year 1 and the scheme would take them to the end of year 2. If all goes well in two or three years time all the older non-readers will have been taught to read and it will only be necessary to run classes for older non-readers who are new arrivals at the school – there were 96 new arrivals at Monteagle last year!

Author: Kate Middleton

The Monteagle Project | The Challenges | A Week in the Life of the Programme… | Benjamin Zephaniah | Monteagle Primary School Poem | Shane's Poem | Why We Did It | What Monteagle Did and What It Cost | The Testing of Reading Ability at Monteagle Primary School

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