Why Reading Progression Documents Are Probably a Waste of Time

By Christopher Such;

I spend roughly five hours per week responding to questions about reading instruction via emails and direct messages on Twitter. And I receive one question more than any other:

“What should our school put on its reading progression documents?”

This question is usually followed by the reason for the request:

“A member of SLT / an LA advisor / a visiting consultant told me we needed
this.”

There is a sort of logic behind a reading progression document. In other areas of the curriculum, it makes perfect sense to write down what we intend to teach in each year group. For example, if teachers know that they will teach equivalent fractions in year 5, they can look at a progression document when considering the prior knowledge that has been developed and the future knowledge for which they are laying the foundations. This can then inform classroom teaching.

So, does this sort of progression document make sense for reading. Well… no.

There are parts of reading that benefit from a clearly defined progression. Systematic phonics programmes by definition are built around a scope and sequence of the knowledge and skills to be learned, specifically knowledge of the relationships between letters and sounds and the phonemic skills required to make use of these. It can also be argued that it is helpful to specify reading fluency expectations in terms of accuracy, rate and prosody for each year group.

But when people ask me about progression documents for reading, they are not referring to the teaching of decoding or the development of fluency. What they are searching for is a list of clearly defined knowledge and skills for the development of reading comprehension. And the purpose of this blog is to explain why such progression documents are inevitably a waste of time.

I have seen many examples of progression documents for reading. They are usually divided into categories like ‘vocabulary’, ‘retrieval’, ‘inference’, etc. They are populated by statements that attempt to identify what a pupil should be able to do in a given year group. It is common to see things like this:

Year 4 – Inference: be able to infer characters’ emotions from explicit details in the text.

Then there is an attempt to show progression by making the next year group’s statement sound a little more complex. Sometimes this is done by just adding adjectives like ‘challenging’ or adverbs like ‘confidently’. What makes something ‘challenging’ or what it means to infer ‘confidently’ is never detailed. It is left for teachers to divine these distinctions. Sometimes, instead, the statement is changed in a more substantial way:

Year 5 – Inference: be able to infer characters’ emotions from implicit references in the text.

Let’s put aside for a moment why the transition from year 4 to year 5 is considered to be the precise moment when pupils should begin to understand implicit references to characters’ emotions. Instead, let’s focus on the absurdity of thinking that these statements mean anything in isolation from a specific text. If a pupil in year 2 recognises that Winnie the Pooh is confused to find Piglet in his house, is this pupil working at a year 5 level for inferences of this sort? Equally, if a pupil in year 7 struggles to recognise Mr Darcy’s repressed ardour towards Elizabeth, does that mean that they are working below this level?

One might argue that we should only make these judgements with age-appropriate texts. This might make sense if the age-appropriateness of texts wasn’t fundamentally subjective beyond measures of word and sentence complexity that tell us very little. The unavoidable truth is that a pupil’s ability to meet every criterion written on a progression document depends on the specifics of the text they are reading. And this depends primarily on the pupil’s understanding of the language contained in the text and the world to which that language relates.

Of course, parts of this knowledge could in theory be specified. Take vocabulary: we could write down a list of the tens of thousands of words, phrases, idioms, metaphors, etc that we wish pupils to understand by the time they leave primary school. We could then attempt to divide these up and assign several thousand of them to each year group. But – and this is the question at the heart of this blog – what purpose would this serve? Any such list would either to be too short to adequately reflect the complexity of what is to be learned or too long to be of any use to teachers. Yes, we might decide to select a list of particularly valuable vocabulary that we want pupils to learn across the curriculum to support their understanding of academic texts, but such a list would not inform us at all about how to teach reading or how to assess pupils’ progress.

In other words, the integrated bodies of knowledge upon which comprehension depends are vast and beyond any attempts to condense them. They relate to everything that pupils learn about language and the world. And trying to boil down the application of this knowledge into a list of ‘comprehension skills’ on a progression document is useless in terms of assessment or teaching.

In fact, such progression documents are worse than useless. First, the creation of these documents wastes the time of the school leaders who create them and the teachers who use them. Second, attempts to assess pupils’ reading against the statements on these documents are nothing more than a pretence in which teachers reverse-engineer what statements they will tick based on what they already know about a pupil’s reading. And third, the existence of these documents perpetuates a false impression of the nature of reading comprehension development, warping teaching further towards ill-conceived, counter-productive test preparation.

So, what should we use instead? We need to begin by accepting that the bodies of knowledge that underpin comprehension cannot be written down in a worthwhile way. And on this basis, we should use a minimalist approach to assessment and a content-focused approach to teaching.

What does a minimalist approach to assessment look like? It means only using things that have a chance of providing meaningful information:

• Phonics assessments for those in the early stages of word recognition development tell us what might need re-teaching and which pupils require additional support.
• Fluency assessments tell us which pupils are likely to benefit most from independent reading and which pupils require extra supported practice.
• Standardised comprehension assessments – the results of which can only give a vague overview of pupils’ current reading capability – allow us to share with pupils’ families fairly reliable information and track big-picture trends across a school.

In concert, these assessments allow us to determine pupils’ most pressing barriers to reading development so that interventions can be provided. (Of course, such a systematic approach should be complemented by bespoke assessments of language-related needs by a SENDCo.)

It might also be worth keeping track of individual pupils’ attitudes to reading: how much they read, what books they like, how they contribute to class discussions of texts, etc. This information can be passed on from one teacher to the next at the end of the academic year.

And what does a content-focused approach to teaching look like? When it comes to defining what we will teach, it means our reading curriculum for comprehension development is the collection of texts that we have curated and the lesson structures we use to teach them. Why? Because introducing pupils to the wonders of written English through exploration and discussion of the language within these texts is how we teach reading comprehension. Part of curating this selection of texts involves ensuring we provide pupils with a variety of text types, language choices and perspectives. These aspects of the chosen texts can be noted to (a) support the teaching of these texts, including the making of connections to pupils’ knowledge of prior texts, and (b) influence future discussions about changes to the curated selection.*

Alongside this, we might include a short list of comprehension strategies (e.g. summarising, self-questioning and re-reading), specifying when we might explicitly begin teaching these to pupils. However, we should bear in mind that these strategies can be integrated into classroom teaching that focuses on text exploration.

In short, I suspect there is no worthwhile argument for the existence of progression documents for reading comprehension. I have sympathy for those who feel compelled to create such pointless artefacts to satisfy ill-informed authority figures. But, ultimately, for the sake of pupils and those who teach them, the best thing we can do is to refuse to waste everyone’s time.

P.S. – Since writing this, I have been reminded of the disappointing fact that the list of ill-informed authority figures asking for pointless documentation includes some – but certainly not all – Ofsted inspectors. It appears to be an unfortunate (and timeless) reality of our accountability system that inspectors are required to cast judgement on aspects of teaching about which they might be relatively ignorant. This being the case, it might be wise (if somewhat cynical) to call your list of texts and their contents a ‘progression document’ so that the inspector can feel like they have got what they asked for. I appreciate that the result of an Ofsted inspection shouldn’t come down to doing stuff like this, but I have lost count of the number of dedicated school leaders who have told me about the importance of ‘playing the game’.

All this makes it even more essential that school leaders are knowledgeable about reading development. For more on the theory behind this, a really good place to start is the idea of constrained and unconstrained aspects of reading (Paris, 2005; Stahl, 2011; Snow & Matthews, 2016). And this blog on the US equivalent of this subject by Professor Timothy Shanahan is also well worth a read: https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/should-we-grade-students-on-the-individual-reading-standards-1

* Hat tip to Clare Sealy for letting me know that this idea was not clear in the first version of this blog.