Primary students learn to read. Secondary school students read to learn.

Religious Education is a core curriculum subject for Catholic schools and is 10% of curriculum time. It is taught rigorously, with all the same expectations as other core subjects. Our current Year 7 pupils are following the new Religious Education programme for schools in England and Wales published by the CES (Catholic Education Service), “To Know You More Clearly”. Most of our pupils come from Catholic feeder schools and a local Church of Wales primary. A minority of pupils come from local non-Catholic feeder primary schools.

As an experienced Head of Department, I have always believed that in primary school students learn to read, and in secondary school, students read to learn. So how does a current Year 7 student read in our subject?

Here is an example from one of our Year 7 textbooks:

What do Catholics mean by the word revelation?

To Catholics, belief in God is a trinity is a mystery. They believe God reveals traces of this mystery through the created world and the Old Testament. However, the fullness of the mystery of the trinity was revealed in Jesus, the Son of God and through the Holy Spirit.

Revelation means being shown information which helps humans to learn about and know something. For Catholics, revelation means the ways in which God is made known to people, such as through showing God’s qualities. This is most perfectly done through Jesus, who Catholics believe God was in human form. (Key Stage 3 Religious Education Directory: Source to Summit Year 7 Student Book – Oxford university press)

Vocabulary from this short text can be usefully divided into 3 tiers:

Tier 1 – high frequency in spoken language (learn, world)

Tier 2 – high frequency in written texts (mystery, fullness, revealed)

Tier 3 – subject specific, academic language (trinity, revelation, Holy Spirit))

We would expect that when reading the text, Year 7 pupils would have some background knowledge about religious beliefs (tier 3 vocabulary –subject-specific) and be familiar with high frequency language.

To comprehend a text, you need to understand around 95% of the words. An average text contains 300 words a page so that means approximately 15 words may be unknown even if the gist of the text is understood. For a Year 7 student who cannot read well, the textbook excerpt will be challenging and incomprehensible.

Children who cannot read well find it difficult to keep up in RE lessons, but not only in RE but all their other subjects too. Reading is an essential part of almost every subject. How can children learn science or geography if they can’t access textbooks or worksheets? These children start and continue secondary school with a reading deficit that prevents them from accessing the Year 7 to Year 9 curriculum and impacts later upon their GCSE exam curriculum.

We know from secondary schools in Wales that there are many children starting in Year 7 unable to access the curriculum due to extremely low reading abilities. Estyn reported back in 2012 that, “Around 40% of learners enter secondary schools in Year 7 with reading ages significantly (at least six months) below their chronological age. Around 20% of these learners are not functionally literate, with reading ages of below nine and a half years.”

Anecdotal evidence from Year 7 teachers in our school notice the variation in reading fluency and comprehension between cohorts of students from different primary feeder schools. This variation results in some students being better prepared to access the secondary school curriculum. This will no doubt be the case across schools in Wales due to the lack of curriculum specificity in reading instruction and guidance for teaching reading at a national level.

Research tells us that “Learning to read is a highly complex undertaking that is underpinned by two fundamental processes: word reading through the recognition and decoding of words, and comprehension of texts through a range of knowledge and skills.” (EEF blog: Phonics – mastering the basics of reading, Caroline Bilton) These two processesmust be included in a primary school’s curriculum to ensure that all students learn to read proficiently before they enter secondary school.

The best bet for achieving this aim is to use a Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) programme through which children learn to recognise letters (graphemes) and their associated sounds (phonemes), and develop the skills of breaking the word down into the smallest units of sound (segmenting) and blending themtogether quickly to read. The Education Endowment Foundation Teaching and Learning Toolkit finds that phonics approaches to teaching reading have, on average, a positive impact on pupil outcomes.

In 2021, in “A letter to Jeremy Miles, the new Minister for Education”Rob Randel, primary school teacher and Wales Advisor to the International Foundation for Effective Reading Instruction, and Terry Mackie, former Head of School Improvement and Inclusion for Newport Council criticise the new Curriculum for Wales for its lack of emphasis on mandatory Systematic Synthetic Phonics and that teachers should only be “aware of” phonics:

Wales, past, present and future, prefers alchemy to the science of reading. The Systematic Synthetic Phonics (SSP) route taken by other countries for the teaching of reading has been, in stark contrast, evidence-based, supported by extensive professional training and crystal clear that in the Year 1 programme of study children will be taught to apply phonic knowledge and skills as the route to decode words in the first instance. Nothing is being left to chance. No ‘pick and mix’.

If we are to prevent our children from having deficits in reading that stop them from accessing the secondary curriculum then we urgently need to address the variation in reading instruction throughout Welsh primary schools and to ensure that all children receive what they are entitled to: the ability to read well. The Welsh Government must mandate the teaching of Systematic Synthetic Phonics and ensure all statements in the curriculum for Wales documentation align with this approach.

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