Looking for Impact? Structure Matters
Why do school structures matter when it comes to reading interventions? Sometimes the obvious answers – or ‘the way we’ve always done it’ – turn out not to be the best solutions. Take reading interventions at secondary school. Usually, interventions for students who are reading at a low level are located within the SEN department, based on the following assumptions: Students who have difficulty reading likely have a disability of some kind (one of the many variants of ‘dyslexia’, for example); Students who are reading at a low level do so because they are less intelligent, and therefore should be taught within the ‘special needs’ context; Low-reading students are less likely to make progress and therefore less likely to assist the school’s results, so it makes sense to identify them as having special needs when accounting for their progress (or lack of it). I’ve pointed out elsewhere why these common misconceptions are wrong, and how they hinder the progress of students. But when we consider that nationally, 20% of students arrive at secondary school unable to …
