The 175,000 11-year-olds struggling to read well

ALMOST 175,000 children are starting secondary school this term unable to read properly, the head of Ofsted has warned.

Chief inspector of schools Amanda Spielman said a quarter of Year 7 pupils will struggle to keep up in lessons because they have not grasped the basics.

Disrupted lessons during the pandemic means these youngsters are still trying to catch up on skills they should have learned at primary school. But they face further barriers because phonics teaching is not ‘necessarily expected’ of secondary school staff, who usually anticipate that Year 7s are fluent readers.

‘I’m worried about the children’

Mrs Spielman has called for a renewed focus on reading in primary and secondary schools. It comes as national curriculum tests for 11-year-olds this year revealed that 26 per cent failed to reach the expected standard in reading.

The proportion was down one percentage point on 2018/19, when Sats were last taken, but up from 25 per cent in 2017/18.

This means that tens of thousands of children still cannot grasp unfamiliar words, or they read at such slow speeds they lose track of the meaning of sentences.

Mrs Spielman told the Daily Mail: ‘I am worried about children who are still struggling to read when they start secondary school.

‘This year’s tests showed that nearly 175,000 pupils didn’t meet the expected standard in reading. That means around a quarter of all Year 7s still have a reading age of below 11. This really matters. Children who can’t read well find it difficult to keep up in secondary school. Reading is an essential part of almost every subject.’

The Department for Education said: ‘Reading attainment figures at the end of primary school increased slightly this year... but we know there is more to do, which is why we have set an ambition for 90 per cent of children to reach the expected standards in reading, writing and maths by 2030.’