Word level reading difficulties at secondary school (England):
The failure to ensure that all children in early primary education are taught ”a vigorous programme of phonics work” (Rose. 2006), to enable them to use phonics as the sole mechanism for decoding print, rather than a ‘balance’ of reading strategies, has had long-term, negative consequences for vast numbers of secondary students. This includes many who are articulate and academically able, who scored at or above the expected standard in the ‘end of primary’ reading comprehension test. Secondary History teacher Heather Fearn explains:
Reading failure? What reading failure? 2015.
https://heatherfblog.wordpress.com/2015/10/28/reading-failure-what-reading-failure/
”Reading failure is endemic. I would estimate that about a third of my A level students have noticeable issues with word level reading that significantly impact upon their progress in history at A level…At secondary school we should be giving students more complex texts to build their vocabularies and reading stamina. However, the research is pretty clear about when difficulties need to be identified if children are to overcome them – way back in year 1. The research is also pretty clear about what it is that struggling readers lack – a grasp of the alphabetic principle that they are able to apply fluently when reading.” (italics added)
The harmful legacy of multi-cueing and its evolution into look-alike reading in KS3 – a secondary school perspective:
”The sheer extent of guess-reading and the number of students reading aloud at sub 150 wpm was a shock to us when we introduced 1:1 testing in September – for us it’s nearly 30% of our KS3 students. The multi-cueing strategy which may seem to work very nicely, quickly building self-esteem in Year 1 or 2 or even 3, where comparatively little vocabulary is needed to read age-appropriate books, where sentences are largely simple and short, and where pictures abound, creates a harmful legacy for a third of students in our school, and has a devastating impact on their secondary school experience, an experience that is extremely difficult to navigate as a struggling reader.”
(Jacqui Moller-Butcher. italics added)
”What our data shows us is that the SAT reading level is, in reality, no reliable indicator of reading ability. In other words, transferring to secondary school at the expected level 4b [now a score of 100] does not mean that you are a competent reader”. Furthermore, ”Research demonstrates that less than half of ‘poor readers’ (reading age under 8) are identified on secondary SEN registers – with the result that they fall further behind and leave school functionally illiterate, having received no help.”
(Mary Meredith. Blog 2011)
Reading…the tsunami.
https://theliteracyblog.com/2021/10/31/reading-the-tsunami/
”As a secondary teacher, you could be forgiven for assuming that students will be able to read the texts that you put in front of them as part of the wider curriculum. Unfortunately, this is often not the case.” (Naomi Hinton)
”To fulfil the demands of the secondary school curriculum, pupils need to be able to read age-appropriate texts fluently. Pupils who cannot read well are not able to access the curriculum and are disadvantaged for life.”
(Ofsted Blog. 2022. https://educationinspection.blog.gov.uk/2022/04/28/supporting-secondary-school-pupils-who-are-behind-with-reading/)
”At secondary level, Ofsted expects that all pupils, particularly disadvantaged pupils and those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) … are able to read to an age-appropriate level and fluency (if not, they will be incapable of accessing the rest of the curriculum, and they will fall rapidly behind their peers).”
(DfE. The Reading Framework. 2023)
North America:
”As an HS principal, we tested all freshman [England. Year 10] to note 30% reading at a 2nd/3rd grade level and one student reading at pre-primary level. I hired an elementary reading specialist who focused on phonics, decoding, word patterns etc. We witnessed rapid success.”
(Veronica Trujillo Kunschik)
”It’s my observation that too many of the top students who ace every benchmark and state test can’t handle multisyllabic words. The issue of illiteracy in secondary school flies so under the radar and that must change.”
(Secondary teacher. Twitter/X)
When high school students can’t read.
Joanna Jacobs. 2024.
https://www.joannejacobs.com/post/when-high-school-students-can-t-read
What role, if any, should phonics play in a middle school or high school? The answer may surprise you.
Shanahan, T. 2025.
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy.
https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jaal.1387
”Recent research has reported that a significant number of older students (here I mean middle school and high school) still lag in decoding ability to an extent not widely acknowledged in the field…Those adolescents who can read at a third or fourth grade level1 – and higher – may need targeted phonics instruction despite those reading levels.”
(Prof Shanahan. Jan 2024. Blog ‘Does the science of reading include middle school?’)
Hiding In Plain Sight: How Complex Decoding Challenges Can Block Comprehension for Older Readers.
Kockler R. & Sutherland R. 2024.
”The widespread belief that the basic decoding skills students have acquired by the end of third grade1 will provide a sufficient foundation for their future reading growth may actually be undermining our efforts to move the needle on older students’ literacy. Complex decoding challenges are hiding in plain sight and can block older readers from comprehending grade-level texts.”
https://edtrust.org/blog/how-complex-decoding-challenges-can-block-comprehension-for-older-readers/#
1American third-grade students are typically 8–9 years old, while fourth-grade students are usually 9–10 years old.
Australia:
”When students exit primary school with reading, writing, and spelling skills around a mid-primary level, as is unfortunately not uncommon, we are setting them up for a slippery slope of academic failure, behavioural dysregulation, poor school attendance, early school disengagement, possible youth justice involvement, and other emotional disorders such as anxiety and depression. Their attitudes to school and learning are jaded at best, actively resentful at worst, and the adults in their world (teachers, school leaders, parents, and grandparents, allied health professionals, and tutors) despair of knowing how to find and afford the increasingly complex supports they end up needing.”
(Pamela Snow. Blog. 2023 https://pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2023/10/school-leaders-and-science-of-reading.html)
”At the start of [2019], 17,000 12- and 13-year-olds walked into high school classrooms all across the country unable to read even at a minimal level. They achieved scores below the minimum standard in the Year 7 National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy reading test. A further 35,000 students achieved only the minimum standard, in which they can barely find basic information in simple written text.”
(Dr. Jennifer Buckingham. The Australian. 2020)
”A teacher trainer in Australia was telling me the other day that his secondary cohort were amazed to go back and find that many of their students couldn’t segment and blend CVCC, CCVC and CCVCC words, such as ‘mist’, ‘stop’ and ‘grand’.”
(John Walker. Twitter/X)
Why do some students leave secondary school unable to read?
”There is often an expectation in secondary schools that if students haven’t learned to read well by the time they begin Year 7, it’s probably indicative of a lack of ability, or a disability.”
(Dianne Murphy. Thinking Reading)
Secondary English teachers are very unlikely to have received training in teaching the essential phonics decoding component of reading: ”As long as kids pick [decoding] up in Year 1 or 2, they’ll be fine. Problems arise if they arrive at secondary school without being able to do this with much facility as most of us secondary trained English teachers lack the training or time to do much about it.”
(http://learningspy.co.uk/2012/02/29/the-teaching-of-reading/)
”I have spent the past nine months interviewing youngsters who are now on the streets or in and out of prison because no one taught them to read and write between the crucial ages of five and seven. And no one, in seven subsequent years of education (most dropped out of school at around 14) addressed the problem. One young man explained: “For my first two years of secondary school, I was in the top sets for maths and science, but rubbish at everything else because of my lack of literacy. That kills you in every subject. Even in maths you need to read the question.”
(Harriet Sergeant. Sunday Times. 08/02/09)
”The secondary curriculum isn’t made up of high frequency words. A year 8 who can’t decode, even one with a decent sight vocabulary, is likely to flounder.”
(Tricia Millar)
”Vaughn and Fletcher…identified several key differences between elementary and secondary schools that complicate the provision of literacy intervention. Relevant to this current study are (1) secondary teachers generally do not believe that teaching foundational reading is their responsibility; (2) there is no longer dedicated time in the day or curriculum to teach reading; and (3) appropriate resources to teach this age-group may not be widely known or available.”
(Henry, M. M., Snow, P. C., Serry, T. A., & Hammond, L. S. 2025)
If a child arrives at secondary school still struggling to decode and spell, it will be more difficult to correct the difficulties created by inadequate phonics instruction. ”Older poor readers have the same basic problems as younger poor readers and need to learn the same skills. Their problems, however, are complicated by years of frustration and failure” (Hall/Moats p.213). They suffer from ‘The Matthew Effect’, from the biblical verse in St. Matthew 25:29, which can be summarized as, ‘The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.’ Early development of decoding knowledge and skills leads to faster rates of improvement with the result that the disparity between more skilled and less skilled readers widens over time.
Disregard anyone who suggests that children will have been ”phonicked up to the eyebrows” by the time they enter secondary school and therefore, if they are still struggling to decode and spell, ”they obviously need something completely different; phonics doesn’t work for some children.” In some primary schools, discrete and systematic phonics teaching is still seen as an unnecessary and politically motivated imposition and, consequently, the mandated daily phonics teaching is lacklustre and terminated as soon as possible, usually once the Y1 phonics check has taken place. In addition, many KS2 teachers lack up-to-date phonics training and expect pupils to use the old NLS ‘Searchlights’ range of word-guessing strategies if pupils enter their classes as still slow or struggling decoders.
Ofsted’s Deputy Director for Schools wrote:
”So, it’s important that assessment checks exactly which aspect(s) of reading that pupils are struggling with – whether weaker readers are having difficulty reading words accurately and/or automatically. This makes sure that you can target extra support effectively. For example, pupils who can’t read unfamiliar words accurately will need phonics teaching. Regardless of age, special educational need or background, the same knowledge of the alphabetic code and phonics skills underpins all reading.”
(Ofsted blog ‘Supporting secondary school pupils who are behind with reading’. 2022)
”Struggling readers are poor guessers and after years of failing to gain meaning by guessing, they stop reading for meaning. By secondary school, they read only familiar words in a text and skip the rest. They’re then labelled with a ‘comprehension problem’ when they actually have a decoding problem.”
(Tricia Millar)
How can secondary schools ensure all their students leave able to read?
The majority of poor readers of secondary age have big gaps in their knowledge of the alphabet code, especially the advanced/extended code GPCs, and they struggle with reading and spelling multi-syllable words. Moreover, most struggling secondary-age readers have developed the habit of guessing whilst reading, using a mixture of inefficient strategies. These strategies need to be replaced, as quickly as possible, by a phonics-only, left-to-right, all-through-the-word decoding reflex. An intensive, high quality phonics intervention programme that rapidly and systematically teaches the missing elements of the English alphabet code, with additional time spent on reading and spelling multi-syllable words, is likely to be necessary.
”If students do not leave school reading well, it is not because of their genes, their social and economic background, or the ‘bell curve’; it is because we, the teaching profession, have failed to deliver.”
(Dianne Murphy. Thinking Reading)
Michaela Community School (http://mcsbrent.co.uk/) is a state secondary school in Wembley (an area of high deprivation), London. In 2017, it received its first Ofsted inspection and was awarded ‘Outstanding’ in every category. About a third of their pupils start Y7 with reading ages below chronological age, some by 4 or 5 years. By Y9, not a single child reads below their chronological age. This remarkable turnaround is achieved by the combination of a synthetic phonics intervention, lots of reading in class (for example, in each science lesson, pupils encounter over 1,000 words of scientific prose pitched to GCSE, A-Level and beyond), and the least able readers stay for 30 minutes after school every day for Reading Club.
Michaela School’s SENCo describes in detail how the school gets all of its pupils reading at or above chronological age by Y9:
https://tabularasaeducation.wordpress.com/2015/01/17/reading/
”Once you have your reading age results, get all the pupils with a reading age below their chronological age to do a decoding test.”
2022. Ofsted carried out a research project on supporting struggling readers in secondary schools. This report sets out their findings and recommendations:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/now-the-whole-school-is-reading-supporting-struggling-readers-in-secondary-school
The Bridge Over the Reading Gap wp.me/p4hKgx-121
Secondary-age reading specialist Dianne Murphy answers questions about ‘dyslexia’ & other labels; phonics & decoding; training for secondary teachers, and Reading Recovery.
”If a student leaves secondary school unable to read it is the school’s fault.” David Didau.
http://www.learningspy.co.uk/reading/every-teacher-needs-know-students-leave-secondary-school-unable-read/
http://www.learningspy.co.uk/reading/5-things-every-new-seconadary-teacher-know-reading/
5 things every new (secondary) teacher should know about reading. David Didau.
http://horatiospeaks.wordpress.com/2014/11/23/330/ James Murphy.
On Reading: ”The great scandal continues, and our multi-billion pound education system continues to churn out tens of thousands of students every year who cannot read or write adequately. What the educators and the sponsors, by and large, do not seem to understand is what it is like to be fourteen and unable to read.”
https://theliteracyblog.com/2014/05/28/why-cant-children-read-dickens/
Why can’t children read… Dickens? John Walker.
https://theliteracyblog.com/2017/02/18/how-to-help-secondary-pupils-with-reading-and-writing-complex-words/
Phonics at secondary school is not just for intervention: How to help secondary pupils with reading and writing complex words. John Walker.
https://thinkingreadingwritings.wordpress.com/2015/03/14/7-misconceptions-about-teaching-adolescents-to-read/
7 Misconceptions About Teaching Adolescents to Read.
Phonics for Older Teens and Adults:
The almost universal assumption that older teenagers and adults would find phonics-based literacy classes ‘infantile’ and boring, was tested back in 2008. A small project, using synthetic phonics with adults, was set up by the ‘National Research and Development Council for Adult Literacy and Numeracy’ because, as they acknowledged, ”The research base for knowing how to improve the teaching of adult literacy is markedly deficient.” (Burton et al. 2008). Despite the fact that the project was done with small groups, rather than one-to-one, and the DfE’s synthetic phonics programme for children aged 4-7 (L&S 2007, now withdrawn) was used (see Resources for phonics programmes suitable for older teens and adults), synthetic phonics proved to be a huge success with teachers and learners alike. ”The learners (mainly Entry 1-3) made significant progress in reading comprehension and spelling”, and ”This progress was achieved in a very short time (on average..between five and six sessions).” (Burton et al. 2008 p.9)
”One thing I find fascinating about working with adult reading students is that the irregular spellings are not the problem. Most of them have memorized the majority of irregular high-frequency words. Invariably, and this includes students who read at about a 4th or 5th grade level, they can’t read words like tot, bub, lad, lug, chad, chug, and so on. This means that they can’t read an unfamiliar word with regularly spelled short vowels like melted, fulcrum, axel, wishful, etc. Even if you changed the entire English language to a 100% transparent code, you’d still have to teach the code.”
(Larissa Phillips. Twitter/X)
http://www.spelfabet.com.au/2016/03/i-havent-got-my-glasses-the-adult-literacy-challenge/
I haven’t got my glasses: the adult literacy challenge.
http://thatreadingthing.com/about-trt/phonics-for-teens-and-adults/
Why phonics for older teens and adults? Tricia Millar.
https://thatreadingthing.com/phonics-for-adults/
Phonics for adult functional skills. Six pitfalls and how to avoid them. Tricia Millar.
48 million adults in the U.S. read at or below the third-grade level. Some educators think it’s not possible to teach them. They’re wrong, writes Larissa Phillips. 2025.
https://www.thefp.com/p/a-fifth-of-american-adults-cant-read-i-teach-them