Ofsted's English subject report: telling this story

In this episode Mark Leech, Deputy Director of Communications, talks to Kirsty Godfrey, Senior HMI, and Zoe Enser, HMI, about Ofsted's recently published English Subject report. 

Transcript

Mark Leech  02:02

Hello and welcome to another edition of Ofsted Talks. My name is Mark Leach and today we're going to be talking about English. We've recently published our subject report looking at the teaching of English in primary and secondary schools and I'm joined today by Kirsty Godfrey and Zoe Enser. Hello, nice to have you with us.  Hello.  Hi, Mark.  So we've published this report. It has quite a lot to say about the different components of of English teaching right across across the age groups. Should we start by just talking through some of the main findings of of the report?

Kirsty Godfrey  02:40

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the really good news stories is about reading. We found that the teaching of reading has improved. And that is really to do with all of those things that have happened over perhaps the last 10 years. So we've had the phonics screening check. We've got systematic synthetic phonics that's been put into the national curriculum. We've had our focus in Ofsted are looking at reading so in every inspection with primary age pupils, we're doing an early reading Deep Dive. And there's also the English absolve, they work so lots of policy government changes and our autofocus have really turned schools attention to the importance of teaching reading, and we know that that's been a real success story. Obviously, there's more to do. And particularly when children get to that point of finishing phonics and moving on. We know this sometimes can be less well understood really about how that curriculum is developed, their fluency is considered. And sometimes there's a rush towards going straight to reading comprehension and what those tests might look like at the end of key stage. So that's an area for further improvement, as is that teaching for those children who might be behind with their reading when they enter key stage two, sometimes they don't get sufficient practice to really embed that knowledge or the right sort of practice to make sure that that they quickly catch up.

Mark Leech  03:59

And we see that strength in reading taken through into into secondary school Zoe because I'm interested as well, we talked about sort of the mechanics of how do you how do you teach children to read but there's, there's part of how do you then use that to access the rest of the curriculum, but also how do they learn to love reading with pleasure? Is that something that we're seeing carried through into secondary school?

Zoe Enser  04:24

Well, there's two very different strands there and what we're talking about when we think about the text that pupils encounter in their engagement with reading, you're absolutely right. That access to reading and the mechanics of reading is going to make a huge difference to how they can then access the curriculum more widely. But we've got that reading culture that development of that interest in reading that habit of reading, that is being strongly developed in secondary schools. There are lots of opportunities in Tutor Time where teachers have really thought about what is it that we want our pupils to encounter what kinds of texts nonfiction short stories, poems, that's all being pulled? together as part of that? And then the separate strand around that is what texts do we study for literature? And it was really pleasing to see that there had been a lot of thought that had taken place around what were the most appropriate texts for pupils. To then use as a vehicle for that literary analysis, analysis, sorry, literary analysis, that understanding of the kind of critical approach that we take to text because they they serve different purposes. We've got the text that we enjoy and share and talk about