From a serving headteacher

Reading Fluency Blog

Evidence-based reading fluency insights from a serving UK headteacher. Practical strategies for reading fluency in KS1 and KS2 – from assessment and progress tracking to classroom practice and school leadership.

A teacher at her desk after school, writing notes beside a stack of reading books

Featured

Whole Texts, Not Extracts: The Case for Finishing the Book

Most reading practice is a slice of a book nobody finishes. The evidence says whole texts build comprehension, fluency and joy in ways an extract never can.

Recent Articles

Reading Leadership

The Year 8 Reading Test: Why Primary Schools Should Care

The government has announced a statutory Year 8 reading test assessing fluency and comprehension. The children it will measure are in your school now, and the gap it will find is set long before Year 7.

Fluency Practice

Repeated reading: the technique everyone knows and nobody enjoys

Repeated reading is the most evidenced fluency technique there is, and the most boring as usually taught. The fix: hide the repetition inside a week of varied, purposeful tasks with a performance at the end.

Reading Leadership

Why more reading comprehensions won't fix comprehension

I introduced phonics in four schools and prepared Year 6 classes for their reading SATs. Here's what I learned about why comprehension worksheets don't do what we hope, and what actually builds understanding.

Fluency Practice

Your phonics results look great. So why is reading still hard work for some children?

Passing phonics proves a child can decode. It does not prove they recognise words instantly, and until they do, reading stays hard work. Here is the automaticity gap, the research behind it, and the flash phrases routine we use at Fetcham to close it.

Fluency Assessment

Why poetry is the fastest route to reading fluency (and the routine we're trying)

Gareth McGovern and I have spent the best part of a year working out how to teach reading fluency through poetry. Here is the research, the week-long Poem of the Week routine we have settled on at Fetcham, and a free one-page planner to try in your classroom.

Fluency Assessment

The SATs Reading Paper Is a Fluency Test in Disguise

Why the KS2 reading paper is often a test of reading fluency rather than comprehension, and how we can best support our pupils.

Reading Leadership

Twelve words per minute in four months: what measuring fluency changed at our school

Thirty-two Year 2 children at Fetcham Village Infant School gained an average of twelve WCPM in four months. Accuracy climbed to 98.5 per cent. The children we worried about most made the biggest gains. A four-month snapshot from a single infant school.

Reading Leadership

How to build a Pupil Premium reading fluency evidence trail that holds up

A step-by-step guide for primary schools: baseline assessment, termly tracking, group-level analysis and connecting intervention to outcome for Pupil Premium reading fluency evidence.

Reading Research

Pupil Premium and reading fluency: where is the evidence of impact?

Pupil Premium funding exceeds £3bn in 2025-26, but most schools evidence reading impact with comprehension scores alone. Here is why fluency data is the missing metric for disadvantaged children.

Reading Leadership

How to prepare for the Year 8 reading fluency test: five steps for primary schools

The Year 8 reading fluency test is coming. Here are five practical steps primary schools can take now to prepare, from auditing provision to training KS2 staff.

Reading Research

Why Reading Fluency Matters: The Research Behind the Year 8 Test

The Year 8 reading fluency test is built on four decades of research that most schools have not had the training to act on. Here is the evidence that underpins it and what it means for primary schools.

Reading Research

What the DfE White Paper Means for Reading Fluency in Primary Schools

The DfE's 2026 white paper creates assessment bookends from phonics to Year 8 fluency, but leaves three critical gaps. Here's what matters for your school.

Reading Research

Your comprehension problem might actually be a fluency problem

A major new meta-analysis screened over 1,500 studies and found most comprehension interventions don't transfer to standardised tests. The research points clearly to the missing piece: reading fluency.

Reading Research

Reading Fluency Benchmarks UK: What the Numbers Actually Mean for Your School

Reading fluency is three things: accuracy, automaticity and prosody. Words correct per minute captures the middle one. Here are the RF Reading Stages, what each band asks, and how the national medians compare.

Reading Research

You Can't Enjoy What You Can't Do

Reading for pleasure is the destination. Fluency is the road that gets you there. Why campaigns like Go All In need a fluency strategy to reach the children who struggle most.

Reading Leadership

Comprehension Questions Don't Teach Reading

Comprehension questions don't build reading fluency. Ofsted said it. The DfE said it. The research has said it for years. And yet walk into almost any Key Stage 2 classroom and what will you find? Children answering questions about texts they can barely read aloud.

Fluency Assessment

How to Assess Reading Fluency in Primary School: A Practical Guide

Assessing reading fluency doesn't have to be complicated. With the right approach, you can screen a whole class in a single afternoon or monitor individual progress in just two minutes per child.

Reading Leadership

What Is Reading Fluency? A Clear Guide for Primary Teachers

Reading fluency is one of those terms that gets used constantly in education but rarely gets defined clearly. This article provides a clear, research-based definition and explains why it matters so much for comprehension.

Fluency Practice

Stop Making Fluency Harder Than It Needs to Be

We've been trying to build fluency with texts that are too hard. And it doesn't work. For children who know their sounds but find 'age-appropriate' texts laborious, try this: make it easier, not harder.

Assessment Practice

Fast, Simple, Accurate: Why Assessment Speed Actually Matters

If traditional running records take 10-15 minutes per child, assessing 30 children means 4-7 hours of assessment time. That's why fluency gets pushed down the priority list. Fast assessment changes everything.

Reading Leadership

The Fluency Blind Spot: What Ofsted Sees That We're Missing

In March 2024, Ofsted published findings from 50 schools showing a systematic gap between decoding accuracy and reading fluency. DfE key stage 2 data shows around a quarter of pupils finished primary school below the expected standard in reading.

Reading Leadership

Why Your 'Good Decoders' Still Can't Understand What They Read

The 2018 NAEP study found that the biggest gaps between struggling and proficient readers weren't in word recognition accuracy - they were in automaticity and prosody. Here's what UK schools can learn.

Reading Leadership

Reading Fluency: The Missing Link in Primary Reading Development

More than 90% of our children passed the phonics screening check two years running. But children still weren't reading fluently. Here's how we identified the missing link between decoding and comprehension.