KS3 Afterschool Reading Clubs
In every Year 7 cohort, there are students who have struggled with reading through their primary schooling. But we find that most of them can learn to read fast with different strategies. You will see from the site that we are leaders in innovation in phonics methodology.
To deliver real change for your struggling readers we will create an afterschool club in your school and work with those kids until they have cracked it. None of this will cost you anything until that breakthrough has been achieved (see below).
Having an XP Club in your school will show you are taking reading intervention seriously in an innovative way. We all know that doing more and more of the same will only lead to frustration.
Counting the Simple Costs of Your Status Quo:
Right now you are incurring lots of costs from this small group of students who persistently struggle with reading:
1) Long term interventions delivering limited results
2) Extra support time in every curriculum subject
3) Wasted time in class due to disruptive behaviour
4) SLT time spent on discipline and pastoral care
5) Direct costs of exclusion
So this is probably your biggest challenge for inclusion and has massive costs across your whole team. We can potentially eliminate all of those costs and drive your KS4 results up as well.
Saving the Deeper, Bigger Costs
As a team leader, your biggest concern is your team isn’t it?
Only your team can teach the children in your care. If your team is happy and set up for success, your school will thrive. So nothing is more important than your team.
But look at the impacts of struggling readers on you and your team:
1) Teacher frustration every day from children not progressing in their subject classes.
2) Teacher stress from the disruption causec by these disengaged students.
3) Teacher illness, driven by that daily stress.
4) Senior leadership time trying to help your team, without fixing the underlying issue.
5) Recruitment costs replacing the good teachers who leave the profession.
Around 40% of your younger teachers are likely to leave the profession within 10 years of starting.
How much is this costing you and the school every year? …£20k? £50k? £100k? I don’t know, but it’s going to be high, isn’t it?
We have run a randomised control trial on this exact issue and the behaviour of the children who learned to read in the experimental group was transformed.
Imagine...
1) Dropping the headaches connected to all of those stresses for your team.
2) Leading a team of teachers who really feel like they are delivering for almost every child in their classes.
3) Seeing a virtuous circle of rising results, deepening satisfaction and better retention of the talent in the school.
It may seem crazy, but that is what a transformation of literacy can achieve for you.
I know you will have doubts that we can achieve that change, but are you so convinced it is impossible that you don’t want to give it a go?
How We Achieve These Results
We have been running a reading research process in Oxford since 2008. We have guided over 17,000 children to reading success and discovered a mix of different possible causes of frustration.
Our approach is to run a diagnostic process to identify what barriers the child has to reading progress and then implement an Individual Intervention Plan to knock down those barriers.
We are happy to work with any mainstream student, including dyslexics. We can also help your SEND team, but that would be during the school day.
How an "XP Club" works
We call these afterschool reading clubs XP Clubs. It’s a computer gaming reference for the children.
We will manage every aspect of this for you:
1) We will directly employ one of your TAs to supervise the XP Club and recruit volunteers.
2) We will provide all the training and support needed for the TA.
3) We will provide all the resources to run the club, except the computers/tablets.
All we need is the thumbs up to get going.
But please note that our capacity for managing XP Clubs is limited and so there may be a delay to getting started.
The Cost
We are running the XP Club network as a CIC social enterprise. You will pay no overhead cost for having an XP Club in the school. We will cover all the direct costs.
When we are successful and a student achieves a pass in the KS2 Reading Test, that is going to lead to huge savings for you. So we ask that the school contributes £700 to the cost of running the club for each child transformed. Our expectation is that they will be able to pass the KS2 reading assessment.
That success-linked cost is eligible for:
1) Inclusive Mainstream Fund support.
2) Pupil Premium Funding.
3) Sponsorship of children from local businesses.
Next Steps
If you are interested, we can discuss it further and answer any questions that you have. Just use the link below to book a meeting time.
If you want to give it a go, you just need to introduce us to a suitable TA, who is excited to get involved.
Once we have a space to run the club in each day, we can get started.