My project

I have decided that for my project I am going to look at 'The impact of the Accelerated Reading Programme on improving the Reading Age of post-16 learners and implementing strategies to create a culture of reading and love of books."

At the college where I work, we have a huge cohort of students who have come to do either a Level 2 GCSE programme of subjects, Level 2 BTEC, Level 3 BTEC or A Levels. In some cases we have students doing these courses who have not achieved a C in GCSE English. This is for various reasons including poor reading skills, poor SPaG skills, not feeing engaged enough or enjoying the subject at school.

We have pioneered the use of AR in a sixth form college. This programme is used prolifically in schools but normally stops by year 9. Some schools continue with it through year 10 and 11. To my knowledge we were the first 6th form/FE college to use the programme with post 16 learners. Ofsted flagged it up as 'pioneering' during our last inspection.

Although we did not use the programme to its full potential, we did notice a marked improvement in the reading ages of our Level 2 students who had to undertake 20 mins of quiet reading at the beginning of each GCSE English lesson. This year I plan to use it to develop the programme fully to support and improve reading skills for our students.

There also tends to be a negative attitude from Level 2 students towards reading with comments from students ranging from 'I find reading boring', 'I hate reading' through to 'I've not read a book since primary school'. There may be lots of reasons for this from students not ever having engaged with reading as a pastime when they were children to maybe finding reading difficult. For whatever reason, many Level 2 students find reading a chore and something that they have to do rather than choose to do.

I want to try to encourage students to not only improve their reading age through the Accelerated Reading Programme, which will in turn help them with their other courses and pass GCSE English, but also to develop a culture of reading and love of books within the college.