Preparing to Meet With St Mary's Catholic School

Once we had a date to meet with St Mary's Catholic School we needed to prepare for the meeting with research and ideas that we could use to help the school.

The main focus that St Mary's set out for us was to help with their goal to achieve higher reading levels in boys. We realised that we needed to do research on this topic to familairise ourselves with the topic.


We found out that low reading attainment in boys throughout school is a national epidemic and one that has been occurring for a long time. It is also known as the 'gender gap'.  A report by Save the Children in 2016 found that the gender gap has only been reduced by one percent in ten years. A report by the DFE, also in 2016, found that in Key Stage one boys were being out performed in all areas and in Key Stage two they were being out performed in all areas apart from maths. Gary Wilson is a key note speaker and has many books published surrounding the issue has said that it has been an issue since at least 1993. He theorizes that the root of the issue could be that we are forcing boys to start reading and writing too early. He explains that in Scandinavia children do not start formal education until the age of seven, and boys and girls perform roughly the same throughout school. However he does also suggest this could be down to the quality of the teaching and the curriculum.

After finding out this information, we also researched ways that teachers are tackling the problem. One of the main ways was to find out the books and genres that boys really engage with and include them in the design and the stocking of the library. We are going to ask Issac Haskell if we can give the students, boys and girls, a questionnaire to find out about their reading habits and what genre of books they enjoy reading. This will give us a better understanding of the needs of the school. 

We also thought of some activities that we could do with the children: 

• Sports Reports - reports about a local football match that had recently happened, maybe the child had played in it. Other children could then read this, quite like a school paper. 
• Role Models - a KS1 student is paired with a KS2 student. The KS1 child will read stories that the KS2 student will write especially for them, after asking them what type of stories interest them the most. This will encourage reading from a young age and the use of the older child being a role model will be good as it will mean that the younger children will see it as 'cool' to read (Wilson, 2002).