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Screened in Year One. Retested in Year Two. One in Nine Fail Twice. There Is No Screener in Year Three.

There’s a moment every September that gets us right in the heart.

A child walks out of a primary school where every adult knows their name, their reading level, and exactly which sounds still trip them up. Six weeks later, they walk into a secondary school with ten different teachers, a timetable full of subjects, and a curriculum that quietly assumes they can already read.

For roughly a quarter of them, that assumption is wrong. I think about those children a lot.

The numbers (brace yourself)

In the 2025 Key Stage 2 SATs, 75% of pupils met the expected standard in reading. Sounds okay, doesn’t it? Now flip it round: one in four children left primary school this summer without secure reading skills. That’s around 175,000 pupils a year arriving in Year 7 with a reading age below 11, according to Ofsted. Picture your nearest secondary school on the first day of term. In every single classroom, that’s six or seven children.

And here’s the bit that keeps me up at night: the gap doesn’t wait for them to catch up. GL Assessment found that 25% of 15-year-olds have a reading age of 12 or below, and one in five have a reading age of 11 or below — pretty much exactly where they stood on their first day of secondary school. Four years of lessons, and the gap just travelled with them, like a stone in their shoe nobody ever stopped to shake out.

Left behind long before Year 7

For so many of these kids, the story starts much earlier, and honestly, it follows a script we could all recite by now.

In 2025, 80% of pupils passed the Year 1 phonics screening check. The 20% who didn’t got some extra support and a resit at the end of Year 2. By then the pass rate had crept up to 89% – which sounds like progress, until you sit with what it means for the other 11%. Roughly one in nine children fails the check twice. And then? Nothing. No Year 3 check. No follow-up. Nobody officially asking the question ever again. The system just… stops checking.

So the six-year-old who couldn’t decode becomes the seven-year-old who couldn’t decode, becomes the nine-year-old “reluctant reader,” becomes the eleven-year-old below the expected standard. Same child. Same gap. Nobody tracking it. By Year 7 that phonics gap is five years old, buried under layers of avoidance, clever coping tricks, and quietly crumbling confidence.

The dropped baton

Think of transition like a relay race. Primary schools run a brilliant first leg. Phonics teaching in Key Stage 1 has genuinely never been stronger. But at the changeover, the baton gets dropped. All that rich knowledge of each child’s reading rarely makes it across. Secondary colleagues receive a scaled score, not a story. And a scaled score can’t tell you that Jamal still muddles his alternative vowel spellings, or that Lilly decodes beautifully but has never once finished a book.

Then comes the cruel irony: reading demands shoot up at exactly the moment reading support falls away. In primary, reading is the subject. In secondary, it’s the invisible entry ticket to every subject. The science textbook, the history source, the maths word problem. A child who can’t access the words isn’t just behind in English. They’re locked out of the whole curriculum, five hours a day, every day.

Motivation takes a battering at the same time. The National Literacy Trust’s 2025 survey – over 114,000 children, the biggest of its kind – found reading enjoyment at its lowest in twenty years, with just 32.7% of 8- to 18-year-olds enjoying reading in their free time. The transition drop-off is heartbreaking: 44.5% of 5- to 8-year-olds read something daily. For 11- to 14-year-olds? 17.1%. For boys aged 14 to 16, fewer than one in ten.

So the children who most need reading miles on the clock are doing the fewest, right when the road gets steepest.

The bit that really gets me

When secondary schools do spot their struggling readers, they hit a second wall: most intervention resources simply weren’t built for this age group.

Hand a 13-year-old a phonics book with a cartoon cat on the cover and you haven’t just given them the wrong resource — you’ve confirmed their deepest fear about themselves. That needing help with reading means being treated like a baby. Many would genuinely rather be labelled “doesn’t care” than “can’t read.” So much of what looks like defiance is actually camouflage.

Ofsted’s guidance on supporting struggling readers in secondary is clear about what works: find them fast with proper diagnostic assessment, teach the gaps directly (yes, including phonics), and do it in a way that protects their dignity. The best schools start even earlier, screening pupils as they arrive, and asking feeder primaries for the story, not just the score.

What we’d love every school to hold onto this September

The transition gap isn’t inevitable. It’s a handover problem, and handover problems can be fixed.

Screen every Year 7 in the first half-term. Make reading a whole-school mission, not an English department problem. And when a pupil needs structured phonics at 12, 13, 15 — give it to them in a form that respects who they are: age-appropriate, engaging, full of characters and stories they can actually see themselves in.

That last part is the whole reason Read Revive exists. We built a fully digital, structured phonics programme designed for older pupils from the ground up, because a struggling reader in Year 7 isn’t a big infant. They’re a young person who missed something first time round, and who deserves a second chance that doesn’t cost them their dignity.

One in four children will make that walk through the secondary school gates this September without the reading skills to thrive. The question I can’t stop asking is: what will be waiting for them on the other side?

If reading at transition is on your mind for September, I’d love to chat or just to hear what’s working in your school.

#ReadRevive #LiteracyMatters #Transition #SecondaryEnglish #SEND

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