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Guest Author: Mark Nichols
Mark is Assistant Principal & English Subject Lead The Avanti Grange Secondary School https://www.linkedin.com/in/marknichols-futureleader/
If you’re teaching in England in 2025, you don’t really choose to care about reading – it’s the air we breathe.
The Department for Education Reading Framework explicitly asks schools to build pupils’ love of reading as well as their fluency Ofsted’s research review for English talks at length about the benefits of reading independently and for pleasure, and about the need for social reading environments, informal book talk and time to read.
At the very same time, the National Literacy Trust keeps telling us that fewer children actually enjoy reading. In its 2024 and 2025 surveys, only about one in three 8–18 year-olds reported enjoying reading in their free time – the lowest levels since records began – and daily reading has dropped to below one in five.
So the policy drum is beating for reading, while many young people are quietly opting out. That tension sits right at the heart of my role as a school leader with oversight for literacy.
This piece is my attempt to make sense of it – and to argue that we need both:
- structured, curriculum-anchored programmes like what we offer in Avanti Grange Reads, and
- a deliberately cultivated culture of reading for pleasure that honours choice, autonomy and social life.
Not either/or. Both/and.
Reading as entitlement vs reading as choice
As an English teacher, reading has always been the heartbeat of my practice. But as I’ve moved into school leadership, I’ve found myself looking at reading through a wider lens.
Broadly, I think we’re talking about two different but overlapping projects:
- Reading as entitlement and access
- Reading as pleasure and identity
Policy and inspection frameworks do acknowledge this second strand. The DfE and Ofsted both draw heavily on the work of Teresa Cremin and The Open University‘s Reading for Pleasure (RfP) research, which has crystallised an evidence-informed pedagogy:
A robust RfP pedagogy weaves together reading aloud, independent reading time, informal book talk and recommendations, all within a highly social reading environment.
This is the “LIST” that OU and partner schools talk about – Learner-led, Informal, Social, Texts that tempt – and it’s powerful precisely because it respects reading as a human activity, not just an assessment domain.
But here’s the catch: school timetables are finite, and leaders are constantly trying to hold these two projects together without letting one quietly crush the other.
Where Avanti Grange Reads fits
At Avanti Grange, we run Avanti Grange Reads for 15 minutes at the end of each day. On paper, it looks very structured – even “draconian” if you only see the surface:
- It’s directed curriculum time, not an optional extra.
- Form tutors read aloud from a shared, carefully chosen text.
- Students follow along; they don’t choose the book.
- Texts are deliberately demanding and diverse – often the kind of books students wouldn’t automatically pick for themselves.
Why do this?
Because there is a strong body of evidence that reading challenging, complex texts aloud, at pace, over time, can transform weaker readers’ identities and access to the curriculum. Research highlighted by Mary Myatt, drawing on the University of Sussex’s “Just Read” project, found that reading complex novels aloud repositioned struggling readers as “good readers”, giving them an uninterrupted, engaging experience they could not yet sustain independently.
The DfE’s English research review also cautions that while reading for pleasure is crucial, it would be a mistake to ignore all children’s need for exposure to increasingly challenging texts in lessons.
In other words:
Avanti Grange Reads is about equity, access and cultural capital.
It’s our way of saying:
- Every child will sit inside rich language every day.
- Every child will hear academic vocabulary, complex syntax, big ideas.
- Nobody is locked out of great books because they were unlucky in their earlier reading journey.
Is it “reading for pleasure” in the pure OU sense? No – and I think we have to be honest about that. It is reading for meaning, for schema, for fluency, for curriculum access – with pleasure, where possible.
That honesty matters, because it stops us pretending that a single programme, however well-designed, can do all the work.
So what is reading for pleasure, really?
The OU Reading for Pleasure work has been a helpful corrective to some of my own assumptions. Cremin and colleagues are pretty clear: if it’s going to count as reading for pleasure, we need at least three things:
- Choice and autonomy Children choose what they read and how they engage with it. That might mean devouring a fantasy series, dipping in and out of graphic novels, scrolling football transfer rumours, or re-reading a comfort book to death. “Good” reading is not defined solely by adults.
- A social reading environment Reading for pleasure is rarely solitary for long. It spills into conversation:
- Adults who read, and readers who teach Teachers, parents and carers who talk about what they are reading, not as a performance but as a genuine part of who they are. OU’s research talks about “Reading Teachers” – teachers who read, and readers who teach – and about reciprocal reading communities where children’s preferences shape what gets shared.
There’s another shift we probably need to acknowledge. Young people’s “reading lives” now include:
- Audiobooks and podcasts, which are often more popular than print – NLT data shows enjoyment of audio content climbing even as traditional reading declines.
- Digital text in all its forms: screens, chats, fan communities, guides, posts.
That doesn’t mean we abandon print, but it does mean that when a student says, “I don’t read”, what they often mean is, “I don’t read books in the way school wants me to.” Our job is to build bridges between the texts that animate them now and the texts that will stretch and sustain them long-term.
Building a reading-for-pleasure culture alongside Avanti Grange Reads
This is where the leadership challenge bites. How do we protect Avanti Grange Reads and create space for authentic reading for pleasure, without inventing a dozen bolt-on initiatives that quietly die by February?
At Grange, with the brilliant leadership of Devon-Louise Oakley-Hogg & Georgia Davies – and, gloriously, colleagues from outside English (yes, I’m looking at you, Lily Wrighton in maths) – we’ve begun to form a Reading for Pleasure taskforce informed by the OU framework. We’re trying to keep it simple and sustainable.
Two examples.
1. Turning “dead space” into social reading space
We’ve identified two areas of the school affectionately known as “the voids” – corners of corridor that currently do little beyond collecting passing traffic.
The plan is to:
- add soft seating and small tables;
- ensure there are “texts that tempt” within arm’s reach – zines, graphic novels, magazines, short story collections, poetry, non-fiction around student interests;
- encourage staff to sit there with a book or a Kindle at key moments, modelling quiet “book blether” with students who drift over.
This isn’t a silent reading zone policed by staff. It’s an attempt to create the kind of low-stakes, social reading environment OU research keeps pointing us toward – the school-age echo of those 17th–18th-century coffeehouses where newspapers and pamphlets were read aloud and debated, and where print and talk wove together into a new public culture.
2. Staff reading profiles: teachers as readers, readers as teachers
I’m disproportionately excited about this one.
We’ve built a simple GPT that takes a teacher’s five (or ten!) favourite books and spins them into a short “reading profile”:
- what they love to read
- how those books have shaped them
- what they’re currently reading or listening to
- one or two recommendations for students
We can then:
- turn these into posters for classrooms and corridors;
- drip-feed them into the fortnightly newsletter;
- use them as prompts on the school podcast.
The point isn’t glossy marketing; it’s normalising talk about reading. When a student says to a teacher, “Sir, you actually read that?”, we’ve already opened the door to informal book talk and to the idea that reading is not just something teachers make you do – it’s something adults choose to do in the wild.
This work sits directly inside the OU/Ofsted recommendation to develop teachers’ knowledge of texts, understanding of pupils’ reading practices, and their own identities as reading role models.
Training staff to read aloud – without killing the joy
One final piece of the jigsaw is how we read aloud.
We already read aloud daily through Avanti Grange Reads. But if we want that time to serve both entitlement and enjoyment, we have to invest in staff expertise:
- Pacing and prosody (not rushing or flattening the text).
- Knowing when to pause for a quick question or comment, and when to simply let the story run.
- Using occasional “book chat” rather than constant comprehension drills.
This is where Myatt’s reminder that “reading aloud is gap-narrowing” really If we treat it as a serious, high-leverage practice – and train for it – we can make sure that structured read-aloud time isn’t experienced as punishment, but as a communal, human moment in the day.
Even when a student ends up disliking a particular book, if – a year later – they can articulate why, draw comparisons, or recommend an alternative, we’ve still succeeded. We’ve activated them as a thinker and a critic, not just a passive listener.
Both/and, not either/or
If there’s a thread running through all of this, it’s probably this:
Reading for pleasure and structured reading programmes are not rivals. They are partners.
- Programmes like Avanti Grange Reads ensure that every child walks daily through demanding, beautiful, sometimes uncomfortable texts – the kind of reading that opens up the wider curriculum and the world.
- A deliberate Reading for Pleasure culture, informed by OU’s research, makes sure that reading is also something children can own: choosing texts, talking about them, sharing them, and sometimes rejecting them.
As literacy leads, our job is to hold the tension:
- to protect curriculum-time read-aloud as a non-negotiable entitlement;
- to resist shallow “reading for pleasure” gimmicks that drain staff energy but don’t build habits;
- and to invest, patiently, in the slow work of building reading communities – the blethering, the book corners that actually get used, the staff profiles, the student recommendations, the quiet moment when a child tucks a book into their bag because they want to know what happens next.
If we can get that balance right, then programmes like Avanti Grange Reads won’t be the thing that crowds out reading for pleasure. They’ll be one of the pillars that makes a deep, whole-school reading culture possible.
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