To be fed up with primary teachers holding readers back due to ‘comprehension’?

Not for a child with comunicaction issues. It means any child with speech and language issues will be held back. The school should utilise the senco or a salt and find ways to work around this.

The best thing our Dds school did for comprehension was a 2 book system - but one book had no words at all, just pictures, one had both.

The kids brought the no word books home and wove a story to us based on inference. Then later in the year when they had developed reading skills, brought home the words and pictures books and were so delighted when they read the words and it was all about what they had told us. "I said that, mummy!".
And yet there were sooooo many parent complaints of the "not doing that", "reading?!, there's no words", "what a waste of time?" variety.
I was a parent helper that listened to readers (reception and ks1) was lovely hearing the stories they made up to the pictures.

We had this 13 years ago with my dd who started school already able to read to about level 6. Despite the qualified teacher who ran her nursery confirming this and stating her comprehension was fine, school insisted on giving her books with no words and then cat hat bat type ones for ages.

As others have said we mostly just read the school books in ten seconds and continued buying borrowing and reading more interesting books at home. My dd did not have speech delay but was extremely quiet at nursery/school so a bit similar in that she perhaps wasn't very forthcoming with answers even tho she understood the story perfectly.

I do agree with this. I used to do benchmarking as a volunteer and there were children who really hadn't understood a word they had read. But ops child has a spech delay and a specialist who has made recommendations and they arent being used according to op. So I dont think its fair to say the child hasn't understood on that basis.

Are they still doing that? That happened to ds more than a decade ago.

Take your child to the public library or book shop every weekend. Let them choose their own reading books. Make sure they always have something interesting/exciting/fun to read at home.

My ds' primary school did the 'they don't have comprehension' thing while ds happily worked his way through the Secret Seven, Famous Five, Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter.

I think schools do it to prevent too wide a range of reading books in a class. Or because the school library is lacking and they don't have the resources.

Well, to get two first class degrees, you must have found a way to communicate your knowledge to someone at the university who awarded you the degrees.

The thing is, ops child can read whatever they like, regardless of books that get sent home. If OP is unhappy, she should communicate with the school. I’m always happy to talk to parents about their child’s education and what the parent thinks is best for them.

Teachers have to find a way to measure a child’s understanding of a lesson. For non verbal children, or non-writers, there are different ways to ascertain this information. However, if you knew the information and didn’t engage with the lessons, or show the teacher what you were reading, they are going to find it hard to know what you’re capable of. Teachers are not superhuman mind readers. They’re normal, fallible people who are trying hard to figure out what skills children have or haven’t got and are trying to help develop the child they see before them.

There aren’t many teachers keeping children on lower level work for a laugh. We actually have quite a lot of pressure to show that children are achieving highly and have to quantify what we’re doing to help children who are not at the expected level.

I'm a primary school teacher and I've also done reading books differently to my colleagues.
I move them through the levels based on decoding, not comprehension. Then move them to free reader (they can choose their own reading books) when they can read a few pages of Mr Majeka fluently.
We also spend a lot of class time reading, sharing and talking about stories. My kids love reading and stories. Therefore they also read in their own time. Therefore their comprehension, although I didn't care about it when they were on the reading bands, is amazing and they perform amazingly on end of year assessments.
But not all teachers do that second part of story immersion. Why? Because the primary curriculum is far too full and there isn't time.
The only way I can manage it is devoting less time to other subjects. Music is often watching a few YouTube videos of songs from a new genre and a dance around the classroom. French frankly doesn't get taught at all. I do it because I believe the best way to set them up as lifelong learners is to get them loving stories. But I am technically not playing by the rules.

Fully agree with this!

As a competent and literate adult I think it’s hard to place yourself in others’ shoes on this. I volunteered to read with primary school children and a lot of them were perfectly capable of reading the sounds, but if you asked them questions about what they’d read, shockingly little had actually gone in.

I often fully understood what I had read but couldn't be arsed to chat about it after reading - I just wanted to get on with reading the next book.

So yes, trying to get a comprehension answer out of me would be like trying to get blood out of a stone. It didn't mean I hadn't understood, it just meant that (even as a pre schooler) I read books as an introverted pleasure not to discuss them. It's why I don't like book clubs.

I have two first class degrees so I think we can be satisfied that letting me read whatever I liked didn't do me any intellectual harm. Thankfully my home probably had more books in than the average library (and I was also taken to the library often) so it didn't matter what books were dished out at school

I remember my English teacher complaining that I hadn't done a book review every week in a half term in year 5 - my peers were reading Sweet Valley High and Enid Blyton. I had read Grapes of Wrath and A Tale of Two Cities.

When my mum went in to set my English teacher straight the teacher hadnt heard of Grapes of Wrath (!) and didn't realise it was a huge (and brilliant) novel. I've read it in every decade of my life since then and each time I see it with new eyes, but that doesn't take away from my first read of it. Maybe I didn't understand every word or concept, or at least as I got older I had a more layered understanding, but I definitely understood the themes and the arguments and I loved the descriptions and the story.

My friend has a non verbal child. He can still read for meaning. He can read a text and point at pictures. So you can say 'how do you think main character felt about the snow' and he can pick a picture of a face showing an appropriate emotion to the context.
I dont think you can expect children with productive language issues to demonstrate comprehension in the same way.

This argument doesn’t make sense. I never said someone won’t succeed in life because they find comprehension difficult. We are also fully aware of biases from our own experiences and work hard in the teaching profession to reflect on what we do and how we teach.

Scientists need to be able to read and interpret data. Historians also need to do the same. We read a wide variety of texts in comprehension lessons.

The primary curriculum is more than just reading btw. I also teach STEM, outdoor learning, PE, maths, writing (and far more report writing than creative writing), art, drama, music, etc.

I have a child with language issues. Inference is an issue for him. We have to teach inference by modeling it and talking about it in lots of different books, in real life and on tv etc, not reading the same book over and over.

But multiple choice is basically giving them the answer. Asking a child to actually understand and comprehend in their own words is important. I agree with the way it’s done.

I teach upper primary, and have done for so long, that I’m not really able to comment on how they handle reading down the school, however If I wasn’t moving a child up a level, I’d definitely find them something different to read, rather than give the same book over and over.

I have met quite a number of children at my stage of primary who can read every word fluently, but cannot clearly communicate that they have understood what they have read. It is quite common, for instance, for children with ASD to be very fluent readers from an early age, but to really struggle with understanding of a text, particularly when it comes to skills such as inference.

I teach two separate reading lessons, reading for enjoyment and reading comprehension. A child in my class can read whatever they choose from my huge choice of books when reading for enjoyment; novels, comics, puzzle books, non-fiction, picture books, etc.

When decoding texts for deeper understanding, a very able reader might struggle more than a reader who has to sound out and slowly decode each word. These texts are deliberately structured to teach different comprehension skills. A fluent reader might need a more straightforward text than a reader who has to sound out each word.

I currently teach a child, who was reading fluently before nursery and can read anything, who chooses to read books at a much younger level (Horrid Henry) because the child identifies with, understands and enjoys the characters and story at that level. They cannot follow more complicated plots, nor understand the relationships between characters. I have another child who is dyslexic and finds decoding a real struggle, but chooses very challenging novels and painstakingly trudges through, because they love the story and are able to tell me very articulately about what they have read.

Just buy them plenty of book at home/let them go to the library
We never just used "reading scheme" type books they are generally pretty awful. We left those for school and found all sorts of fun books for home.

And let them read the same book a few times if they want to. My son must have read the wimpey kid and 13 storey tree house books several times over.

I always focussed on my goal -.that I wanted my children to see reading as a pleasure, not a chore. Same with learning and education more generally, I wanted them to see it as a privilege and an adventure. My children both read and learn things for fun,.without being asked, and always do their homework without nagging. This is because when they were little I never made them read or do homework if they were tired or grumpy or not feeling it.

Nope. The school is wrong to have kept him on the same books this long. Keeping on the same books for comprehension will
limit his phonics exposure
Put him off reading (no one likes reading the same book over and over)
Clearly not give him the comprehension skills he needs to move on

He should be receiving intervention or a different support for his comprehension. Reading schemes don't actually teach kids the comprehension skills. I would want to know what is being done to actually address his comprehension understanding because rereading the same books over and over doesn't do that.

IME schools take all the joy out of reading these days even when kids enjoy it and are good readers. All the angst over filling in reading records.

I do think reading comprehension is important, ideally a child gets to the point where they can scan read and absorb the critical information to understand the text quickly. I would say however that I was an early decoder (could read fluently before reception) and comprehension just sort of clicked when I was perhaps 5 or 6, I suspect it’s a bit of an organic experience rather than a taught one for some of us.

I do understand why they hold back whilst checking because decoding is the easy bit. DD is in a holding pattern at the moment because I think her comprehension has some catching up to do with her decoding skills. I’m actually fine with this because it is the most important skill imo.

They should be trying to chuck him some books from the level up occasionally and he definitely shouldn’t be rereading books.

However when DD started reception it became clear that when the teacher was asking her comprehension questions she didn’t understand what was expected. So if you asked her what the book was about she would give a one word answer (think, camping) which is not what the teacher was looking for. So I had to read a book with her and say “if Ms Pendergast ask you what the book is about what she wants you to explain to her is this”. It wasn’t that she had an issue with reading comprehension she just wasn’t responding in the “correct” way. No-ones fault but perhaps you could have a teacher and ask what exactly they are looking for an explain it to your son? I imagine it’s a common problem for kids. For us it was easily fixed once I understood where the barrier was.

'There did seem to be a system of putting a large number of hoops for the ones who read well early so the official reading level gap with the others in the class wasn’t too big.'

Another poster commented this and yes this was absolutely our experience. It was obvious it was intended to slow down the stronger readers because when the slower readers eventually reached that level they were not made to do it.
At the moment in uk primary schools bright children are constantly being held baack to enable those who struggle to 'keep up'.