Yes, sorry to get sidetracked OP - just to reiterate that it sounds like your DD is making good progress, especially in the light of the difficulties she has experienced.
thegamesafoot: In my own experience (and bearing in mind that this is in broadly fairly middle-class areas and there will always be exceptions!) there is often a group of perhaps six or seven very capable readers who emerge from Reception. These are typically (but by no means exclusively) autumn and winter-born girls whose parents have given them some additional phonics input at home, often because these children appear ‘ready’ for school and reading is one area that many parents prioritise. By the beginning of Year One these children are able to decode pretty efficiently, especially if the main teaching focus during Reception has also been on phonics. In the schools I’ve taught in, it would be rare for them to come up as free readers, but they’ve often whizzed through the early stages of the scheme books and have reached white level and beyond.
However, in many instances this group’s comprehension skills haven’t kept pace with their ability to decode. Yes, they can tell you roughly what a character is feeling, or broadly explain what has happened, but once higher order reading skills are introduced they can struggle. I think this may be in part because their understanding of what ‘reading’ is is very tied up with mechanical skills; they see being able to read the words on the page as the most important thing, and can struggle to see the point of questions about what they’ve read.
I’ve led many guided reading sessions where my middleish readers have shown a much deeper understanding of the text than my ‘most able’ group, picking up on nuances, reading between the lines and giving much more thoughtful responses to questions about what is going on. This may be because for these ‘average’ readers learning to read has been a more holistic process, where phonics skills have developed alongside comprehension skills. By the end of the year, some of these ‘average’ children (interestingly, it’s often younger boys) will have surpassed the ‘most able’ group from Reception. Often this is more in terms of NC levels, where more emphasis is placed on all-round understanding rather than the raw ability to decode. Usually there’ll be one or two of the Reception group (the really exceptional readers who genuinely love books and often also display considerable emotional maturity) who are still ahead, but those whose early advantage was based primarily on good phonics skills are overtaken.
I think in Year One generally things can even out a little – the summer born or more timid children are that much more settled in school; the boys who might have spent much of the Reception year tearing around on scooters mature a little, and those children who might be very capable but have had little input at home have had time to catch up.
Apologies for the essay – it’s a bit of a complex one, but I think the key thing in supporting able readers is to encourage them to take a thoughtful, discursive approach to what they read, rather than letting them race through level after level of the ORT (or whatever scheme is used) just because they can.