Reading comprehension has never been more important, says Aaron Jordan, assistant headteacher at Millfield LEAD Academy, a primary school in Leicester.

Thanks to digitisation, today’s pupils “may not have to write or even spell a word in the working world they’re going to be in”, he says. “But they’re always going to have to understand - artificial intelligence will never understand something for you.”

One way to improve comprehension is to increase pupils’ vocabulary, perhaps through wider reading. But that is no easy task, with recent studies showing that the number of children enjoying reading has dropped to the lowest level in almost 20 years.

So how can schools ensure that their pupils are equipped with the vocabulary they need to comprehend well?

Jordan and his colleagues believe they have a solution. They call it Starling - because, he explains, “a starling is one of the best birds at hearing, imitating and retrieving sounds, and the direct instructional nature of the session is almost like a murmuration”.

Progress made by PALS

In 2019, Jordan was trained in Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS), a whole-class, structured programme that aims to improve reading fluency and comprehension for key stage 2. The approach, which has been extensively implemented in the United States, is currently being evaluated by the Education Endowment Foundation in the UK, with hundreds of schools participating.

Thanks to PALS, “over a relatively short period of time, we saw really accelerated progress”, Jordan says. His school rolled out PALS across KS2.

But Jordan was struck by a statistic he had read: that you need to understand 95 per cent of the vocabulary you read for thorough comprehension of a text.

In PALS, while reading in pairs, children raise their hands if they can’t read a word. But, Jordan thought, “they have no mechanism to tell us that they don’t understand that word”, and no method of learning its meaning - which, when it comes to comprehension, is key.

So, working with Dr Emma Vardy, associate professor at Nottingham Trent University, Jordan devised a model that takes the “hands up” component of PALs and combines this with Barry Zimmerman’s model of self-regulation in a reading programme for Years 3 to 7.

The Starling script

Under this set-up, the teacher puts pupils into mixed-ability pairs. The pairs are each given different books, pitched to the ability of the higher-attaining reader, according to the book’s Accelerated Reader level. Each partner reads aloud for five minutes, while the other partner tracks the words on the page with a pencil.

When a pupil doesn’t know a word, they raise their hand. The teacher comes over and tells them its definition, following a script:

Teacher: The word is “exhausted”. What is the word?
Pupil: The word is “exhausted”.
Teacher: It means very tired. What does it mean?
Pupil: Very tired.
Teacher: Good, now read the sentence again.

The teacher uses tier-one (basic, high-frequency) vocabulary to define tier-two (high-frequency but more mature) language, says Simran Sembi, a teacher at Millfield and a Starling coach. It’s important that the child repeats both the word and the definition back to the teacher, “so I know their neural pathways have been developed, and I know the pronunciation and understanding is there”, she explains.

After five minutes, the partners swap roles, repeating the process. Throughout, the teacher - and a teaching assistant, if the class has one - writes the words that pupils are querying on the board.

High frequency, tier-two words

The aim is that by the end of the 10 minutes the teacher will have chosen the 10 words that will be most useful for the whole class to learn. That doesn’t mean the most impressive words, says Jordan, but “high-frequency, tier-two words that are most likely to appear”.

Then, for the next two minutes, partner two (the weaker reader) recalls what they have read to their partner. Meanwhile, the teacher and TA together finalise their 10 definitions, which must use five or fewer tier-one words. They write these on the board. The pupils don’t write a thing.

For the next 10 minutes, the pupils come on to the carpet. The teacher follows the script as above, with the whole class responding in unison. This time, the teacher also gives a concise example of how the word might be used in a sentence, which the pupils also repeat.

Then comes story time: the teacher asks pupils to choose a location and an activity, and the teacher devises a story using these and all 10 of the class’s words.

“It’s not about having the best story,” says Sembi. “It’s about showing children that tier-two language can be used in any context.”

After the teacher has modelled a story, the pupils devise their own, speaking aloud to their partner.

Vocabulary retrieval

The final part of the Starling model is retrieval of the previous two weeks’ words, spoken aloud via call-and-response between teacher and class.

Starling is timetabled for three sessions a week. In week four, pupils are assessed on the words in short tests that are peer-marked.

It’s a tightly timed, fast-paced session, which encourages pupils to “stay on task the whole time”, Sembi says. “Their brains should really be in gear” - aiding long-term memory.

And it’s working. Jordan says there is no other rigorously evaluated scheme that yields a retrieval rate greater than three and a half words per week. Starling is showing results three times that number.

Thanks to Starling, says Peter Wood, Millfield’s headteacher, the school, which was “just below national” average in terms of reading in the 2019 Sats, is now one of the top-performing schools for reading, writing and maths combined at greater depth in Leicestershire.

Jordan adds that the school, which is just below the national average for free school meal eligibility at 22.2 per cent, has also been recognised both by Ofsted and the Department for Education for the impact Starling has had on children from disadvantaged backgrounds, with those in receipt of pupil premium particularly benefitting from the programme.

Wide-ranging impact

Starling makes up three-fifths of the school’s reading offer, and, of course, time is also devoted to reading novels together as a class and talking about characters and plot. Jordan says the impact of the children’s greater vocabulary acquisition is evident in their writing across all subjects and in how keen they are to read in their own time. The language confidence instilled by Starling has given pupils a “habitual nature of reading”, he says.

In fact, Wood adds, when Accelerated Reader saw how many books Millfield pupils had read, “they thought we were four-form entry instead of two”, he laughs.

Of course, there have been challenges. Some teachers have worried about not being able to read all of the books themselves - as many as 15 per class. But that isn’t necessary, Sembi says. “Our job is to facilitate opening up [pupils’] world through the acquisition of language - we don’t need to know all those books.”

Another fear some teachers have is not being able to come up with an appropriate definition on the spot. This gets easier with practice, Sembi says, adding that not knowing “is absolutely fine, because we want to show the children that it’s OK that there are words we don’t know”. In that scenario, a teacher might just say, “I don’t have a definition at the minute,” write the word on the board and then discuss it with a TA where possible, or go away and bring a definition to the next lesson.

There is, however, no getting away from the fact that the lesson moves quickly, and the teacher is required to get to the raised hands as fast as they can. “When it started, I used to wear heels on some days,” says Sembi. “Most of us wear trainers now.”

But, adds Jordan, Starling is “designed to be really efficient for teachers and not add to their workload”, given that the only required preparation is book allocation.

And while the pace of the lessons may prove challenging for some pupils with special educational needs and disabilities, Jordan explains that various adaptations are possible to make Starling suitable for children with different needs. He recalls how one Millfield pupil, who has selective mutism, was still able to take part by agreeing to mouth the words, while autistic children have been given greater autonomy over choosing their text.

International rollout

Since introducing the scheme at Millfield, the Starling team has piloted it across some of the academies within the 27-academy LEAD trust, and is now carrying out fidelity checks at other schools, including internationally.

The school is also offering free open mornings for other practitioners to come and see what Starling is all about, as well as running more formal training at a cost of £350 per person.

Could Starling be the future of literacy teaching, as well as a means of reigniting a love of reading in children?

“We know for a fact that the higher the language acquisition is, the higher the life chances,” Jordan says. “And how do we make the book more enticing than the digital device? We do it by decoding the coded world of books.”