Decoding In Secondary: Still An Issue For Some Students

Theme 2: Decoding

For some pupils, difficulties with word-level reading do not end in primary school and decoding, the ability to accurately read unfamiliar words using knowledge of sound–letter relationships, remains a live issue at secondary. It may no longer be visible day-to-day to staff, particularly in later secondary, but it can quietly block access to every subject.

Mainstream secondary practitioners, focusing on building fluency and comprehension, know that these higher skills rest on decoding. When they identify decoding as weak there are interventions that can be made, but these may not always be judged appropriate due to the extent of previous phonics exposure.

How We Got Here

Over the past decade, decoding instruction has become much more consistent at primary level. Government policy, especially since the introduction of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check in 2012, has embedded systematic synthetic phonics across schools in England. This has improved early reading outcomes, especially for younger children.

As a result, the average Year 7 pupil has had extensive phonics instruction at primary, but this doesn't guarantee mastery. Some students missed out; others didn’t secure what was taught; and in particular EAL and SEN students might not yet have secure decoding.

Guidance now recognises this. The Department for Education's 2023 reading framework states that any pupil unable to decode fluently should be taught synthetic phonics, regardless of age. The EEF and Ofsted echo this: schools should assess decoding explicitly and provide targeted instruction where needed.

Yet given the heavy emphasis on phonics at primary, there is sometimes an understandable reluctance to base interventions around this at secondary. Students may be disengaged, and practitioners may be wary of repeating approaches that have previously had limited success.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Most secondary schools screen reading ability on entry, often using reading age tests or digital assessments. Where results suggest difficulties, further diagnostics may follow. Many schools use this information to distinguish decoding problems from other issues such as fluency or comprehension.

For those where needs are diagnosed as being decoding, schools often use structured programmes designed for older learners—like Read Write Inc. Fresh Start or Toe by Toe. These are typically delivered in small groups or one-to-one, and some schools have dedicated staff trained to deliver them.

In other schools, where practitioners are battling student disengagement, they choose to address decoding not through stand-alone interventions, but as part of broader reading support.

In all cases though, ideally, monitoring is a key part of the process. Some schools use regular, fine-grained assessments to track whether decoding is improving. Others rely more on general literacy data or teacher judgment. There's variation in how long interventions last, and in how decisions are made about whether support has "worked."

Where the guidance and the evidence end

However, while current guidance and evidence are highly valuable, they still leave uncovered ground. Guidance tells schools what to do when decoding is weak—but this is oriented around entry to secondary: the guidance says less about assessing the success of interventions and what to do next. In many schools, structured intervention ends by Year 9. If a pupil still struggles in Key Stage 4, support may be minimal unless they are identified as having SEN.

By KS4, decoding is rarely addressed through a distinct intervention and generally sits within broader literacy support. While schools continue to assess reading, there is often no explicit mechanism for revisiting whether decoding remains a barrier. But this means that where decoding issues do persist, they can be hard to spot. Older students may read fluently enough to mask underlying gaps, which means those gaps are less likely to be identified and addressed.

And, for a subset of students, including many with SEN, decoding remains insecure in KS4. For these students, understanding their mastery of decoding is as important as ever.

Where This Leaves Us

Decoding sits at the base of the reading pyramid. It isn’t the whole picture, but it underpins everything else. Knowing when decoding is still an issue—and when it's no longer the main barrier—is a crucial professional judgment.

Current guidance steers practitioners towards explicit phonics instruction when this is identified as a need; yet in practice this is not always what practitioners judge as most effective. 

The project seeks to form a more nuanced view of decoding and how schools address it among struggling readers in secondary and in particular in Year 9 and KS4.