Students with Reading Difficulties

Diagnostic Testing

The Department of Education provides computer-based standardized assessments of literacy (the Northern Ireland Literacy Assessment [NILA]) and numeracy (the Northern Ireland Numeracy Assessment [NINA]) for use in the autumn term of Years 4, 5, 6, and 7. These assessments are intended to support schools in identifying the strengths and diagnosing the learning needs of individual students. Literacy skills are tested across three strands: Listening, Reading, and Writing. The tests are optional for schools, and outcomes are not collected centrally. In January 2016, the Education Minister decided not to renew the contracts with providers with effect from September 2017 for the computer‑based assessments.

Instruction for Children with Reading Difficulties

There is an explicit expectation that high quality teaching that is differentiated for individual students is the first step in responding to students who have reading difficulties. The 2009 policy for school improvement, Every School a Good School—A Policy for School Improvement, was designed to support and, when necessary, challenge schools in improving the quality of educational provision and outcomes for their students, particularly in literacy and numeracy. It sets out the following characteristics as indicators of effective performance: ⁴³

Teachers use adaptable, flexible teaching strategies that respond to the diversity within the classroom.
Assessment and other data are used to inform teaching and learning effectively across the school and in the classroom and to promote improvement.
Effective interventions and support are in place to meet the additional education and other needs of students and to help them overcome barriers to learning.

The Department of Education’s 2011 strategy, Count, Read: Succeed, also emphasized the importance of high expectations of success and effective use of data to track progress, allowing underachievement to be addressed as soon as it begins to emerge.⁴⁴

The Delivering Social Change Signature Programme was launched in 2012 to improve literacy and numeracy as part of a wider government initiative tackling poverty and social exclusion. The program recruited recently qualified teachers who were not in a permanent teaching post on a two year fixed term contract to provide additional support for students at risk of underachieving. The program ran during the 2013–2014 and 2014–2015 school years and involved 151 primary schools.⁴⁵

If, despite the completion of planned interventions, a student continues to underachieve against the targets that have been set, the school considers whether the student has a special educational need. Students with special education needs can access special education provisions to meet their identified requirements. For example, students with dyslexia may access small group teaching in English, and students with visual impairments may receive handouts in larger print.

Some students require specialist intervention from outside the school; for example, from the Education Authority. Students can access this support if they are at Stage 3 or above on the stages of assessment and provision set out by the Code of Practice on the Identification and Assessment of Special Educational Needs. From 2012 to 2015, the Department of Education funded a special education needs continuing professional development literacy project that aimed to:^46,47

Develop teachers’ competence and confidence in their ability to identify individual learning profiles
Develop teachers’ competence and confidence to match evidence-based interventions to individual students’ learning needs
Help teachers identify students’ literacy strengths and address students’ difficulties

The project was delivered through online sessions in which the whole school participated, combined with face to face teaching sessions for up to two teachers per school.