School Spotlight – The Compton School

How did you first come across the Lexia program and what led to the school’s final decision to purchase?

Emily: About 4 years ago, I put in a school development bid with the local authority for some of their post-covid funding. I decided to write something about the whole school reading strategy and Lexia was part of that tool kit.  It was a three-tier approach; so there was a whole school approach that looked at the development of staff, making sure that every teacher was a teacher of literacy and reading. Being a secondary school, we made sure that teachers understand how children learn to read and the specific barriers that they might have with their reading. Lexia was to be part of our targeted support following the screening of our young people. We wanted to have a licence at Key Stage 3 for our bottom 20% of readers as a catch-all to run alongside other interventions that we run as a school. We have daily phonics instruction here at secondary level and paired reading for fluency practice and we call Lexia our ‘tutor in a computer’. It’s our way of making sure that the young people that aren’t getting one to one intervention or they just need a little bit of support, are getting a bit of extra help closing those foundational reading gaps.

We introduced it with 60 licenses, and we liked it so much that, in the second year of the strategy, we then purchased 120 licenses. We now have three trust schools that have Lexia and that all started with us here at Compton. It’s great!

What do you feel makes Lexia stand apart from other reading skills software products on the market?

Emily:  I think that because it’s an adaptive programme and it’s bespoke to the needs of the particular student. I think that that’s a big sell for us in terms of making sure that the students are getting the correct level of instruction, making sure that they’re closing the specific gaps that they have in all areas of reading. That’s an excellent part of the programme. I think another part of it is the gamification.

Deeya: Yes, since the start of term, we’ve had a couple of weeks with Year 7 now, they have been really competitive with keeping up streaks! They come to tell me about their high streaks and it’s a real treat for them to be able to compete with their friends and get a high score. They also keep track of it themselves and show me and their other teachers what they have achieved. It’s a real sense of achievement for them!

How is Lexia used in your school? Please provide details of your daily routine and how you ensure that you reach recommended usage as well as which pupils use the program in school.

Emily: Lexia forms an in integral part of our Year 6 transition. We’re relatively stable in terms of student intake so we get students to take their CAT test early. So, the prospective Year 6 pupils come in around May to do their CAT which is much earlier than our other schools. We then use the Verbal Reasoning Score and start to have a look at data before they even do their SATs to identify if they could have some reading barriers. In the summer term, after they have had their induction day, we invite usually around 50 students who will make up our new Year 7 cohort, and their parents, into school for an afternoon. The young people will go and do their Lexia Auto Placement test, and we will speak to the parents to really get them on board with the program and what to can do. This is to avoid the ‘summer slide’ and ensure that there are no gaps even before even start secondary school and that the parents buy into our school ethos of reading.

We give each of these students a Lexia licence and give them the ambitious project of who can do the most minutes over the summer holidays. The winner gets a £10 Amazon voucher. They just love it and they go wild for it! In fact, in previous years, we’ve have children actually graduate and finish the program even before they start secondary school! It’s great for the students because they have been successful in an area they potentially haven’t been before and then we can reuse the license with another student which supports us financially as a school. It’s really powerful!

A good thing about the program is that it is a finite program so the students don’t feel they are chipping away at an endless task. Some interventions can feel quite arduous but the fact that there is an end goal with Lexia, its quite motivating for the students.

After the Year 6 transition, we then do our more forensic screening to make sure we’ve got the right children. At the moment we heavily load Year 7 so we are probably going to use about 70 of our licenses in Year 7.

Last year, we created a Lexia Lead position who is the head of Lexia and we run a breakfast club because we found that the children we were targeting were getting quite dysregulated at the end of the day. We found that Year 7 parents were more keen to drop their children to school a little earlier and the turnout have been very positive. They can come, have a biscuit, they can do half an hour on Lexia and it means that they have already achieved 30 minutes of their Lexia time. We also have 30 minutes of personal development time (PDT) at 10:30. Once a week, they come out of one of their personal development times and they are with Deeya in the computer room, completing Lexia for another 30 minutes. We target each student to do 90 minutes a week, so it means that we’ve given them an hour to build up their minutes and they only have to do 30 minutes in their own time.

Having it structured in this way means we can be supportive in giving them this time. Deeya then also has protected time on her timetable to do interventions so the young people are withdrawn during this time to complete interventions.

Deeya: They are really motivated to do well. During the breakfast clubs and the PDT, I give them highest streaks rewards like chocolates and postcards, so that also helps with their motivation. During the PDT, I will have a look at the minutes that they have achieved in the past week and multiple students are getting above 200 minutes in the week which is incredible! They are so motivated to achieve a high number of minutes each week.

We also have Lexia prefects in Year 11 who come and help in the sessions during PDT that are incredibly supportive. They help with giving out headphones and making sure that the biscuits are given out while I take the register. They help make that session run really smoothly. The students come in and sit down immediately. They genuinely really enjoy it.

Describe the impact that Lexia has had on your pupils. Have you noticed a positive change in their motivation to succeed in literacy? 

Emily: Lexia forms part of a very broad package of support that we offer. We had our reading meeting this week and there are 8 or 9 of us around a table sharing information and Lexia forms one critical part of that. For me, it’s a safety net. It catches everybody regardless of whatever other interventions are happening. At the start of the year, I review the data and I can clearly see a correlation between a child’s engagement with Lexia, the minutes and units gained, and the reading progress over the year. There are several case studies that we have had within our school, particularly with disadvantaged students, with one student making nearly 4 years progress in her reading age!

In terms of SEN outcomes as well; very strong. I think as a school we have had a 20% uplift in students reaching the expected benchmark for reading last year as a result of the suite of interventions, including Lexia, we have put in place.

I think for me, as a leader, I don’t teach Key Stage 3 that much, but of those 60-70 target students in Year 7, I know them really well because of Lexia. Because they have had that licence and we’ve had those interactions, I know their reading profile and where they placed in the Auto Placement. It’s really powerful as a leader. There is a lot of positive impact.

We find that a lot of readers may be positioned as potentially having quite low motivation from never being successful with reading. We position them as the most successful people in the room. It’s often the weakest readers that have really bought into it. It’s accessible. So, for the first time in potentially across all of primary school and into secondary school, they are successful at something that they haven’t been successful at before, and that’s incredibly motivating! You can start to see those sparks on intrinsic motivation starting now. You see them

Deeya: I am a Year 7 form tutor and teacher of a different Year 7 class, so I have lots of positive interactions with Year 7. Having those students pass me in the corridor or in the playground, they will ask me ‘Do we have Lexia today?’, even if it is not our timetabled Lexia day. I have been very impressed with the continuous motivation that they want to do Lexia outside of school.

They will come up to me and tell me that they are trying to beat their highest streak or pass their highest number of minutes. It’s had a really positive impact on their motivation. I’ve even had a few students ask me if they can join Lexia just because they have heard about the positive impact of it from their friends. I don’t think the students view it as an intervention and I think it’s to do with the way that it is packaged.

Can you give an example of a Lexia success that sticks out to you?

Emily: We have had one young man who was in our first cohort of Lexia and he was placed in the foundational level for every stand. He graduated from Lexia at the end of last year. He is on the SEN register and has additional needs and ASD but Lexia was a really safe and structured part of his day. It really supported him with his reading and feeling successful in this area. Now that he’s finished the program and in Key Stage 4, he saying to me that he wishes that he could do Lexia again and he really misses that part of his day.

I think, particularly for children with additional needs, it provides that routine, that structure, that safety and that success. I think that’s really helpful for him.

Deeya: We have just started the Year 7 cohort for this year and some of the students started off a bit unsure about the program. Now we are a few weeks in, they are so positive around it. They are coming to breakfast club and additional sessions in the middle of the day, they are completing sessions and home and getting certificates already. I think that positive turn around bodes well for the end of the year where we will probably have some more success stories to share!

How have you used rewards to motivate and celebrate success on the Lexia program?

Emily: We have a rewards pyramid structure. First, we have weekly rewards such as a biscuit for being logged in with your headphones on and, when the student achieve over 90 minutes, they will get a chocolate. We also give out Lexia postcards and prizes and positive praise, making sure that the students are praised across the school.

We then have termly awards, like last year, when we noticed that the students were completing a lot of using in the Word Study and Comprehension strands but the Grammar units were behind anything else. So, we had a Grammar challenge over the holidays and the person that completed the most Grammar units over the half term holidays won a £20 Amazon voucher. We normally set them for the holidays because we want the children to keep practising over the break and it’s a great way to connect with home. We saw a massive uplift in the students completing Grammar units and the prize was given out in assembly. It’s a win-win! We have a few termly initiatives like this, usually a £10-20 Amazon voucher and, if students complete 1000 minutes over the term, they are entered into a raffle.

We also have end of year rewards trips. Last year, we took all our Lexia graduates on a trip to the cinema. It is just around the corner from our school. Tickets only cost around £3 per child so it was fairly cheap but it was really motivating for all of them to try and finish the program so they could automatically come. We also took some of our high-engagers too so if you were in the top 30 to either complete the program or to have the most minutes on Lexia, you got to come out of school for the afternoon. We would walk them to the cinema, give them some popcorn and watch the film. It’s a really lovely way to end the year and a positive way to celebrate their hard work and effort persisting with something and carrying on. I think its really powerful.

I think it’s that extrinsic motivation that you need to get them to buy in at the beginning. But then, I think they start to see the benefits for themselves. They can position themselves as a better reader. Eventually, you want to move away from the biscuits and postcards and you want them just to feel more positive about reading and to want to read more.

How useful have you found the myLexia reports in terms of demonstrating progression and informing planning?

Emily: Reading is the key to the curriculum, and it is very high on the agenda. I will report myLexia data to governors so the governors are aware of Lexia in school. Deeya is really good at communicating progress, particularly with those most critical students, with SLT so that we know who the top achievers are.

Deeya: In the Lexia sessions, I have myLexia open on my computer so I can see each group and their usage and minutes. I sort them from highest to lowest so I can congratulate the high-achievers and then and award their chocolates. Equally, I look at the bottom of the list which can highlight who is not engaging as well. It’s helpful to see and know who to speak to and have conversation about why that might be. Maybe they are lacking motivation or maybe they are not able to access Lexia at home due to a technical issue. It’s important data to see so that I can start the conversation and provide support. We also use the usage reports to see the units and minutes for a custom date range over the summer holidays.

Emily: It’s a really useful feature for monitoring engagement. For me, the Skills Status reports are really helpful for me in terms of measuring impact and who is engaging most across the year. We have also be able to see if Year 7 haven’t been moving forward with Grammar and that has told us we need to do a Grammar challenge. Often, I have it open on my phone and if I’m talking to young people around school I can pull up their name on myLexia and have a look at how many minutes they have done that week and congratulate them. It’s a very user-friendly portal, quite easy to navigate around.

It’s also easy to move licenses in and out and set up classes. I think our next step will be to share the platform with more teachers so they can monitor progress with their classes a little bit more. It’s handy to assign staff to each of their classes so they can see who in their class are engaging with Lexia and what their progress is like.

Deeya: When I do interventions one-to-one with students, its really helpful for me to see. I print off the resources so I can have them in front of us when we go through it. The list of who has repeated units and who is struggling is helpful, especially when I see students appearing on it more than once.

What main piece of advice would you give to a school that was just getting started with Lexia?

Deeya: I wasn’t involved in the initial set up of Lexia like Emily was, but I think that the running of Lexia over the summer holidays is something that has really worked for the cohort this year, especially with starting their engagement in the program early. I think that is something that a school should do if they want to be successful with it and have the cohort be so positive with it: Get started as early as possible.

Emily: If you can’t and you do not know your Year 6’s before they start, I think getting parental engagement and getting the parents on board is really helpful. Get the parents in and get them to look at it. Deeya held an amazing virtual workshop on Zoom for our parents. We sent links to the parents so if they couldn’t come in over the summer holidays, we texted out a link and they could join virtually. We recorded the meeting with all the relevant information like how they could use it, how it worked and the timetabling and all the operational things and then we stopped the recording and had a Q&A. We then emailed that recording to all the parents that couldn’t come so they had all the relevant information. That’s something that all schools could do.

We also had a ‘Welcome to Year 7’ evening this week and we normally have Lexia as part of that. I think parents really want something tangible that they can do at home to support them, especially with English. This is something that is tangible. They can see that it’s happening in front of them and that is the way they can support, just by giving them access. I think that’s one way to be successful with the program, by getting that parental buy-in.

What feedback have you had from your Lexia pupils?

Deeya: It’s been overwhelmingly positive. I’m probably sounding repetitive but they just love it. They associate the sessions with so much positivity and warmth and they look forward to coming. Even the students that are hesitating at first to come to the sessions because of the potential stigma around it. I think they have overcome that and now most of Year 7 see the session as very, very positive.

I’ve had a few students ask to join Lexia just because they have heard from their friends about the positive impact of it. That obviously means that it is having a positive impact on their motivation. It’s not really seen as an intervention. It’s seen as a group of people who want to succeed and do well.