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Children are growing up in a time of exponential change, but what fundamentally matters, what always remains the same is that to read and comprehend anything deeply requires us to slow down and focus with sustained interest and involvement.
against passive engagement with screens. Given that nine children in an average classroom of 30 are living in poverty (Sutton Trust: 2025), this continues to be a focus for CLPE in our work to support schools to develop an English curriculum that enables children to thrive in their journey to becoming literate. In the Foreword to our book, The Power of a Rich Reading Classroom (CLPE: 2021), Aiden Chambers begins: “Everything changes, except what fundamentally matters, which always remains the same.”
He goes on to share how, since print began, we have always been concerned with the best method for teaching reading and how we help children become keen readers and why being literate matters. Even in 1982, Margaret Meek (1982:15) observed how we ‘read’ not just the printed word on paper and on screen but a wide range of visual and symbolic imagery and that being literate relies on drawing this reading knowledge and experience together to make and create new meanings.
Spring-Summer 2026
Children are growing up in a time of exponential change, but what fundamentally matters, what always remains the same is that to read and comprehend anything deeply requires us to slow down and focus with sustained interest and involvement. Anyone interested in child development will want to ensure that they prioritise and develop in children the ability and willingness to think critically, independently and with concentration. In other words, to develop cognitive patience. The cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf first linked this concept to deep reading (Wolf: 2018) and argued that there is a reciprocal relationship between extended reading and cognitive patience. In a virtuous circle, cognitive patience is required for deep reading of longer form texts, such as novels, and the very act of doing so develops cognitive patience.
Successful and proven approaches: CLPE has long understood and been able to evidence the impact of working with high-quality books in depth and
over a sustained period in the classroom. This is at the heart of our programme, The Power of Reading (
https://clpe.org.uk/ teaching-resources/english-curriculum-maps), in which teachers read aloud and unfold a carefully chosen book over weeks, making meaning together through a range of creative approaches, proven to deepen comprehension.
Fundamentally, The Power of Reading is a rich and inclusive literacy curriculum in which reading and writing as social activities are fully explored and exploited with increased opportunities for sustained talk and interaction.
The programme has been independently evaluated and proven to significantly close the attainment gap between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils, raising engagement and attainment for all pupils, including those who may be educationally vulnerable (Doherty: 2019). It builds on a wealth of research to bring evidence-based teaching approaches into the classroom, including:
l Reading aloud a range of literary PEN&INC. 33
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