Primary teachers hired to teach Glasgow secondary pupils to read

Primary school teachers have been hired to work in Glasgow's high schools to address the growing number of new starts who are unable to read properly.

The primary teachers run intensive catch-up classes for first year secondary school pupils without basic literacy skills.

Glasgow's education director, John McGhee, said fixing the problem was a "moral imperative".

Scotland's ranking in the Pisa international education study will be published on Tuesday but previous reports have suggested a long-term decline in reading standards.

There are currently primary qualified teaching staff working in 14 of Glasgow's 30 secondary schools to improve literacy and numeracy standards.

The majority of children who are getting support as part of the project have English as a first language.

Katrina Crickett does the role at St Andrew's High School and utilises the systematic synthetic phonics method of matching letters and sounds to help pupils, who can be taught to read in a matter of months.

She explained: "Some young people when they're coming in, they can't read.

"They've got reading ages of maybe five or six-years-old - they can't recognise basic words that we take for granted.

"They can't break those words down and sound them out to work out what they mean."

Katrina says her maximum class size of 15 - nearly half the size of some of the primary school classes she used to teach - allows her to focus on getting pupils up to speed.

She added: "It's making a difference, being able to strip it back and actually sit with them and find out what it is they don't like about reading and working on that.

"It's actually quite disheartening when they come to me because they have so much passion and so much knowledge, but they just don't have the confidence to show that.

"So a big part of my job is to give them the tools and confidence to access the rest of the curriculum."

The number of pupils reaching expected levels of literacy in Scotland's schools are at a record high.

But despite this the latest data shows one in four primary school-age children across the country are still struggling with basic literacy skills.

In Glasgow, 68% of P1,P4 and P7 pupils were achieving the expected levels of literacy in 2024/25 - the joint lowest rate in Scotland.

The man tasked with improving this is John McGhee, who hired a primary school teacher to work on literacy levels in his previous role as headteacher of St Andrew's High School.

He said: "As a headteacher I was seeing, increasingly, a number of young people coming in with very basic literacy skills - some young people who simply couldn't read.

"There is no way, as a moral imperative, that we should have young people leaving school not able to read.

"Our success as a country will be largely dependent on the skills of young people leaving our schools.

"My sense of it is we kind of lost touch a bit with some of the basics."

McGhee added: "Our target is that all young people in Glasgow, by the time they leave primary school, will have a minimum reading age of about nine-and-a-half.

"It's a very high target but to set it means they can access most of the literacy that they need to access an adult life."

The Pisa report due to be published on Tuesday measures education standards among more than 700,000 15-year-olds worldwide.

The last report, published in 2023, showed a long-term decline in Scotland's performance in reading, maths and science.

But the Pisa study is just one way of measuring standards in Scotland's high schools.

Last month's annual exam results showed pass rates have increased, with the pass rate for Highers up 0.8% to 76.7% while Advanced Highers rose by 0.9% to 77.6%.