Video · Teachers Media
Improving Boys Literacy In Wales Barry Comprehensive School
Boys' underperformance in literacy — particularly writing — has been one of the most persistent patterns in UK education data. Schools that have made ground on it tend to combine three things: a genuinely broad reading diet, high-status writing tasks with real audiences, and a whole-school insistence that talk is the foundation of writing.
About this video
The literacy attainment gap between boys and girls is well-documented across UK national assessments — persistent at KS2, sharper at GCSE English Language and Literature. It isn't universal (individual boys and girls fall right across the spectrum) but at the population level the pattern has held for decades. The interesting question is what the schools that have narrowed it are doing differently.
One consistent finding: those schools reject the idea that boys need "boy-friendly" books — usually a euphemism for a narrower diet of action stories or non-fiction. What actually shifts engagement tends to be the opposite: broadening what counts as literature, taking pupils' cultural interests seriously, and modelling the pleasure of reading as something adults visibly do. Whole-school reading time, staff reading recommendations displayed publicly, and reading aloud in secondary lessons all appear repeatedly in the case-study evidence.
On writing, the pattern is about purpose and audience. Writing to a real recipient (a letter to a business, a pitch to a local councillor, a review for a genuine publication) shifts pupils' investment in a way that "write a persuasive letter" never quite does. Underneath that sits a lot of oracy: high-quality talk, structured discussion, and time to rehearse ideas out loud before committing them to paper.
What the evidence points to
- A visible reading culture. Staff reading recommendations, book chats, DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) time, and reading aloud beyond primary.
- Talk as the foundation of writing. Structured oracy — talk partners, group discussion, presentational talk — before pupils are asked to write extended pieces.
- Purpose and audience. Writing tasks with genuine recipients, not just the teacher's marking pen.
- High-quality models. Sharing strong examples of writing (from published authors and from pupils) and analysing what makes them work.
- Vocabulary as everyone's job. Explicit vocabulary teaching across all subjects, not just English.
Discussion prompts
- If you asked ten boys in your school which teacher makes them enjoy reading, would you get ten different answers, or would the same names come up? What are those teachers doing?
- How often do the boys in your class get to write for someone other than you?
- What would it take for oracy — structured talk — to be treated as seriously as writing in your subject?
Try this in your classroom
- Ask five boys to name the last book they finished. If most can't, that's your starting point — a reading diet, not a writing intervention.
- On the next extended writing task, name a real audience: another class, a local business, the school website. Watch what changes in the quality of the drafts.
- Build in five minutes of structured talk (talk partners with clear roles) before any extended writing task for a term. Notice what pupils are able to write that they weren't able to write before.