Glossary

Standard Age Score.

Use this to understand how your students are performing against the standardised sample.

It is important to understand that scores between 89 - 111 are within the average range and that if a student scores within this range on each NGRT assessment then they are performing as expected for their age.

Stanine or ‘standard nine’.

This breaks the SAS scores into nine groups to make the group level scores easier to analyse.

Use stanines to group students across a cohort when planning in next steps and monitoring which students are in line, below or above age related expectations.

The NGRT assessment is broken into two parts: Sentence Completion and Passage Comprehension – you will get a stanine for both parts. We have based the Reading Support Quadrant on this.

Reading age demonstrates a student’s ability in terms of the average of others at that age.

They are derived from the raw score at different age points.

Reading Ages tell us about the reading ability of a single child and a single point in time.

They are not useful when monitoring progress as the rate learners progress with their reading varies, meaning you cannot genuinely report monthly progress. A child at age 6 will expect to progress at a much faster rate than a child aged 12 for example.

National Percentile Rank.

The NPR ranks a learner’s performance against others in the representative sample and is used to show the percentage of individuals from within that sample, who scored equal to, or less than the learner’s particular score.

A student with an NPR of 50 means they are scoring as positively as 50% of the standardised national sample.

FAQs

Effective provision should be well-matched to a student's individual strengths and challenges. The appropriate next steps for one student may be very different to another – colleagues should adjust, or 'graduate' provision in order to personalise adaptations and/or interventions to suit their needs. In some settings this may be referred to with other terminology such as 'waves' or 'tiers' of support (for example) – the intentions are the same.

Prior to the implementation of adjustments or interventions it is helpful to determine the anticipated outcomes of such support and how these outcomes might be measured. In some instances, these may be monitored by way of teacher observations or skills development, but in others this could involve pre- and post-intervention testing which might include the use of standardised tests. NGRT can be used termly, and a progress report can be used to analyse impact. Similarly, YARC (Forms A & B) could be used to provide a detailed profile before and after the intervention.

Evidence-based interventions are used to help students close gaps and to improve skills in reading. In many cases these interventions have the desired outcomes, leading to students being back on track with their peers. However, for some students, even a skilfully delivered intervention may not help them to overcome specific challenges – more specialist support may be required. We might describe these students as 'resistant' to intervention.

Identifying barriers to learning is a process that takes time and requires a range of information and data (both qualitative and quantitative) to build a detailed profile of need. We would recommend talking with as many stakeholders as possible to consider context when making decisions related to a student's strengths and challenges and to determine the most appropriate screener(s) to use to investigate these. The needs of each student (and school) will be different—establish if there are particular types of needs that are common within your setting and prioritise these as a place to start.

Kaia

SC 4 / PC 6+

Growing independent reader. Vocabulary and syntax is weaker compared to comprehension skills.

This is Kaia. She is a reader who is growing in independence. The difference between her word reading (SC) and comprehension (PC) suggests she has a ‘spikey profile’ (a discrepancy of more than two stanines). This discrepancy may be affecting her ability to understand and use language to her full potential. She will need to be supported in her word reading in order to improve her fluency and overall understanding of a text. She may choose texts that are too 'easy' for her in order to stay in her 'comfort zone'. She will need to be exposed to high quality texts and be supported through explicit vocabulary instruction in order to develop her reading skills further and balance her profile.

Key Questions

Does Kaia engage in discussion in lessons?
How can she be supported in making links between words i.e. understanding synonyms, antonyms, roots, etymology?
Do you have concerns about decoding?
Do you have specific concerns about learning difficulties?
Does Kaia have access to high quality, age-appropriate texts both in school and at home?
Do you know of any hearing difficulties which may impede her word reading?

Next steps

You need to:

Understand her level of vocabulary awareness
Explore her literacy skills versus her cognitive abilities
Work with colleagues so that support is aligned, and further investigation is considered.

Kaia may need:

Vocabulary support - this could be through high quality teaching rather than an intervention
Teachers to expose Kaia to high-quality Tier 2 and 3 vocabulary
Read age-appropriate texts both in school and at home

SEND Guide >

< Back to support quadrant

*These profiles are for illustrative purposes and have been created to help introduce just some of the varied learner profiles your NGRT data may show you, and to help support personalised learning. The profiles from your own NGRT data may share some similarities with the example profiles but it is important to consider each learner individually.

Anna

Dhanesh

Michel

Charlotte

Kaia

Anisha

Muhammed

Finn

Rhian

Sam

Senior Leadership Team - School Groups

Reading / Literacy Leader

Teacher

SEND Leaders

Students

SAS

Stanine

Reading Age

NPR

What is a Graduated Response Model?

How can I review the impact of intervention?

What does it mean if a student is ‘resistant’ to intervention?

What factors should I consider when exploring the SEND guide?

Kaia

Key Questions

Next steps

You need to:

Kaia may need: