Sharing The Final Year with a whole-year group

One year group, one book, one librarian: Reading The Final Year with my whole Year 7 cohort. 

School librarian Alice Leggatt shares the impact that reading an entire book had on one Year 7 group - and explains why she will be repeating the experiment with her transition students this year.

"I highly recommend reading a whole book all the way through to students, with no expectations
of them other than to sink into a good story and chat about their thoughts."

 

I had been the librarian at Oaks Park High School for a year and a half when I decided that my primary focus for the remainder of the term was to read my Year 7 students a whole book.  It sounds like a ridiculously simple thing to focus on, a 'back-to-basics' exercise I pulled out the air, but it was the result of careful consideration, observation and planning.

For context, I work in a mixed sex comprehensive secondary school in South West London, with a hugely diverse student population and a large number of children with special educational needs (the school houses the largest specialist Autism base in a mainstream school in the UK).  I manage our vibrant library with the support of our Library Assistant, and I teach library lessons to Years 7, 8 and 9 alongside running study sessions for the older year groups.  I see Year 7 once every two weeks (one out of every eight English lessons), and it is this year group who get the most input from me, the idea being that we embed use of the library early on in their school careers.

The main focus of my work in library lessons is to encourage reading for pleasure and information; I link our library books to elements of the wider curriculum and to cultural and world events, with lessons divided into time reading together, time responding creatively and time reading independently and browsing books.  The lessons give me a valuable window into student reading habits and allow me to respond quickly to interests and trends in reading.

Mid-way through this year, and as a result of discussions with students, I became aware that there were many students (about 60% of the group) who had not read a book all the way through since they started with us in Year 7.  Some of them told me that they had never done so.  This is always to be expected to an extent - not all students are keen readers - but it was more pronounced with this cohort.  The reasons they gave for this were varied, ranging from 'reading's boring' to 'I can't find a book I like' to 'our teacher never got time to finish the book' (this in relation to primary school class reads).  However, the most common response I got was that students were selecting and starting books but were abandoning them in the first few chapters as they couldn't concentrate on them or couldn't 'stay in' the story.  Students themselves often cited their phones as a reason for distraction, and all said that books took too long to get 'to the good bits'.

The huge value of reading fiction on mental health, brain development and critical thinking does not need to be reiterated here (so many fantastic, in depth studies are available elsewhere), suffice to say that trying to prove to my struggling readers that it was possible for them to enjoy a story all the way through became an extremely urgent priority.  After a lot of thought on how best to approach this I settled on reading the same book from start to finish to the whole of our Year 7 cohort.  I wanted them to have the experience of sharing a story together, of reacting to it as a group and to feeling that sense of accomplishment readers get when they finish a book.

The book I chose, after long consideration, was Matt Goodfellow's verse novel The Final Year  (Otter-Barry Books, 2023), which recounts 11-year-old Nate's experiences during Year 6. It was newly published, so students were unlikely to have already read it; its verse format gave it an immediacy and pace that I knew my 'get to the good bits' students would appreciate; and the narrative, characters and setting were supremely relatable.  The wonderful illustrations by Joe Todd-Stanton were also important - I was mindful that the most popular books in our library are graphic novels, and that there needed to be a strong visual element to our lessons as many students prefer this way of taking in stories (I use a visualizer to show the illustrated pages).

Before I started reading the book with them, I ran an introductory lesson explaining why we were doing this and what I was hoping we would all get out of it.  I showed images from a University of Cambridge research project which scanned the brains of readers and non-readers and beautifully highlights how reading 'lights up' many disparate parts of the brain, and I talked about my own journey as a late-developing reader as I didn't want students to feel that they were being judged in any way.  I also reestablished boundaries for reading as a class (no talking when I was reading, hands up, listen to others etc.), and explained that it would just be me reading aloud, as I wanted the class to be able to relax into the story rather than anxiously awaiting their turn to speak (this also allowed for effective oracy modelling).

From the first page of The Final Year, I felt something change in my classes.  The story and the language were not what they had been expecting when I told them that this was a book written through poems - the language sounded the way they spoke, the characters did things they had done and felt in ways they had felt. There was a palpable sense of surprise followed by interest, and by the second lesson I no longer had to sell the idea of reading a whole book at all.

The Year 6 setting allowed us endless avenues of discussion - what had my classes' residential trips been like?  Had they ever had a teacher like Mr Joshua?  Were they missing primary school in any way?  -  and the realistic presentation of friendship and bullying issues in the book prompted some truly thoughtful reflection.  Discussion time was essential and built into the lessons, giving time for the story to 'breathe'.  Movement breaks and the 'right to fidget' (draw/play with plasticine etc. as long as it was quiet and not distracting to others) were also a core element, with the more relaxed mood of the lessons helping to make the story accessible to the whole range of students, from top sets to nurture groups.

My absolute favourite moment with all my classes was reading the poem which describes the sudden rush to hospital of Nate's youngest brother, Dylan.  The abrupt change of pace, the repetition and the breathlessness of it was a joy to read aloud, and every time I looked up into the shocked, wide-eyed faces of my students I knew that my gamble had paid off and that they really were engaged.  The cries of students of 'Miss you CAN'T stop there!' were a particular joy.

With twelve Year 7 classes, one librarian, one copy of the book and bi-weekly classes, the whole project was no mean feat and took us nearly a term to complete, but it was thoroughly worth the effort and my often-hoarse voice!  When we had finished reading we created a display for the book, with every student writing down one reflection on a paper feather to make up a copy of Nate's wings from the book's front cover.  These reflections were so thoughtful, with students writing that they loved the book because they had struggled with anger issues like Nate; that Dylan's Spidey-man obsession reminded them of their own little brother and they always complain about him but love him really, that it was good to read a book that showed kids 'like we really are'.  Nearly all of the responses mentioned emotions in some way.

As well as creating the display, we also wrote a poem as a class, adapting the opening poem in the book to suit our setting.  I asked students to really think about their first day in Year 7, and then we crowd-sourced their ideas.  I shared the resulting poems with other staff who, like me, were moved to have a sudden, clear insight into what our school can look and feel like through the eyes of new students.  As an added benefit, many students said that they would never have written poetry before reading The Final Year, but that they now felt more confident to try something creative.  We also saw an uptick in loans of David Almond's Skellig, which Nate relates to throughout the story.

Next year I will be moving this project to the first term as it fits so well in to those challenging, exciting, overwhelming transition months.  Our Year 7s often arrive full of enthusiasm for books and reading, having been offered a broad range of fantastic middle grade books in primary school, but we see this wane as they move up through the school and new distractions take over.  I want to try and maintain that enthusiasm, to link primary to secondary and to prove that the love of a good story doesn't have to end, that there are even more amazing books waiting to be discovered on our library shelves, and that books can grow with them and help them in so many ways.  Matt Goodfellow recently announced that there will be a sequel to The Final Year, called The First Year, focusing on Nate's experience in Year 7 - it's almost too perfect!

If it is at all possible to achieve in your secondary school, I highly recommend reading a whole book all the way through to students, with no expectations of them other than to sink into a good story and chat about their thoughts. I hope that my current Year 7 students will remember the experience we all shared, will keep reading, and will greet Nate as an old friend if they encounter him again.

Do you have a reading initiative you'd love to share with other schools?  We'd love to hear about it!   In the first instance, please send a brief paragraph summary to [email protected].