My reading groups have turned into five separate lessons

Yes, in Prep and Year 1 the code lesson is whole class. And no, the groups that follow are not a second phonics lesson running beside it.

Everyone gets the same explicit teaching of the same sounds, from you, at the same time. The groups afterwards are practice of what you just taught, plus a real catch-up dose for the students your screening flagged. Grattan puts that catch-up need at about 20 per cent of students even in a classroom that teaches reading well, and splits it: roughly 15 per cent taught in a small group, roughly 5 per cent needing intensive one-to-one support. Extra instruction for a handful of children, then, not for all 24.

Which answers the other thing everyone types under those rotation photos, the one about how much planning it must take. You are not writing five plans. You write one, then decide who needs longer at it, who needs an adult beside them, and who is ready to read it on their own.

The structure underneath it

Grattan's Reading Guarantee and AERO describe the same three-tier shape, and AERO is clear that the tiers above the classroom supplement core teaching rather than replace it. Grattan's line on catch-up is the one worth pinning above your planning book: the instruction should "support work done in the classroom, rather than be a substitute for classroom teaching".

Two things about that 20 per cent before you plan around it. Grattan takes the figure from the international tiered-support research rather than an Australian headcount, and the report is about catch-up support, not about how a Prep classroom runs its groups. Nothing in it tells you what your rotation should look like. What follows is our read of the evidence sitting around it.

And look at where that evidence sits. Grattan reproduces the US practice-guide ratings, and the recommendation to differentiate classroom reading instruction by students' current reading levels carries a low rating. The recommendation to run targeted small-group teaching for students who fall below a screening benchmark carries a strong one. Splitting the class lesson into streams is the weakly supported half. The catch-up group is the well supported half.

The daily class lesson is also policy now, not preference. Victorian government schools must deliver at least 25 minutes of systematic synthetic phonics a day in Foundation to Year 2, and Queensland's reading commitment expects reading taught every day in every classroom. Neither prescribes rotations.

The part of the rotation worth dropping

Four pieces of the standard rotation: levelled and predictable texts, the guessing prompts that travel with them, running records as the thing that sets the levels, and streaming the groups by level.

Grattan names levelled and predictable texts as whole-language inheritance and recommends schools stop using or repurpose them, with early-years predictable texts not worth repurposing at all. The v9 Australian Curriculum removed the cueing language and the reference to predictable texts. If the wider shift is what you are after, we have written up the Science of Reading version of it.

Five from Five gives the test you can run on your own rotation board in ten seconds. If a card tells a child to skip the word and come back, look at the picture, or try a word that makes sense, that is the three-cueing model sitting inside your groups. Tunmer and colleagues found it works against weaker readers specifically, because it trains the habits poor readers already have.

Running records usually set the levels, and Grattan is direct about them too: aligned with whole language, silent on phonological awareness, phonics and fluency, and inclined to over-identify students as at risk. A child who reads small for little is credited with a strategy rather than marked wrong, so the record cannot tell you why the child is stuck.

Then the grouping itself. Evidence for Learning rates within-class achievement grouping at +2 months overall on very limited evidence, and the studies measuring literacy outcomes found no difference on average. The positive months are in maths. It also warns that low-achieving students can end up with lower expectations placed on them and less engagement.

A rotation where every group reads the code you taught

Practice text comes from the sounds the class has already been taught, plus the heart words you have pre-taught. That single rule fixes most of what goes wrong at the far tables.

Rosenshine's success-rate work puts guided practice at roughly 80 per cent accuracy, and independent practice higher, approaching 95 per cent. The conventional bands say the same thing in text terms: 98 to 100 per cent accuracy is independent reading, below 95 per cent is frustration, and Allington's finding is that off-task behaviour and negative attitudes climb at frustration level. A station a child works at with no adult is independent practice by definition, so the text there has to be close to errorless. Unseen levelled text is not, and we have set out which book does which job separately. For the tables with no adult, there is a short list of routines Prep and Year 1 can run on their own.

Cognitive load is the other half of it. Working memory holds around four chunks, and for young children who have not built chunking strategies the working limit can be two or three novel items. Every unfamiliar grapheme held during blending takes a slot. Run five unrelated activities at once and the switching costs come straight out of the decoding the rotation was meant to practise.

What earns its place at those tables is re-reading. The same short decodable text, a few times through, with someone to model and correct: Prep texts of 30 to 60 words, Year 1 around 60 to 120, short enough that a full read takes a couple of minutes. We have written up the six-minutes-a-day version of this already, so the short version here is that assisted beats unassisted. Teacher, peer, parent or a recording, any model beats none.

One plan, different amounts of it

The NSW explicit teaching guidance gives the cleanest decision rule going. Many students showing the same error means reteach it to the whole class. A few means targeted small-group or one-to-one scaffolding. And what varies between students in that guidance is mostly the level of scaffolding and the verbal prompts, telling, asking or reminding, which is withdrawn as success goes up. The sequence stays the same for everyone.

That is most of the planning answer. Your groups differ by how much practice they get and how much adult support sits next to them. The catch-up group may also go back over earlier code it missed, say the short vowels a child is still mixing up, while the rest of the class practises this week's digraph. That is reteaching on the same ladder, not a separate programme.

Two things worth knowing before you set the group sizes. Shanahan's read of the research is that teachers cover more content teaching the whole class, and once you count transitions, small-group time loses its edge over the same minutes spent whole class, which is why groups are best saved for reteaching identified gaps. And small group tuition is worth +4 months at two to five students, with effectiveness falling away noticeably above six or seven. Four groups of six with an adult on each is a lot of adults for a structure the evidence does not back.

Where those adults go matters as well. Teaching assistants delivering a structured intervention they have been trained in show a solid benefit; the same assistants used as general classroom support typically show none. Put your trained adult on the catch-up group, and take that group yourself where you can. If the group is running and still not shifting, count the sessions before you change the programme.

On the "are you just changing bits each week" question: yes, and that is the design working. The structure holds, the sounds and the text change. Grattan's teacher survey found the typical full-time teacher spends six hours a week sourcing and creating materials, and teachers with access to a shared bank of quality materials spend three hours less. Those hours are the ones a five-track rotation eats.

Working out who is in the catch-up group

Screen the whole class, at least twice a year across Prep to Year 2, and follow up with diagnostic testing only for the students the screen flags. That is the order Grattan sets out, and it means you are not assessing 24 children in depth to find four. If you are unsure which of your tests does which job, here is how to tell a screener from a diagnostic.

Use what you already have. If you have Year 1 check papers, they will tell you which sounds to reteach first once you read them by sound instead of by score. Dictation and your own running notes from the class lesson do the same job in Prep.

Then keep the group moving. Churchill Primary, a regional Victorian school Grattan profiles, groups junior students by decoding ability and reassesses fortnightly to shift students between groups. It had dropped its hour-long workshop with cueing strategies and open independent reading, which the school describes as chaotic, in favour of whole-class explicit teaching with one or two sound-letter combinations a week. In 2016 nearly half of Year 3 and 65 per cent of Year 5 sat below the national minimum standard in reading. By 2021 no student did, and fewer students needed catch-up at all.

Timing counts too. A US study of nearly 200 students found Year 1 and Year 2 students given catch-up help on word reading progressed twice as fast as students who got the same help in Year 3. Prep and Year 1 is the cheap end of this work.

Four sets of practice text off one lesson

The slow part is the practice text: four sets off one lesson, every word decodable against the sounds your class has been taught. Phonicspal does that part. It reads your progression, so the text at every table comes out of the code you have taught, in whatever sequence your school follows, with the amount of support as the only thing you change between groups. Have a look at how the decodable side works.

Same lesson for the whole room, then more of it for the group your screening flagged. That is the structure the evidence keeps landing on.

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Figures above are published by the Grattan Institute, Evidence for Learning, and the NSW, Victorian and Queensland education departments.