What seven ‘Breakthrough’ schools tell us about early literacy and the disadvantage gap

By FFT Education

Our new report shows that a coherent and practical focus on reading from the earliest stages in primary school is instrumental in improving pupil attainment and tackling the disadvantage gap.

For this report, we case-studied seven schools who consistently outperform the national average and where pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds excel.

In each of these schools we visited, at least 30 per cent of the cohort was eligible for free school meals. The school’s overall Key Stage 2 attainment in reading, writing and maths had been consistently high across 2023, 2024 and 2025 and they had outperformed the national average.

Nationally, only 46 per cent of disadvantaged pupils reach age-related expectations in reading, writing and maths, yet in all of these seven schools that figure was at least 73 per cent and in some schools even higher, peaking at 94 per cent.

As part of these visits, we sought to understand each school’s approach to reading, in order to consider how this success could be replicated in other schools across the country.

We are presenting a series of five learnings for schools:

There was agreement across all school leaders about how pivotal early years and nurseries were for literacy development.
School leaders identified the importance of and how they prioritised teaching reading skills through phonics in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2.
No school identified phonics as sufficient on its own, instead coupling it with reading practice and literacy lessons to develop reading fluency, comprehension and oracy to support independent reading.
A whole school approach is absolutely vital to ensuring success.
Each schools’ conviction to focus on reading was driven from the school leadership.

These learnings are not a golden ticket and every school insisted that this is not about copying another school’s system. But we hope that this report provides a useful read into some clear and practical lessons that schools can take forward and apply to their individual contexts in the new school year.

You can read the full report here: Breakthrough Schools Report

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