Westfield Primary School
We talked to Vicki Bowery, Deputy Head at Westfield Primary School (in Radstock, with 374 on roll), about the impact of Pageticker on reading.
At a Glance:
92% of parents logging reading weekly
295 average books completed weekly
93% of children have written a book review
“One parent said ‘It’s easier to find your phone than a pen!’”
“Older children use it on their own devices”
“It’s developed a whole school community feel for reading”
What was the main reason that you signed up to Pageticker?
Reading is a huge focus in every school and we wanted to make sure that we were monitoring how much children were reading for pleasure and reading their phonics books outside school. We thought having less paper, and less reading diaries to get lost, was just easier to manage.
How easy was Pageticker to implement?
Really easy. I asked for parental feedback to start - one said "it's easier to find your phone than a pen" which validated my feeling that it would help parents and carers record reading more quickly. Because it syncs with our MIS system, the office staff felt that side of it was really seamless. We've got a lot of children who either live between two households or have grandma or grandad active in their reading: we generated extra codes for them so we weren't putting the onus on one person to record everything. The uptake was really quick.
How would you describe the impact of Pageticker for pupils within school?
We talk a lot about the importance of reading, so our children know that it’s the gateway to everything across the curriculum. We have an expectation that children read four times a week, and monitoring this on one screen is much more time efficient than with 30 paper reading diaries. With Pageticker it’s quicker for parents to be able to log reading, mark accuracy, and spot difficult words - our parents are using that really well. For teachers it’s easy to see, on one page you're recognising each individual’s reading in a class. It takes two seconds to go down, read the comments and quickly give them a heart or comment back. So the communication between home and school is really effective.
Children also really like having the app, and the older children are using it on their own devices - they're quite involved in the reading-for-pleasure process. It's developed a real whole school community feel for reading.
Has Pageticker been cost effective?
Yes. When we looked at the cost of our reading diaries, we were making a bit of a saving using Pageticker. So from a monetary side, where you're always trying to juggle finances, it just felt really good to try.