Children, parents and staff love it! Having noticed the impacts of the first lockdown, Lexia couldn’t have come at a better time for us. As a school, we feel reassured that Lexia is supporting the reading progress of our children in school and at home.

The reports have been so valuable in highlighting specific gaps that need to be targeted and its ease of use has allowed the children to become increasingly independent in their learning. Staff are also able to track and monitor the progress of those children not in school.

To say that the children are engaged is an understatement; I have never witnessed a class of children of all abilities become so immersed in a reading program. The children love to be rewarded for their efforts and cannot wait to receive their next certificate, this also spurs on their peers too! We would not be without Lexia now.

We decided to purchase Lexia as it is a personalised reading program that the children can access at home and in school, it goes beyond simple comprehension and is developing all aspects of reading. It also means we can have an accurate picture of pupil engagement in reading at home.

Lexia has a rounded approach to reading – comprehension and skills including vocabulary development. The text’s presentation and ‘sparkly additions’ make it a truly child-friendly reading resource.

We’ve noticed changes to our students’ motivation to succeed in literacy and how are they responding to their own progression through the Lexia levels. Our students love it, there has been a truly positive response to it, so overwhelming in fact we have had to encourage some children to slow down! –  that is unheard of!!!!

Using the data dashboard makes monitoring progress really easy across the whole school, year groups, classes or at an individual level. I particularly like usage as this is a way of acknowledging effort too (this is often forgotten to be celebrated in many schools as it is difficult to truly measure)

Lexia is successful for us as we have all embraced it fully, like all good resources it is the implementation and the constant drive and push that makes them work.

Following on from the initial training session, I have found Lexia has really benefitted my students. I have been using it both with students who are in school and those who are remote learning. The students have found it easy to access both in school and at home and this has helped us to deliver and develop the key literacy skills that the students need.

From my own perspective, I have found that some of my students who lack confidence in their own ability have really engaged with Lexia and I can visibly see the improvement both in their attitude and confidence, as well as their understanding of the core elements that Lexia works on.

I have found the data analysis section to be extremely useful as it has allowed me to identify which students are in need and how to help them to progress further. This is something that will be extremely useful in terms of planning the next steps and interventions for pupils across the school.

The next step for us is to fully embed Lexia as an intervention tool across the whole school which can be used to both enhance and further develop the students’ understanding of the basic literacy skills that they need to progress in all areas of learning.

I am extremely happy with the impact that Lexia has had so far and, once it is fully embedded across the school, have no doubt that this will lead to an improvement in overall literacy standards.

Our school system was changing from middle and upper schools to now primary and secondary schools. Many Year 7’s had a low reading age, and as we had never had year 7 students before, we were not equipped to deal with this issue, hence the purchase of Lexa (Strategies).

It was soon realised that there was no one to deliver this program and if the students were to work independently, it wouldn’t be successful as there were students with a very low reading age that needed guidance and support. So, I started to support small groups of students and hold Lexia sessions for Years 7 – 10.

All of my students are now working on Lexia PowerUp with different levels of support from myself. We have half an hour of Lexia and then half an hour of shared reading with the group. Small groups are taken out of different lessons during the week with home use being encouraged, many of our parents are on board with this. We track their streaks and the students record them on the board in my room. PowerUp is great as the parents are able to track their child’s progress and be involved in their learning at home. We have found the smaller the group the better, students are proud of themselves for being able to move through the units and the levels. We think it’s great that if they are struggling with a question, they can come out of that one strand e.g., Grammar, and go into Comprehension to answer questions there until they have teacher support. We really like the video options of being able to watch the “explainer”.

PowerUp has been received very enthusiastically. Most find it more enjoyable than Strategies. They are pleased with being able to use the back button to repeat and it is a great way for them to learn from their mistakes. Now they can make use of that mistake and it can really help their learning, leaving them more motivated and confident in their reading. The change in students and their whole demeaner in school is amazing. Their behaviour is better and they are more confident in their literacy abilities. Being able to monitor their own progress and take ownership of their learning is so important and has helped build their confidence.

One student benefited massively from PowerUp during lockdown, his reading age increased by 80 months (almost 7 years’ worth of progress). He was first tested late September in year 7 and then retested start of Year 8, and was working on Lexia during the first lockdown. I’m now no longer working with this student has he no longer needs that support and can attend other lessons confidently.

Every time the students complete a unit, they got a point then the student with the most points at the end of the session gets a small treat. I also reward the student in the group whose score has improved the most. Prizes are also given out for good home use. Our students love to be congratulated and given a prize to celebrate their success. Some of them tell me that they enjoy reading and are reading more confidently and fluently now.

I use the reports every week. Our students are expected to work on Lexia for an hour at home and then during our session during the week. I check the usage report every Monday morning, the reports enable me to not just track their minutes but their progress. Our students know that I check the reports and I will reward the most successful student. I even contact parents/caregivers if students are not using the program at home, which is compulsory homework for Lexia students. The reports were a great tool during lockdown, as I was still able to monitor student usage and progress remotely, allowing me to contact parents and make them aware that their child was not working on Lexia as much as they should be but to also be able to congratulate those making progress and award them even though we were all working from home.

I am so passionate about Lexia, PowerUp is really user friendly, it doesn’t patronise the children at all. The students respond with great enthusiasm and are motivated to complete units and levels, as they want to achieve. I am extremely proud of my students and their successes!

As part of a wider literacy strategy, we were encouraged to look into Lexia PowerUp, and we are so glad we did. We initially trialled it with some of the most vulnerable pupils in Year 7 and 8 and we have been staggered by the rapid improvements they have all made. Every student in the trial group not only made rapid progress in word study, grammar and comprehension, but all of their reading ages increased significantly, some by over a year and a half in less than four months.

It’s easy to see why our pupils have made so much progress: students love the program. There is a wide range of interesting texts with videos, game-based activities and rewards that not only engage pupils but motivate them to continue improving. It has been incredible to see students who have sometimes found it difficult to engage in literacy activities grow in confidence and thrive in and out of the classroom. Students are keen to work independently through the tasks for homework and it’s been invaluable during lockdown. The Skill Builders paper resources both reinforce and extend their learning and make brilliant homework tasks too.

Lexia have a variety of webinars, training sessions and helpful videos, and the training and support we have had from Laura has been exceptional. We are looking forward to rolling the program out to other groups.

Lexia has given us a whole school platform which ensures consistency in approach, whilst giving learning matched to each individual pupil, allowing progress from their starting points. Whether in school or via remote learning, Lexia provides us with the mechanism for monitoring and increasing progress and improving outcomes.

We are delighted to have Lexia as part of our support strategy in our school. Although it is early days, we are confident that the system will provide us with exactly the targeted research-based intervention that we need. The capability to be undertaken at home is of course invaluable at this time. The support from Lexia has been second to none and we feel we are getting the help we need to implement the program with precision and fidelity.

Thank you to our Lexia UK contact, for all your support. It’s been quite a journey since my co-English lead and I attended a session back in January or February last year, to find out a little bit about Lexia as a program. Within ten minutes of that demonstration starting, I was hooked. Amongst other positives, I knew it would be great for engaging our reluctant readers.

We have now made another purchase with you based on the success of the program within my Year 6 class during last year’s lockdown from March onwards, and have been able to roll out the program to all of our Year 2, 4, 5 and 6 children. Feedback from staff has been really positive – you can imagine how teaching staff generally respond when a subject lead cheerfully announces, “And here’s something new that I’d really like you to fit in your timetables for your class every week!”.

I have presented to Governors about the success of the program, both Lexia and PowerUp (which we now have had six children progress onto). Key reasons to support our recent additional purchase were:

• Engagement of reluctant readers, and additionally those at high level.
• A way of overcoming that age-old hurdle in our area of children (not) reading at home.
• The facility for class teachers to monitor usage, progress and areas of individual difficulty with ease and at speed.
• The fact that the program can be easily installed and used at home, which was of huge benefit during the spring/summer lockdown, and potentially for another lockdown.
• The pre-set ‘lessons’ for those who are flagged as struggling with a concept.
• Production of professional-looking certificates on completion of a level.
• An educational tool which our parents also feel is beneficial!

The whole Lexia experience has been hugely positive: for the children, the staff and myself as Senior Teacher and co-English Lead.

The main thing for me is that at a glance I can see who is struggling, the time the children have been on the program and the progress that they are making. It is important when investing a large sum of money into an intervention that you evaluate the investment against the progress the children are making and I think that the children are reflecting the monetary investment with their interaction which is great.

With blended learning currently in place at the moment, we have to monitor pupil engagement on a daily basis, the one area that is thriving is Lexia, parents are reporting that the children can’t wait to complete their Lexia work, parents are finding it very supportive as their children are completely independent whilst using the program, freeing up some valuable time for our busy parents having to add homeschooling to their daily routine.

Here are some comments from our teachers:

• Easy to set up and navigate (I haven’t had so far anyone saying they can’t access, or they did not manage to find it/ use it)
• Because the children do not need support for the activities (they only need supervision while using the laptop) parents have been very keen on using it at home as an additional learning resource
• For the children at home, I gave the parents the option to use the lesson plans I receive to fill the gaps children might have. The printed out lesson plans/activities are very detailed. Personally, I printed out an ‘extension’ pack and that could be used easily in school (and perhaps for a focused group of children; or at home, with very little supervision again)
• It is easy to navigate, in terms of looking at their activity and seeing those who are flagged and need extra support, as well as obtaining the lesson/intervention activities

Lexia could not have come at a more poignant time for us as a school. Back in 2020, just as the prospect of home-learning seemed increasingly likely, we recognised that Lexia had the potential to not only support our pupils reading progress in school but also form a core part of our ‘remote learning’ provision.

The appeal of the program lay mainly in the personal, tailored approach that it delivers to each pupil – this was something that would be increasingly difficult with children split between home and school. With Lexia, we are able to have an overview of not only every child’s engagement in the program but also their progress; identifying key gaps in knowledge and using the resources provided by Lexia to scaffold interventions.

During our trial period, we focussed on a single class of pupils and saw an incredible impact in terms of their progress just over those 4-weeks. In some cases, we had pupils who were actively and independently seeking more time on the program because they were enjoying the process so much. This level of engagement, coupled with the visible impact on progress in the classroom, have both helped to foster a greater love of reading in our trial class. It, therefore, made sense for us to roll out the program to other year groups, safe in the knowledge that we could use the program flexibly to accommodate both whole class provision and specific, targeted intervention.

Throughout the trial process, and purchasing stages, the team at Lexia were always on hand to support and guide us, providing regular communication and training opportunities.