Waiting until September means losing the entire summer. Graeme Finlay explains that by administering the NGRT to Year 6 pupils in May and June — with all data available by mid-June — Bishop Wilkinson Catholic Education Trust ensures secondary reading leaders know exactly which children need support before they arrive, not weeks or months after. Intervention is in place from the very first week of secondary school, eliminating the lag and the stigma of late-stage identification.
Previously, some secondary schools were administering the NGRT in September, after pupils had already crossed the threshold. That created a structural delay: the test had to be sat, scored, and interpreted before any decisions about support could be made. Children who needed targeted literacy intervention were left waiting.
Bishop Wilkinson Catholic Education Trust — 47 schools across four local authorities in the North East, serving around 12,000 children — moved the testing window to May and June of Year 6 precisely to close that gap. With approximately 70% of its secondary pupils coming from the trust's own primary schools, it has the infrastructure to make this work at scale.
The result: all diagnostic data is available by mid-June, weeks before the September start. Secondary reading leaders can analyse results, plan provision, and allocate resources over the summer — arriving in September ready to act, not beginning to assess.
The practical impact is significant. Rather than spending the first half-term of Year 7 identifying who needs help, secondary staff already have a full picture. Talia Caralambos and Graeme Finlay both emphasise this in the episode: the goal is that no child arrives at secondary school and waits to be noticed as struggling.
There is also a subtler benefit. Late-stage identification — being pulled out for reading support months into Year 7 — carries a social cost for adolescents. Moving the diagnostic to primary removes that stigma. By the time pupils walk in on the first day, support structures are simply part of how the school is organised, not a reaction to failure.
This approach reflects a broader principle discussed across the episode and explored further in Education: Joining the Dots: transition is not a single handover moment, it is a planned continuum — and assessment is the thread that runs through it.
"Don't wait until a child is failing to act. You need to diagnose on entry, involve staff from the start, and if you're fortunate enough to have digital tools that you can access, align that to your transition work, because it can be transformational."
Talia Caralambos — Director of English, School Improvement Team, Laidlaw Schools Trust.
Caralambos trained and taught English and Media at Ritchie Diver Secondary School in London before relocating to the North East in April. She comes from a bilingual household and taught English in India at age 17 — an experience she credits with sparking a lifelong commitment to equity and education through literacy. As Director of English at Laidlaw Schools Trust, she supports curriculum development and literacy improvement across 11 schools serving communities marked by high mobility, economic disadvantage, and in some settings over 60 languages spoken by pupils.
Bishop Wilkinson Catholic Education Trust begins transition at the end of Year 5 with a large event called the Bishop Wilkinson Celebration of Sport, bringing together pupils from across its 47 schools before they move up to secondary.
Talia Caralambos argues that reading is "the biggest and most important barrier to academic success, and actually the biggest barrier to all success." Given the communities Laidlaw serves — with high mobility, economic disadvantage, and over 60 languages spoken in some schools — literacy sits at the very heart of the trust's transition model.
Laidlaw Schools Trust uses the NGRT (New Group Reading Test) as an early diagnostic within its Year 6 to Year 7 transition programme. The NGRT reading data is collected before pupils arrive at secondary school, giving teachers a clear picture of every child's literacy level from day one.
This answer comes from the episode Putting literacy and assessment at the heart of student transition on Education: Joining the Dots.
Listen to the episode on Listenly