The children will come back in September. They’ll have grown. They’ll have forgotten where they put their water bottles. They’ll have forgotten how to line up. And some of them will have forgotten how much they love reading. That last one is the bit we need to worry about.

The summer holidays are brilliant. They should be. Children need time away from school, time to play, explore, talk, travel, be bored, discover things and, hopefully, get lost in a really good book. But we also know that extended breaks from learning can have an impact. The research around the ‘summer slide’ is not new and, while the size of the effect varies considerably between children and contexts, the overall picture is clear, some children return to school having lost some of the knowledge and fluency they had built during the previous year. When it comes to reading, that matters.

Reading isn’t like learning a fact and then putting it safely in a drawer. Reading is a skill, a habit and a practice. We get better at it by doing it. Children need regular opportunities to read if they are going to develop accuracy, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. And the children who need the most reading practice are often the children least likely to have picked up a book over the summer. That creates a particularly unhelpful cycle, a child who already finds reading difficult reads less over the holiday, their fluency doesn’t get the regular practice it needs, and they return to school finding reading hard. Because it feels hard, they are less inclined to choose to read. Before we’ve even got through September, we’re trying to solve a problem that has been quietly growing for weeks.

So what should we do? Not panic. And definitely not launch into a frantic ‘catch-up’ programme on day one.

The answer isn’t to throw everything at children because we are worried about what they may have forgotten. Instead, September should be about getting the foundations right and getting reading moving again. Think of it as a reboot, not a recovery mission. The first few weeks are a golden opportunity to re-establish the conditions in which children read well: getting books back into children’s hands, re-establishing reading routines, rebuilding stamina and reminding children that reading isn’t simply something they do because an adult tells them to. It is something they can enjoy.

For some children, that might mean returning to a much-loved series. For others, it might mean a graphic novel, a funny book, non-fiction about something they are obsessed with, poetry, magazines or a book that an adult reads aloud to them. We sometimes get so caught up in whether a child is reading the ‘right’ book that we forget the most important question… are they reading?

Of course, this doesn’t mean abandoning challenge. Far from it. Children need access to ambitious vocabulary, rich language and texts that stretch their thinking. But reading for pleasure and reading development are not competing agendas. They should feed each other. A child who discovers that books can make them laugh, teach them something fascinating, transport them somewhere completely different or help them understand the world is far more likely to want to keep reading.

And this is where the teacher makes an enormous difference. A strong start to the year isn’t simply about putting up a beautiful reading display or creating a new book corner. It’s about deliberately creating a classroom where books and reading are visible, valued and talked about. Talk to children about books. Tell them what you’re reading. Read aloud every day. Recommend books with genuine enthusiasm. Give children time to browse. Let them see you enjoying a book. Make space for reading that isn’t immediately followed by a worksheet, quiz or comprehension task. If every encounter with a book ends with ‘Now answer these six questions’, we shouldn’t be surprised when children start seeing reading as work rather than something worth choosing.

There is another important piece of the September puzzle: fluency. Some children will return after the summer able to decode accurately but less fluent than they were at the end of term. They may read word by word, lose expression or struggle to maintain meaning across a paragraph. This is particularly noticeable for children who are still developing automaticity. The answer isn’t simply to tell them to ‘read more’. We need to teach fluency.

Repeated reading, modelling, echo reading, choral reading, performance reading and carefully selected texts can all provide opportunities for children to practise reading with greater accuracy, appropriate pace and expression. And crucially, fluency isn’t an end in itself. The purpose of becoming a fluent reader is to free up cognitive capacity so that children can focus on meaning. We don’t want children simply saying the words. We want them thinking about the words.

So, when September arrives, perhaps the question shouldn’t be, ‘How much learning have they lost?’ Perhaps a better question is, ‘How quickly can we get every child reading successfully, confidently and regularly again?’

That changes the conversation. It moves us away from panic and towards purposeful action. It means identifying the children who have returned less fluent than before. It means checking that decoding is secure where it needs to be. It means explicitly teaching fluency rather than assuming it will develop by itself. It means putting high-quality books in front of children and making sure they have time to read them. It means reading aloud to children who may not yet be able to access those texts independently. And it means paying particular attention to the children for whom the summer has widened an existing gap.

Because the summer slide doesn’t affect every child equally. And that is perhaps the most important thing to remember. For some children, six weeks of summer will mean six weeks of reading, conversation, library visits and bedtime stories. For others, it may mean very little access to books at all. The gap can therefore widen while school is closed.  September is our opportunity to close it again.  Not just through intervention. Not by trying to squeeze six weeks of lost learning into the first fortnight. Instead, we need excellent teaching, carefully chosen books, explicit fluency instruction, rich talk and a relentless belief that every child can become a reader.

So when the children walk through the gates in September, taller, with new shiny shoes and a little bleary eyes from the early morning that they aren’t used to…remember our aim…

We’re going to get them reading. And we’re going to make them want to.