how Salisbury High School uses NGRT
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“The information is priceless”: how Salisbury High School uses NGRT to act on reading comprehension needs from day one
Salisbury High School had made strong progress in decoding and fluency. Its students could read the words, but many weren’t understanding them. Since introducing the New Group Reading Test (NGRT), the school has a much clearer picture of which students need comprehension support and what to do next, before they even walk through the door in Term 1.
School: Salisbury High School, Salisbury North, South Australia
Type: Year 7–12 public secondary school
Featuring: Meg Hughes, English and Literacy Improvement Leader
Product: New Group Reading Test (NGRT)
Using NGRT since: 2023
Literacy and numeracy are the core focus at Salisbury High School, backed by an executive team that makes them a genuine priority. Over six to seven years, the school’s phonics intervention shrank from a large program to just four or five students per year level. Most students were now fluent readers.
But fluency had become a blind spot. The reading test the school used before 2023 focused on decoding and fluency, with comprehension tacked on at the end, and that data point was largely overlooked.
“We really had our reading fluency and decoding programs down pat and we were seeing lots of great progress, but comprehension was where our students were hitting a barrier.”
Meg saw it play out in classrooms. Students could present as capable readers while retaining very little.
“Sometimes we’ll have a student in intervention and teachers will say, ‘But they can read, I’ve heard them read.’ And we’ll have to say, well, they’re fluent, but their focus is so much on reading the words that they’re not understanding the words.”
The answer came through a reading professional learning community within the school’s wider portfolio of primary and secondary schools. A teacher from another high school presented on NGRT, and for Meg’s team, it clicked.
“It just clicked for us that the test was what we were missing in terms of next steps with comprehension.”
Salisbury started by testing every incoming Year 7 student on Year 6 transition day. Over the summer break, the team used the results to build its intervention program, so staff knew their students before meeting them properly. Students then resat NGRT at the end of Year 7 and again at the end of Year 8 to track growth and decide who still needed support.
The depth of insight from NGRT led the team to refine its approach for 2026, using it as a deeper diagnostic for the students who need it most. The process now begins with Year 6 PAT-R results: any incoming student scoring below a C sits NGRT on transition day. The team then uses stanine scores to group students by need and works through their Individual Student Reports to find the strategies common to each group, building group profiles and resources around them.
From there, students are withdrawn from lessons three times a week to work with an SSO (School Services Officer) on the strategies from their reports. End-of-year retesting shows who has grown and who still needs support, giving the team a clear starting point for the following year.
“Without the individual student reports, we would just be going in blind and it would take us a term to figure out what to do with the student. If we can go into Term 1, Week 1 knowing exactly what we can do for a student or students in a small group, it just means that we hit the ground running.”
Meg is clear that the upskilled SSO team is central to making it work.
“I would say the key is our SSO staff who have been upskilled to be able to administer literacy and numeracy intervention. You just have to put the trust in the systems and the people.”
For Meg, the real value of NGRT isn’t simply knowing where students are. It’s knowing what to do next.
Individual Student Reports: the “what next”
The Individual Student Reports drive Salisbury’s small-group and one-to-one intervention. Each report includes practical strategies, and when the team grouped students, they found many strategies were shared across a group. That made it simple to create resources for teachers and SSOs.
“Knowing what to do once we had the data was key. That’s where we were really stuck, because we didn’t know what to do. Having those strategies just changed everything for us. And realising that it was pretty straightforward stuff that we could easily implement the next day in our classrooms.”
Cohort and group reports: the bigger picture
NGRT lets Salisbury select any group of students and report on them as a cohort. The school has a large EAL/ELL cohort, and some students also attend a dedicated literacy class of 200 minutes a week. Creating a group report for a class of around 20 students shows the teacher what to focus on as a whole class, alongside individual needs.
The cohort data, including the Excel export, also helps the leadership team evaluate its own impact.
“If we’re able to look at a cohort of students and see that from the end of Year 6 to the end of Year 7 there wasn’t great growth in their reading, then we’re going to change what we do from the end of Year 7 to the end of Year 8. It helps us redirect our resources in terms of teachers and people, and our student groups. We’re able to look at our effectiveness as a team.”
Salisbury follows a simple flowchart. PAT-R identifies students who may need support, NGRT provides the in-depth diagnosis, and teachers and SSOs discuss the results together in professional learning meetings.
NAPLAN plays a different role: a safety net. Because results don’t arrive until late Term 2 or Term 3, they come too late to shape intervention groups. Instead, the team uses NAPLAN to check whether anyone has slipped through.
“We more use NAPLAN to look at, is there anyone we’ve missed? If a student is flagged that we didn’t already have on our list, then we would administer an NGRT with them to see what’s going on. Did they just flick through the test because they were in a bad mood on the day? Or have we missed them in everything else?”
For Salisbury, NGRT has helped shift the focus from identifying reading difficulties to acting on them. The school can plan intervention before the school year starts, measure growth across Years 7 and 8, and redirect resources where they’ll have the most impact.
“The information you get from the NGRT is priceless. We wouldn’t be able to do what we do in our intervention groups without administering the NGRT. It’s been a game changer for us.”
For Meg, the purpose runs deeper than test scores.
“We all know that quality of life is linked to the ability to read. So for us, our goal is always, if we can improve the reading comprehension age of our students, then we get to improve the quality of their life once they leave school.”
Against the backdrop of Australia’s PISA reading results , Meg acknowledges national data can feel disheartening. But she encourages leaders to look at what’s happening in their own classrooms.
“To see, in the span of six to seven years, the improvement of students from not being able to decode, to being fluent readers and now focusing on comprehension, is heartwarming. And you don’t see that in the NAPLAN results. You do see it in your schools. I think it’s all about systems, and it’s all about making room in your budget.”
Meg’s first piece of advice is simple: start with the Individual Student Reports. The strategies are where the real value lies, and looking for the ones shared across groups of students makes intervention planning far more manageable.
“If you’re starting out with NGRT, those individual student reports with strategies are where to begin.”
She also recommends giving yourself time to settle on the right data points. It took Salisbury around two terms to land on stanine scores as the best way to group students by need. A clear flowchart helps too, so everyone understands how NGRT fits alongside PAT-R, NAPLAN and teacher judgement, and who is tested and why.
Above all, Meg says, invest in your people. Upskilling SSOs to deliver intervention has been central to Salisbury’s success, and it’s what allows the school to act on the data quickly and consistently.
In 2027, Salisbury will replace small-group withdrawal with an additional 200-minute class for students needing both literacy and numeracy support. Participation will appear on report cards, and the school plans to use strategies from the Individual Student Reports to give parents practical ways to support reading at home.
Want to see what your reading data could tell you? Download a sample NGRT report to explore the Individual Student and cohort insights Salisbury High School uses to plan targeted support.