Older struggling readers have very low expectations of what they can achieve and I've generally found those same low expectations are echoed by their teachers and support workers.

When I was volunteering in a small SEMH school for boys, the English teacher asked me to liaise with the support assistant who was working with the same year 7 student - just to make sure we were on the same wavelength.

She showed me a wooden alphabet puzzle for toddlers - you know, a for apple, b for ball etc. Today I suspect it would have been something like this:

I showed her this:

Her response was, 'but he can't read!' But he can, I assured her. He'd even read  'Ipswich Australia' fluently because he was gaining confidence in attacking long words. Ipswich contains very simple code and I suspect he just knew Australia. The vast array of sight words that older students bring to a lesson is a wonderful bonus for That Reading Thing tutors.

High expectation is a marvellous tool when it comes to encouraging struggling readers, but it requires a couple of things to be firmly in place.

• They must have conquered any fear of attacking long words. This requires practice from the first TRT lesson and involves building, spelling, reading out of context and reading in text, words that can be decoded at the current level. (Decodable doesn't mean 'easy'; it means 'possible at your current level'.) 
  That means: 
  'admit', 'until', 'combat', 'illness', 'fantastic' and more in the first lesson and
  'extending',' suspending', 'accomplishing', 'instructions', 'recognition', 'attraction', and others within 3 to 5 hours.
  This quick progression gives our students confidence when the code gets more complex and leaves no time to dwell on Pip the Pig. We do have decodable sentences at each Foundation Level but they are sentences that tap into a student's latent knowledge and experience of the world.
• They must be feeling secure in the knowledge that The Deal will be applied in every situation. The Deal is: 'You never have to know anything we haven't learned together' and this safety net means that their days of associating reading with humiliation are over and they can start learning from errors.