About NGRT

The New Group Reading Test (NGRT) is a standardised assessment to measure reading skills of students aged 6-16 years against the national average. Through a variety of exercises, NGRT can assess students’ knowledge of phonics, comprehension, decoding ability, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, deduction and inference skills, authorial intent, and ability to deal with figurative and idiomatic language (depending on the age of the student and test selected). Tasks include sentence completion, passage comprehension and phonic exercises. NGRT tests not just the ability of students to decode what they read, but also to comprehend and apply meaning.

NGRT indicates where a student’s reading ability sits as compared to the national average, and so can therefore be used to identify where intervention may be needed, or where further development can be pushed. It can be used termly or bi-yearly to monitor the impact of any interventions and assess a student’s progress.

Developing literacy in primary school is key and reading ability is fundamental to a student’s ability to access the curriculum in secondary school. Having a reliable measure of reading ability that is accurate and monitorable is what NGRT can provide. Using it regularly helps to quickly spot problems that will hold back a child’s progress, facilitate customised practical classroom solutions for each student, and then demonstrate the impact of the interventions put in place.

NGRT was standardised against a UK sample of over 11,700 students.

Restandardisation (coming spring 2027)

NGRT digital's reading norms will be updated with an up-to-date data set in spring 2027 to ensure reading attainment is benchmarked accurately against today’s student population. 

A standardised score tells how a child has performed in relation to his or her peers, so it is important to update the standardisation periodically to reflect the current population. 

Updated scores will appear automatically in Testwise, and you will not need to do anything.

NGRT paper will not be updated at this time.

Features of NGRT

• Can be used for whole class or group administration
• NGRT is available in both digital (PC or tablet) and paper editions 
• NGRT is in two parts: 
  • Sentence completion (measures decoding with some element of comprehension) 
  • Passage comprehension (measures a range of comprehension skills of increasing difficulty)
• The DIGITAL version is adaptive, so it responds to the level of the child as they take the test. 
• Results for digital tests are generated automatically on completion while the paper-based versions are supported by GL’s scoring and reporting service
• Use NGRT digital alongside New Group Spelling Test (NGST) digital, and create a Spelling and Reading Report comparing and analysing results from both tests 
• Use NGRT as an initial reading test, then use the results to identify struggling students who might benefit further from our other assessments, such as York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension (YARC)