You Can’t Lead on Literacy in Isolation

Is your house falling down? Here – have a hammer, a youtube video and a sprinkling of good luck.

It’s nonsense, right? That’s how we feel about a strategy for truly ensuring appropriate literacy expertise is deployed in schools, to bring teachers confidence, and see students excel.

We read with interest the brilliantly summarised TES article by Megan Dixon (associate lecturer at Sheffield Hallam), who was pointing out the very real need for having literacy experts in place in our education system.

She references an ASCL report about the ongoing impact of Covid-19 on current practices and on attainment and talks about the problems ‘marching up through the system year by year’.

We see it too – plainly and starkly.

The majority of our experiences are in secondary school, where schools seek out our programmes and classroom vocabulary solution to support students across the key stages.

As you might expect, deploying the right intervention and effective teaching method for children beyond primary, requires an even more complex and considered strategy.

We cannot risk being accused of the ‘babyfi’ technique on a student in their teenage years, who needs significant support with their reading and vocabulary.

Megan raises the all-important question: ‘Who DO we call on to help the poor readers who have not responded to any aspect of the phonics programme? Who can support secondary schools to ensure every student continues to learn to read and is able to read to learn?’.

Of course, as the point suggests, we can’t have students continuing through their high school years without the ability to ‘read to learn’. To do so, we compromise every aspect of their learning journey.

How on earth might we ever expect them to decipher exam papers, when there are still vulnerabilities in fluency, vocabulary understanding and therefore comprehension.

Well, thankfully, we do know the solution.

And we know that it is possible to help anyone to learn to read. We know that multi-component interventions can be the answer – but pedagogy at intervention level must be diagnostic.

There is a big difference between a 14-year-old student who has gaps in their phonics, vs one who has a lack of fluency or vocabulary understanding.

We must provide for those students as individuals, having assessed where they are at and what they require.

Quite rightly, Megan concludes an acknowledged fact – that specialist literacy teachers who able to assess, analyse, write and deliver bespoke interventions for a child are harder and harder to find.

True. And yet, is it right that we should expect all the emphasis to be placed on the shoulders of existing stretched teachers in their schools?

Long term strategic thinking is what’s required.

It cannot be:

• Place an additional burden on an English teacher and expect them to resource themselves
• A ‘quick hit’ of an elite team coming into school, delivering training and then backing away
• Hoping for the best and deciding the cost of an intervention is just too much

Instead, it must be:

• Recognition that English is a discreet subject with a curriculum of its own
• A consistent solution, supporting teachers to deliver, in things such as vocabulary instruction, questioning to support deep thinking, spelling etc
• A focus on school-wide literacy culture, with all effort to lessen variability in the student experience, especially in vocabulary instruction
• Targeted specific interventions, delivered by expertly trained and resourced staff who can work hand in hand with a curriculum that focuses on subject specific literacy instruction
• Respect and resource for the staff entrusted to deliver the necessary intervention programmes, all the while appreciating what a critical part they play in students’ lives

If you’re interested in chatting with us about the dilemma of focused literacy interventions, and how we make this happen, please do get in touch. Start by emailing [email protected]