Literacy

Demonstrate your school’s commitment to building a successful reading curriculum and inspire a child’s love of reading with the One Education Reading Award.

We offer a huge range of resources for schools to access whilst providing schools with a criteria in order to work towards the accreditation of the award. There are three sections within the award – Reading for Decoding, Reading for Understanding, and Reading for Enjoyment.

The Department of Education have highlighted their focus on improving reading and promoting reading for pleasure; the award will illustrate the priority that your school has given to providing children with the knowledge, skills, passion, and enthusiasm for reading - which will last the whole of their lives.

Depending on your school and reading journey so far, you can choose to work towards the bronze, silver or gold award with the option to apply for the next level of award the following year.

Over seventy schools are now involved with the One Education Reading Award around the country. The One Education Reading Award criteria has also been adapted alongside Bridgelea Primary School and Springwood Primary School to support schools with alternative or specialist provision. For more details please contact Laura Lodge.

SUPPORT PACKAGES

Reading Award Support Package

• 4 half days / 2 half days support
• Individual Reading Award log on
• Reading Award criteria and guide
• Access to online resources
• Access to online CPD including webinars
• Email support
• Plaque and use of logo on completion

Reading Award Online Support Package

• Individual Reading Award log on
• Reading Award criteria and guide
• Access to online resources
• Access to online CPD including webinars
• Email support
• Plaque and use of logo on completion

We share your passion for literacy and drive to make a positive difference within schools and also understand the pressures of leading the largest subject in the curriculum.

Our literacy specialists can help to support your Literacy or English Lead in developing their skills and knowledge in leading Literacy across the school. This support will help Literacy Leaders to feel confident in making and leading changes in reading, writing, phonics, oracy and SPaG.

Together with your Literacy or English lead, we can audit current Literacy provision, develop an action plan and support you to implement the plan.

We can work with you to develop an engaging whole school Literacy curriculum, ensuring a clear progression in the growth of knowledge and skills across a child's school journey. Alongside this, we can support you to build a consistent assessment system that enables staff to develop pupil progress through gap analysis.

We can also work alongside you to monitor the implementation and impact of your curriculum intent through a variety of methods, including pupil voice, book looks, observations and learning walks.

Our Literacy specialists also hold Literacy Leader Network Meetings every term – focusing on developing skills as leaders, sharing best practice and building further knowledge of literacy.

Working with children to develop their Literacy skills is our passion. We often work with small groups of children to support them to build knowledge and develop skills such as guided writing and editing.

We are also able to support schools in the run up to stautory assessments, working with children to identify strengths and next steps to support teaching. We are able to create bespoke approaches for individual children and small groups; making a real difference to progress and attainment.

Our Literacy specialists work across the school sector, including developing Literacy in schools with alternative or specialist provision. Working alongside our colleagues in the SEND; Educational Psychology and ETS teams, we support the development and delivery of the Literacy curriculum to support individual pupils.

We tailor all of our approaches and training to your school's specific needs, working alongside you to support your school's journey, whatever the focus.

Working alongside Bridgelea Primary School and Springwood Primary School, we have also adapted the criteria for the One Education Reading Award, meaning that we now have specific criteria for both special schools and alternative provision settings.

Assessment must be both accurate and useful in order to have impact on pupil progress. We can support you to embed bespoke assessment systems that capture useful information whilst being mindful of workload.

We can also work alongside staff to analyse assessment, looking at strengths and gaps in coverage and planning next steps for the classroom.

The team are all Manchester moderators and as such are well-placed to offer advice and support on the assessment of Writing. Our consultant Laura Lodge is also a curriculum expert on Reading for the DfE, and as such is heavily involved in the development of statutory assessments on a national level.

We use this wide bank of knowledge to support schools to moderate their teacher assessments across the curriculum, both as external validators and alongside staff. We also regularly hold moderation training meetings, where teachers can work alongside our staff and other schools to moderate their assessment judgements.

Reading is the key to unlocking the rest of the school curriculum and is a crucial life skill. As such, Reading needs to be right from the very start of a child's school journey.

We can support you to embed the teaching of Reading in EYFS and KS1, focusing on using systematic synthetic phonics for decoding whilst also building understanding and a love of Reading.

A good Reading curriculum begins with quality books and as such we can support you to audit your current book stock, checking that children have access to both phonetically decodable books appropriate to their phonics knowledge and quality texts to share with their families for pleasure.

Vocabulary is vital to life. Research shows that children born into lower socio-economic backgrounds are likely to have less exposure to a wide vocabulary and that this will directly impact their later academic achievement. Understanding the importance of vocabulary and embedding vocabulary building throughout your curriculum is key.

With this in mind, we have developed the 'Vocabulary is V.I.T.A.L. approach to support schools to make vocabulary a priority. We can support you to embed a clear and engaging approach to vocabulary building, including training; in-school support and taking part in measurable research projects.

Reading for understanding is an incredibly important life skill. As good readers, we use a wide repertoire of skills, almost all of them automatic. This means that as adults, we find it challenging to break down the teaching of Reading sufficiently for pupils, often overlying relying on questioning rather than actual teaching reading skills.

The Reading Gems approach was created by our team to support staff to do just that - focus on the teaching of Reading skills, e.g. retrieval, inference and relationship.

Our approach can be made bespoke to suit your needs, suiting both whole class and small group reading styles. We can work alongside staff to choose appropriate texts; embed reading skill-specific subject knowledge; enhance day to day teaching and make assessment useful.

Developing Reading Fluency:

Good reading depends on fluency. However fluency is more than speed. We can support your school to embed approaches to teaching Reading fluency through methods such as echo reading, choral reading and much more. We can provide training for best practice; fluency specific interventions and assessment of reading fluency.

The teaching of Writing is a complex subject and one that requires excellent subject knowledge. We believe in the importance of high quality texts as the foundation for writing teaching and as such we have developed the P.I.C.C. a Text approach.

Working from the starting point of a writing outcome, the sequence guides staff through deciding upon the R.A.F.T. (Reason. Audience. Features. Tone) of their outcome; choosing quality texts; prediction and interrogation of the text; capturing ideas for writing and culminating in writing and editing a final outcome.

Our approach focuses on writing effectively and guiding children to become good writers. We can support you to renew your writing teaching sequence; working alongside staff for bespoke training and development, including model lessons and team teach sessions.

Grammar and Punctuation underpin writing, however the teaching of these concepts needs to be well thought out in order to be successful.

With the advent of the KS1 and KS2 GPaS statutory assessments, many schools have moved towards discrete and less-contextualised grammar teaching. However, research (Safford, 2016) shows that while teaching such as this may increase test scores, it does not support Writing.

We can work with your school to review the teaching of GPaS to ensure it is engaging and creative, benefiting both end of Key Stage assessment and children's ability to write.

Supporting Spelling:

Spelling is a challenging aspect of Writing for many children and teaching spelling needs careful thought. We have a large bank of resources including progression documents for every year group; word lists and diagnostic assessments.

We can support you to develop staff subject knowledge in how to teach spelling effectively and engagingly, assessing children's spelling knowledge and creating a bespoke spelling curriculum for your needs.

Schools often request our help to support children to achieve greater depth in Reading and Writing. We can support you to best develop children's skills and knowledge, challenging them appropriately for their attainment level.

We have developed a suite of training and resources to facilitate greater depth learning, including specific approaches to both Reading and Writing. We are also able to work with groups of children to support them to achieve Greater Depth learning in Reading and Writing, providing an engaging and targeted approach to deepening learning.

Professional development for literacy is important for pupil attainment across the whole curriculum, however smaller budgets and time pressures can make it difficult for school leaders to invest in good quality CPD for their staff.

Our Literacy specialists can support you in making a positive step towards upskilling your staff with a wealth of affordable and flexible CPD options that helps to develop knowledge, skills and expertise across the subject.

Meeting the 'Standard for teachers’ professional development', our CPD is in line with DfE recommendations. Our flexible course are designed to meet the needs of a variety of audiences and can be bespoke to you and your school.

Our Literacy CPD provides you with a range of knowledge, resources and skills whilst our specialists instil in you a love of the subject, enthusiasm and increased motivation.