Background
We have been given the project of working with a school to raise attainment in literacy. It has been described by Ofsted as:
A large community college...in West Sussex. The town is an area of coastal deprivation with low basic skills in the adult workforce. The proportion of students with learning difficulties and/or disabilities is well above the national average. The school has specialist status as a sports college.
By looking at the information available to us, including Ofsted reports, the school’s website and the previous creativity project we have begun to come up with a picture of where the school currently stands with regard to literacy.
· Ofsted reports have highlighted that...
- standards need to be raised for all children
- children need to be more actively involved and challenged in their learning
- progression needs to be monitored more effectively
- children need to be aware of their targets and what they need to do to meet them.
- Speaking and listening has been focused on through the school’s new curriculum but levels of literacy are still low
- There are opportunities to develop functional literacy skills across the curriculum
- The students come in from the feeder schools with below average levels of literacy and numeracy
- Low levels of literacy, particularly writing, hinder students’ progress in other areas of the curriculum.
· The school’s website shows us that they have implemented a number of initiatives to raise standards in literacy such as:
- Literacy plus programme
- West Sussex Book Awards transition project
- The FAB group
- Writers’ Club
- Key Stage 3 Gifted and Talented’ group
- And extra-curricular opportunities, such as visits from authors and invited speakers.
· Reading the booklet produced by the students managing last year’s project has identified that they:
- Implemented a 6 week literacy intervention for Year 8 pupils
- Focused on removing children from the classroom where possible to keep them engaged
- Kept pupils’ self esteem high by empowering them as the experts
- Gave the children strategies that allowed them to become autonomous learners in English
- Used a variety of teaching strategies including the use of multi modal resources, reading journals, blogging and free writing.
Our aims
Building on the success of last year’s project, we propose a programme focusing on developing pupils as writers. Using the critical reading skills acquired through the intervention Ready Steady Book, we hope to remove barriers within the reader writer relationship and therefore increase attainment.
We would like to consult the pupils that we will be working with in order to incorporate their interests and ideas about what would work for them into the programme. Some of our initial thoughts would be to:
- introduce response partners
- look at the talk for writing model
- model and scaffold the writing process explicitly with the children
- shared writing
- develop success criteria through a genre approach
- develop writing through immersion in text type
- writing frames/ starters
- displays to aid writing / working walls
- ensure creative purpose and audience e.g. blog, book, magazine
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