| Wider Support
Whole school policies and practices
Underachievement in literacy hinders overall attainment. It requires school-wide action. Three policy strands are identified in what follows.
Structures
The successful whole-school structures in the BSA surveys included:
- literacy working groups led by a SMT member
- literacy as a regular theme at staff meetings
- a skilled co-ordinator
- appointed at senior teacher level
- passionate about literacy (but not from the English team)
- who works with staff to support the literacy elements in their subject teaching
- a literacy bulletin drawn from the work of all subject teams
- at subject level
- the analysis of subject-specific literacy requirements (e.g. vocabulary and spelling, the kinds and levels of reading challenge in text books, the demands of the subject’s common writing genres)
- the teaching of subject-specific literacy skills, as an integrated strand of subject teaching
- the use of a suite of techniques and strategies shared with other subjects (e.g. displaying key words and spellings, graphic planning strategies, note-making, green pen policies that identify surface errors without correcting them...)
- encouraging wider reading in the subject
- regular contributions to a staff-room portfolio of successful literacy practices.
Speaking and listening
The BSA report on Drama and Literacy at Key Stages 3 and 4 (Frater and Taylor, 2003) has wide implications for school literacy policies. Low-achieving students were often more effectively supported for literacy in drama than in other subjects; this was chiefly owing to the prominence of planned and structured talk in drama classes. This talk was of four kinds:
- spontaneous speech
- co-operative talk when planning presentations
- the planned talk of improvised performances
- the evaluative talk that followed performance (a blend of spontaneous, considered, and skilfully prompted talk).
Much of this arose from printed texts - often challenging ones - and led to the composition of written texts (including drama journals, scripts, and formal essays), with clear benefits showing up in the students’ writing. In this regard, drama points the way for most other subjects.
Parents
Adults ‘with poor basic skills are also less likely to have been read to as a child ...Those with very low skills were also most likely to have had a father who left the overall management of their child to the mother’ (Parsons and Bynner, 1998, p.31).
Addressing underachievement in literacy is often a cultural enterprise. Though it is too late, by secondary school, to restore the intimate reading that some parents omitted when their children were infants, the recruitment and retention of parental support is most vital where it has been least apparent. The BSA surveys have listed many successful strategies for engaging parents; their effectiveness lay less in the ideas themselves than in their wholehearted endorsement by headteachers, and the enterprise and persistence with which they were pursued.
Four Further Sources of Web Help
On inclusion
www.dfes.gov.uk/publications/guidanceonthelaw/11-99/11-99.htm
www.blss.portsmouth.sch.uk/emtag/keydocs.shtml
NASEN
www.nasen.org.uk/
The National Literacy Trust
www.literacytrust.org.uk/
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