Elaine Cropper, literacy coordinator, Myrtle Springs School, Sheffield
 

Myrtle Springs School introduced the literacy hour to the secondary classroom and developed literacy across the curriculum while part of the 1998 key stage 3 national literacy project. As a result, the school came off special measures, and both behaviour and literacy standards improved.

Myrtle Springs School was removed from special measures in November 1999, with no serious weaknesses and in February 2000, staff were filmed teaching the literacy hour for inclusion in the key stage 3 training video, which is now being used in the local education authorities piloting the English Framework.

In September 1998, the reading ages of 201 Year 7 students were measured using the NFER Group Reading Test. Only one student, a boy, recorded a high-order reading age of 15+. 85% had a reading age of 11 and below at the start of the year. By June 1999, having implemented a literacy hour and whole-school literacy approach, this figure had been reduced to 59%. And 12 boys and 15 girls had a new reading age of 15+. Altogether, 35% of the students who took both tests improved their reading age, 24% by 2 years or more. Of the 60% of students, who still had a reading age below their chronological age, 21% still managed to improve their low score. A similar degree of progress has been evident with students in 1999/2000.

Much had happened since the start of the academic year 1998/9. Myrtle Springs School was still on special measures when it was chosen to take part in the then key stage 3 pilot national literacy project. The city's schools were divided into cohorts 1-3 determined by need - our school was part of Cohort 1. £8,000 of initial funding was made available to us to develop our literacy strategy, alongside considerable support from Sheffield Advisory and Inspection Service.

When the school was put on special measures in 1997, Ofsted confirmed what the school had already identified, which was the need to raise achievement through increasing levels of literacy and numeracy and by improving the quality of teaching. There was a general sense among staff that students were more capable than their written work suggested, and that students' poor text knowledge was preventing them from fully accessing the secondary curriculum. Both staff and students were frustrated with the latter sometimes exhibiting challenging behaviour in situations where their learning competence was being questioned.

Introducing the literacy hour and whole-school literacy
I had observed the literacy hour being taught, and I was given the opportunity to teach it myself to a Year 5 and a Year 6 class in a local primary school. I talked at length with teachers at my son's primary school fuelling my conviction that much of the key stage 2 literacy hour could be effective at key stage 3. More than that, I thought it was a model of good teaching which would go some way to addressing the problems we had at Myrtle Springs School. Our new headteacher and the senior team gave their unqualified support to the school's drive to raise literacy standards and together we put a range of strategies into action:

• The literacy hour was taught to Year 7, every Friday morning, by a team of staff from the English department who had been trained by the literacy coordinator.
• Staff agreed that all subjects would include literacy skills in their schemes of work
• All staff were trained by the literacy coordinator, senior manager, head of English and LEA literacy consultant on 'literacy coaching' (text-attack skills), using writing frames, and Directed Activities Related to Texts - DARTs
• Money was spent on high quality texts, dictionaries and thesauruses for all English classrooms
• Wall displays were put in classrooms to reflect teaching points e.g. key words, target language

All staff agreed to implement four procedures within lessons to promote literacy:

• To act as a "literacy coach" - explicitly teaching text-attack skills and good reading behaviour
• To use writing frames to help students scaffold their writing
• To improve standards of oracy by encouraging students to answer oral questions in full sentences
• To end each lesson with a 5 - 10 minute plenary, tied in with the learning objectives for the lesson - "What have we learned today?"

The literacy hour
The weekly lesson is based on the primary format of 30 minutes text investigation led by the teacher, using either big books or enlarged texts. The teacher models the reading of the text, followed by whole class choral reading. What follows is a series of questions at text, word and sentence level, which is directed by the teacher, and which ensures a high level of engagement from the students. Twenty minutes guided reading runs alongside the rest of the class working independently. Enhanced staffing at key stage 3 has enabled paired teaching - although this has been limited to the least able and most able classes. The final 10 minutes is a plenary session where teaching points are revisited and the students share their work. The texts used have included a wide range of poetry for example, Ian McMillan, Seamus Heaney, weather poems, football poems - plus non-fiction texts such as The Magic Bean, information Big Books, newspaper extracts, letters and instructions.

Boys and the literacy hour
Boys burst to answer questions in the fast and pacy 30 minutes' of oral work. The explicit nature of the teaching, the consistent lesson format, the highly structured sections of each lesson where there is a practical application of the skills covered and the set amounts of time for each activity, all appeal to boys' learning styles. We also feel that the lesson is more popular with boys because less time is spent 'emoting' and empathising with the text and more time is spent on deconstruction - how language communicates meaning. The 'closed' writing activities such as language investigation using a dictionary and thesaurus, finding examples of word classes, writing a specified number of sentences, similes or metaphors, are all appealing because they offer a definite outcome.

Teachers and the literacy hour
High quality, structured materials and lesson planning have encouraged and supported good teaching. Simultaneous teaching of the same lesson to the same year group has encouraged discussion of teaching methods and learning outcomes and partnership teaching within the hour encourages professional debate and provides excellent INSET for staff.

Monitoring
The Sheffield key stage 3 Literacy Project is monitored by the Sheffield LEA through the Inspection and Advisory Service, and by Professor Elaine Millard of Sheffield University. Internally, Myrtle Springs has used a variety of methods. These include attitudinal questionnaires for the students, self-evaluation by the teaching staff, the headteacher's departmental review, literacy hour lesson observation by the headteacher and senior team, partnership teaching with the literacy coordinator and lesson observation by visitors from a variety of educational establishments. Finally, through the process of termly inspections by Ofsted, the effectiveness and success of the literacy project has been confirmed.

The next steps
In common with our primary colleagues, we have found that although reading standards have improved, the standard of students' writing has not risen at the same rate. Our whole-school focus this academic year (2000/2001) is to initiate procedures to improve the standard of writing across both key stages. So far, this has included adopting the English department marking system across the school, extending the use and complexity of writing frames, explicitly teaching writing genre in each subject area, teaching subject specific spellings and insisting on a standard of presentation for all pupils' work.

To support the non-readers for whom the literacy hour at primary school has not been a success, we have seconded a Reading Recovery teacher, who has devised individual reading courses, based on the Reading Recovery methods, for the small number of students who enter Year 7 without functional literacy.
 

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