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• 21Jan2011

  Removing Barriers to Literacy

  Posted by George Dugdale

  Ofsted's latest report, Removing Barriers to Literacy, is the result of two years of visits at a range of settings, from early years to adult education and everything in between. The report focused on literacy provision across all ages, particularly for those in underachieving groups, such as children in care. 

  The overriding message of the report is that literacy is everyone's business. Settings that achieved the best results had "at least one senior member of staff with an excellent knowledge of literacy and its pedagogy" and that for secondary schools it was vital that "teachers in all subjects had received training in teaching literacy." The National Literacy Trust's work with schools focuses on ensuring that literacy is considered a cross curricular priority and our own experience and evidence matches that of the Ofsted report.

  Starting with the earliest years, the report finds the biggest challenge facing many early years providers is the number of children who arrive with late language development. In one nursery visited approximately 30% of three-year-olds started with a marked speech delay. In many instances a lack of early years communication skills is an awareness issue; parents are not aware of the importance of communicating with their young children. The National Literacy Trust is particularly interested in this aspect of the report as our Talk To Your Baby campaign works alongside professionals in raising awareness of these issues.

  Among the barriers identified to successfully promoting early years communication, and indeed any parental involvement was a lack of specialisation when communicating with parents. The report says that "Inspectors did not find any examples of schools focusing specifically on engaging the families of White working class pupils." The importance of tailoring messaging to individual groups cannot be understated and the problem extends beyond parental engagement and into classroom practice. 

  One school visited had seen its English standards declining because they had not realised the results of their White British pupils, a minority in the school, were particularly poor. This report makes it clear that properly utilising data available to schools is something that must be pursued if results for all groups of children are to be improved.

  Throughout the report examples are given to illustrate best practice. One such example typifies the effective analysis of data by an excellent subject leader in a primary school, which led to improvements in pupils’ reading standards:

  The subject leader noticed that the reading ages of a small group of pupils reached a plateau in Years 3 and 4 and were not meeting her high expectations. She looked for the reason. Following classroom observations and discussions with staff, she discovered that daily reading practice ceased in Year 3 and the teachers relied on a weekly guided session and on parents to listen to children reading at home. Although this was satisfactory for some of the pupils, progress for those not reading at home slowed significantly. She set up a group called ‘reading champions’ specifically for the identified pupil group, using ideas from the National Literacy Trust, and encouraged the older children to lead reading sessions at lunchtimes. This was so popular that she extended it to breaks and before school. As a result, the reading ages of the pupils in the identified group increased at the same rate as those of their peers, as did their confidence in reading. 

  The National Literacy Trust is pleased to see our resources mentioned in this context and broadly welcomes the report as a key component of the current debate around literacy in formal settings across the UK. 

Tags: Children, Early Reading Connects, Early Years, Early years sector, England, National Young Readers' Programme, Partners in Literacy, Policy, Reading Champions, Reading Connects, Reading The Game, Schools & teaching, Talk To Your Baby, Talk for Writing, Words for Work, Young People

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