Norwood Girls' School decided to help its pupils struggling with basic literacy skills by reversing the roles; turning the learner into the teacher. Partnership consultant Elizabeth Gowing explains.

The head of Year 9 and I sat looking through the data on reading ages for her pupils. At the lower end of the cohort it was a depressing picture: 30 students, aged around 13 but with an average reading age of seven years and seven months, had made on average one month's progress for every year they had been at the school. Not only were these readers desperately underachieving, but they were slipping further behind their peers as time went on.

Our conversation took place in the first weeks of the Norwood Achievement Partnership Education Action Zone in Lambeth, south London. The Zone, funded through Excellence in Cities, had employed three teaching consultants to raise standards in English, maths and science; to reduce social exclusion; and to support transition for pupils in its schools.

As the consultant for literacy, I saw an opportunity to trial an approach to raising reading standards which focused on building self-esteem and used a model supporting partnership between schools. We hypothesized that persisting with a model the girls knew was teaching them very basic literacy skills could reinforce in them a sense of failure. The difficulties of finding age-appropriate texts to support literacy teaching of young women who read at the level of a seven-year-old meant that the texts used often offended their dignity. I planned a way to give the girls a sense of themselves as reading experts, with the only people to whom they seemed expert in comparison - children in Year 1 at the local primary school.

I designed a programme to develop the Year 9 students as 'Reading Mentors' for the Year 1 pupils. The role was introduced as a prestigious one; they were given an hour a week of 'training' in the sight vocabulary and phonic knowledge they would need and had to familiarise themselves with a series of picture books which would appeal to the Year 1 children. The training included inter-personal skills (how to show you're listening to someone, the importance of praise, how to be an ambassador for the school, what to do if a confrontation situation arises), a regular Snap game using sight vocabulary, and activities using mini whiteboards to reinforce phonic skills. Of course, all these were the skills that the Year 9 girls needed themselves, but the rationale given for the sessions was to build their capabilities as Reading Mentors. Their sense of self-worth was thus built up rather than undermined as they learned core literacy skills.

These sessions were delivered Jackie Callaghan, the school's Learning Mentor, with support from myself. Jackie hadn't taught literacy skills before but she had an excellent relationship with the girls, which made it easy to build her teaching repertoire and confidence. After every two sessions with Jackie, the girls would go for one session to the local primary school and work one-to-one with their reading mentee, reproducing the same text, games and phonic knowledge they had practised. These sessions were an enormous success with the younger children, who loved the attention of 'their' teenager, and in that environment the Year 9 pupils blossomed.

After 24 weeks of the programme, the girls' reading ages were tested again. In this short time their average reading age had increased to eight years and seven months: a year's improvement in just 24 weeks. We held a focus group to find out what they thought had changed through their involvement in the project. Some of their responses brought a lump to my throat: "I want to be a primary school teacher now"; "Now I feel good because I can read easily. I can read anything"; "When you have children and they ask you, 'Mum and dad, what does that say?' Well, you'll be able to tell them now."

The success of the project has led us to use the same approaches in a range of other contexts. We have repeated it with other Year 9 and Year 8 cohorts, shared it with other schools, and developed a programme for the original cohort of girls as they moved into Year 10. As they moved up the school we developed the role of Independent Reading Mentors, supporting them to take a similar approach but working in their own time and with younger family friends or relatives. In all these new contexts similar positive results for reading age and self esteem have emerged.

We have also developed the structure to be used by other mentors - police officers at Streatham police station and sixth formers from a local independent boys' school, Dulwich College, who now read each week with Year 5 boys.

These projects have embodied and developed our approach to partnership - a belief that we learn things best when we are helping others learn, and that this is true for police officers, for teachers, and for pupils in any phase or sector.

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