Leading literacy
Graham Tyrer

Graham Tyrer, deputy headteacher at Nicholas Chamberlain Technology College in Warwickshire, explains how a focus on literacy and leadership helped turn the school around, bringing it out of special measures and achieving the best results in its history.

For schools facing challenges, getting literacy and leadership right is especially crucial. In 2000, our key stage 3 results in English showed 51 per cent reaching level 5 or above (about the same for science and mathematics). In GCSE English, 45 per cent achieved grade C or above. The school had just been placed in special measures and I was appointed to help raise achievement.

Now, with a new head, the school is out of special measures and in March this year, we had a successful Ofsted inspection. The school has gained Technology College status, and is leading a National College for School Leadership Networked Learning Community of 15 Warwickshire schools. English results in 2004 were the best in the school's history, rewarding the effort and patience of staff: at key stage 3, 76 per cent reached level 5 or above; in GCSE English, 56 per cent gained grade C or above. In addition, there was a 100 per cent pass rate at AS and A2. Ofsted's comments on our literacy work were revealing: "exceptionally well led".

In circumstances such as ours, it is essential to have a supportive, proactive headteacher and Lesley King is exemplary in this role. Key to the team have been the excellent assistant headteacher for key stage 3, Colin Bradley, and head of English, Janis Kirk. All of us share the following values:

" raising achievement depends on students having very high quality literacy skills at all levels
" whole school literacy planning, monitoring, evaluation and review must take place inclusively
" staff must feel excited about teaching literacy and confident enough to take risks.

Planning and monitoring played an important part in securing these values in practice. We designed a sequence of whole-school training sessions to both inform and involve staff in developing teaching strategies. Over three years, we have delivered training on high-quality writing, information skills, oracy strategies and accelerated learning, linked to further training on target setting and assessment for learning.

A range of 14 voluntary training sessions throughout the year further explores each of these. In addition, our 'Teacher Enquiry' programme invites each member of staff to work with colleagues on classroom-related learning research and a significant number of staff have chosen literacy related topics. All training is connected to formal Key Stage 3 National Strategy training and Colin Bradley ensures that implementation is managed effectively and the extent of classroom impact is monitored continuously.

We want staff to feel part of a connected narrative of professional development that builds over time. Therefore, writing training links to reading by focusing on non-fiction skills and references schemes of work identified by subject teams as key to raising standards. The link to students' work is essential: by trawling work regularly, tracking students and observing lessons we are able to show staff where the common literacy weaknesses are across the school and how these are changing. A formal whole-school literacy worktrawl takes place three times a year and the results are fed back across the school. Subject and year teams then commit to teaching core cross-curricular entitlements in each year group.

At the heart of the process is building students' own leadership capacity. We believe all students can be taught leadership skills and use a number of methods. For example, we target approximately 30 students in Year 8 who use their influence negatively around the school and, as a consequence, are about two levels away from their average point score median. The majority of these students are boys. They are invited onto a high-profile five-term leadership training course called Learning to Lead. In a year group of 300, this represents what we hope will be a critical mass percentage: if one in 10 highly-influential students begin to use their leadership capacity positively, this helps raise the attainment of others who enjoy following their example.

It seems to work; in Year 9, the chosen students achieve higher value-added test scores than students who had similar results at key stage 2. More importantly still, the two year groups who have completed the leadership training so far have achieved the highest percentage in the school's history, reaching level 5 and above.

In essence, it's about being inclusive and seeing literacy and leadership as part of the core entitlement for the whole school.