On the same page: a whole-town approach to reading

The pandemic has confronted every school in the country with unprecedented challenges. Most have been able to count on the help and advice of a Trust or local authority. But schools in Blackpool had another pillar of support – the community literacy project championed and project-managed by charity Right to Succeed and launched two and a half years ago to address the low reading abilities of many 11 to 14-year-olds in one of the most deprived towns in the country.

The project, co-funded by the DfE Opportunity Areas programme alongside significant ongoing contributions from trusts and foundations, rests heavily on the advantages implicit in a place-based approach to improvement. By combining the insights gleaned from data, investing heavily in staff CPD, sharing best practice locally, and providing a consistency of implementation that hasn’t always been available in previous initiatives, the programme aims to harness the efforts of a community of schools to address a challenge that all face.

Intervention variability

It’s a similar story at St Mary’s Catholic Academy, says its Assistant Headteacher and KS3 Literacy Lead, Becci Jones: “We’ve put in place audio book resources and tried to weave together some of the other things we do normally – such as Bedrock, the vocabulary intervention – to try to keep things ticking along during that 30 minutes daily. But like Bernie we have struggled to mobilise other types of intervention we would normally do. For lower ability reading students we have tried to use the Meeting function in Google Classroom to connect those students with the learning support team.

“We did work with staff just before we went into the last lockdown about reading from screen to try to think about how much text to share with different groups of students, so remote learning this lockdown has been far better than it was in the first lockdown. But engagement remains a concern for us.”

Karen Lewis, the Lead for English and Literacy at Educational Diversity, the town’s pupil referral unit, agrees that the situation has improved markedly since the first lockdown: “We now ensure access to four to five hours of live lessons in English, maths, science and PSHE weekly on top of the lessons we put out using Google Classroom. We also found we couldn’t deliver all the interventions we wanted to remotely, so we try to work with the most vulnerable in school. So we have a mix of everything going on – face-to-face teaching, live lessons and the remote learning platform.” All of which has resulted in impressive student engagement figures of 80% – though Karen says they vary by centre.

Firm foundations

Bernadette underlines how beneficial it was that the Blackpool schools had a well-embedded, whole-school literacy strategy before the pandemic hit. “It wasn’t just about any of our schools having a reading programme in the morning. It was also about embedding those long-term curriculum changes, to ensure all subjects had a focus on reading. And that wasn’t done overnight. I think our schools have rethought the curriculum and revamped it to ensure it’s more rigorous and that all subjects have a strong emphasis on literacy development.”

Before the project started, Blackpool hadn’t suffered from a lack of literacy initiatives. The problems rather were the lack of a joined-up community-wide approach, inconsistent investment in staff training and any long-term consistency. “When we first started off on the journey there were an abundance of transactional interventions aimed at supporting targeted cohorts of pupils,” says Paul O’Neill, Chief Programmes Officer at Right to Succeed. “And while there will always be a need for impactful interventions, especially for pupils with specific needs, and some of those interventions have been very successful, what we’re really seeing now is a cultural shift across all the schools where every child in Key stage 3 is receiving a high quality literacy offer .”

Schools across the town are now being far more forensic in their approach to literacy development and focusing on doing fewer interventions, but implementing the selected research-informed approaches really effectively, says Paul. “In the past there were so many interventions that people were apprehensive about stopping any of them because they weren’t sure which were working.”

Another problem, he says, was that expectations were unrealistic – that the interventions alone would solve the literacy issues within the schools, when in reality they are only part of the long-term solution. Paul believes what’s different about the literacy project is the significant investment in professional development, the whole-school approach to reading and the local shared endeavour: “All the schools are going on a collective journey, with an unwavering commitment to learning and sharing what has and hasn’t worked.”

Variability of student performance

In common with the experience of teachers elsewhere, and in line with our initial analysis of trends nationwide, Blackpool’s schools have witnessed student progress as well as frustrations during lockdown. “We’ve noted some really positive progress,” says Karen. “It wasn’t nearly as frightening as I had feared. Almost three-quarters of our students made progress in their reading ages – some by almost two years.”

Karen puts that improvement down to the heavy lifting done by the PRU on literacy before lockdown. “It’s down to the fact that prior to lockdown we’d changed the timetable to put in place reading time, the fact that reading became a real ethos across the school, the fact that on the remote learning platform so many of the activities involve reading. The focus on reading didn’t change during lockdown. It was a whole ethos across the board.”

“The NGRT testing meant we had that baseline and were able to see where the biggest gaps were,” says Becci. “Interestingly, at St Mary’s the Standard Age Scores of our Year 7s into Year 8s remained quite stable. It was the older year groups where we started to see a drop off in reading performance – in Years 9 and 10 particularly, and with boys more than girls, with FSM more than non-FSM students. So NGRT was really helpful in September in allowing us to see who needed help and putting in place the necessary interventions.”

Priorities post-lockdown

Now Blackpool’s schools have returned to in-person teaching, what are the priorities for literacy? “Ethos and routine,” says Becci. “We want to get students back to reading for 30 minutes each day as soon as possible. We’re making sure the book they will start with is a book they will enjoy. Re-inducting them into their reading routine will be crucial.”

“It will be the same for us,” says Karen. “Getting them back into the routine of form-time reading. We’ll also carve out some enrichment time in the afternoon for lots of wellbeing interventions – allowing students to meet and to talk to people. We’re trying to cover as many bases as we can and adapt where necessary now the students are fully back.”

Bernadette says South Shore’s focus will be on supporting those students who she thinks have suffered most during lockdown. “We’ll have to dedicate some real legwork with our stanine 1 and 2 students, who I feel have really suffered in the lockdown, a) in terms of engagement, and b) in terms of meaningful interventions via the screen. So that will be our main priority.” She also says that while most departments have embedded disciplinary literacy, others need more support. “There is still some work to do with some faculties– on how to tackle literacy barriers within their classroom.”

But Heather says some of the lessons learnt during lockdown they will aim to keep. “One of the things we’ve noticed is that some students who are typically really hard to reach and engage, they won’t often set foot in school, are really keen on live lessons and remote learning. Over 90% of these students have been engaged. The blended learning approach is really important for them. And we may well continue with that if it’s possible.”

All secondary schools in Blackpool, including two all-through schools and the pupil referral unit have been involved in the project’s journey to date, and the collective endeavours of Armfield, Aspire, Ed-Diversity, Highfield, Montgomery, South Shore, St Mary’s, St George’s and Unity will be called upon to catalyse the reading recovery efforts across the town as Blackpool embarks upon its aspirational new 10-year education vision and strategy.