Text messaging: enlisting the whole school to boost literacy

As unwelcome and disruptive as the first lockdown was, Wickersley School and Sports College in Rotherham could at least take comfort from the fact that it was relatively well prepared. “We were quite fortunate as we had already invested a lot of time in digital learning using Google Classroom,” explains Mandy Crane, Associate Headteacher at the school. “All our staff and students had been trained over a couple of years on how to use it, so they were quite au fait with the platform.” The school wasn’t able to put on live lessons during the first lockdown, but virtually all lessons were live by the time the third lockdown ended, which is reflected in the impressive online attendance figures. “Around 85% of our pupils joined online every day,” says Mandy. “Only 5% weren’t engaging online at all – between 11 and 15 pupils per year group, which is quite low.”

Wickersley is part of a 13-strong school Trust, the Wickersely Partnership Trust, based in Rotherham and Gainsborough. The five secondaries and eight primaries are responsible for approximately 7,000 students drawn largely from middle-class and white working-class backgrounds, with relatively few from ethnic minorities.

Wickersley School itself is a large comprehensive in an area of low deprivation, with just shy of 2,100 students, and is the only school in the Trust to have a sixth form. “We have a relatively low proportion of pupil premium students, around 19-20%,” says Mandy, who also coordinates literacy cross-curricula, “but quite a high SEN cohort – over 350 pupils have special educational needs, of whom 55 have Education, Health and Care Plans.” Wickersley is the school of choice for those with SEN in the Rotherham area, and has specialist autism and hearing-impaired units.

Cautious optimism

Nevertheless, the Wickersley teachers are pleasantly surprised at how little impact the pandemic has had on reading ability overall. “Our Year 7 results this year were pretty much the same as last year and in line with the national average, even though we had expected a drop,” says Halima.

In fact, she believes average and above average readers have made exceptionally good progress. “Proficient readers probably made even more progress than they may have done in the classroom because they were having to do things independently – they had to extract information and follow instructions on their own.” Though Halima also pointed out that this variation in performance – with many children coping well with literacy and some struggling – posed its own challenges for teachers. “Teachers have struggled too because while some children are racing through the work, some have been quite slow, so the teaching of literacy has been quite difficult.”

Mandy says this cautious optimism about pupil performance isn’t just felt in the English department. Teachers in other subjects, while concerned, didn’t have their worst fears confirmed when students returned after the first lockdown. “It could be because we had high engagement even if we didn’t have live lessons. We had a lot of training last year on a lot of different methods of formative feedback after every lesson. All the teachers in our school had plenty of strategies to ensure they were feeding back to students in some way and engaging them.”

Text-based boost

Conversely, online learning has probably strengthened some reading skills, Mandy suspects, because so much learning and teaching was ultimately text-based. “The push to use more reading resources as a method of teaching has probably encouraged more reading, more often, for more students.”

All of them were, however, concerned at the effect lockdown has had on weaker readers. While overall literacy has remained relatively steady, the resilience of average and above average readers has to some extent masked the struggles of those at the other end of the ability range. “This year, in Year 7 the numbers needing intervention were in line with expectations overall, but among them were more of the very weakest readers,” says Halima.

“Roughly 100 students need intervention every year, broken down into 60% need one level, 30% at another and 10% who need the most support. This year we had nearer double the number of students at the very weakest end, more of whom were girls.” And the numbers of Year 8 students needing interventions hasn’t declined, as the school would normally expect.

Next steps

The teachers are clear about their priorities now students have returned to school. “We’re really keen to get lessons started for our weakest readers. It’s been frustrating having barriers in place for our normal interventions,” says Lizzie. “We’re also trying to see if we can get more curriculum time as well because the deficits for the lower ability groups seem to be greater,” adds Mandy, “and we know that lots of interventions, frequent and often, are most effective.”

But she says that any successful literacy strategy has to be a whole-school effort. “Getting the whole staff on board is crucial. Staff have to understand that it’s not just the job of English teachers to teach children to read. Though I wouldn’t underestimate the urgency and the number of times you have to come back to get people on board. It needs lots of frequent pushes and reminders about how to do an active literacy strategy.”