Words for All

Four years ago, Bolton Learning Partnership, an ambitious education collaboration consisting of 28 secondary schools and colleges, approached Whole Education because it was concerned about the poor literacy of white British boys in the city’s secondary schools, some of whom had been previously high-attaining students.

“The immediate cause for concern were the changes to GCSE exams,” explains Lisa Ling, Director of Secondaries at Whole Education, “and how it would affect these boys, particularly disadvantaged students. But the partnership also wanted a programme that would not only have an immediate effect but a long-term, sustainable impact too.” The aim was to deliver a programme that would make a real, long-term difference to young people’s language and literacy skills and that would “become part of a school’s DNA”.

The Bolton Learning Partnership was determined to avoid the literacy project being a short-term or one-off extra that had been typical of many interventions previously, says Lisa. “It wanted a programme that could be built from the ground up and that involved schools supporting other schools. So, yes, it required a project that would improve literacy for these boys, but it also wanted a collaborative project that meant all 28 schools in Bolton that took part shared responsibility and offered support to all their young people.”

Core elements

There are three core elements to Words for All:

• The first is immersion in the best research on vocabulary, reading and language interventions. This also involves support and advice from recognised experts in the field such as Alex Quigley, David Didau and Sir Tim Brighouse.
• The second is understanding why some students are not improving as much as you would like. What are the social, emotional and psychological barriers that may be holding them back? Is it a lack of confidence, low self-worth, or something else? “We found that a lot of the issues with the boys in our first project in Bolton were tied up with identity,” explains Lisa. “They weren’t improving in many cases because they didn’t necessarily want to improve. Their dialect and vocabulary were tied up with who they were and the social setting in which they lived.”
• The third element is implementation. “Most well-intentioned plans fail because implementation is poor,” says Lisa. “Any successful project not only has to be well planned but that implementation leads to sustainable change too.”

Successful implementation

Words for All works on a triad system. There are three phases to the programme – the launch with mentors and NGRT to understand a school’s context, identify appropriate students and write a proposal in the autumn, followed by implementation in the spring term, which involves recording what works best and feedback from project mentors, and impact and evaluation in the final term.

In school, the project is based on three key people – an SLT lead, an English lead, and a lead in another department. The model allows for feedback, reflection and replication between departments, with the aim of promoting cultural change through staff development across the entire school.

This pattern is repeated at the local level – the programme is designed to harness the power of community networks and to capitalise on a sense of place. Every school is part of a virtual network of three, with new entrants being able to rely on mentoring from more established programme members.

Professional feedback

Participating schools have been impressed with the programme. “The results of Words for All speak for themselves with students improving their reading age between one and three years over a six-week intervention, says Allison Cowan, Assistant Vice-Principal at Smithills School, Bolton. “NGRT has been instrumental in helping us to measure this improvement and at better informing us of specific student needs… It has been a phenomenal tool, not only to evidence improved reading ages, but to better understand student needs and signpost personalised interventions.”

“We use the NGRT test to make sure that intervention and teaching is really incisive and ‘impactful’ and that no student is left behind,” adds Rebecca Dann, Assistant Headteacher at Sharples School, Bolton.

Education expert Mary Myatt is incredibly supportive of Words for All: “It’s absolutely tremendous this work… The work that comes of out of a collaborative process is always richer and deeper than if we’re trying to do stuff on our own. It powers up professional learning. I think the care and the thought that the Whole Education team has put into this is absolutely phenomenal.”

Mary points out that the quality and power of NGRT was an especially attractive feature of the scheme: “What particularly impressed me about it was not just that it provided robust and reliable data to inform practice but that it is highly adaptive, and so when the children were being tested or checked they are not taken to a place where they are going to feel like failures. I think that is a subtle but important element of this. It provides us with useful information without making the children feel diminished in anyway.”