The Sounds-Write Podcast

Episode 13: Cultivating a Love of Reading with Gemma Pierson

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In the thirteenth episode of The Sounds-Write Podcast we hear from Gemma Pierson, headteacher at Princecroft Primary School in Warminster, UK. Gemma discusses the literacy strategy that Princecroft have implemented across the school and talks about how her team cultivate a love of reading amongst their student. Enjoy!

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Laura:

Hello and welcome to the Sounds-Write podcast. I'm the host, Laura, and in today's episode I'm talking to Gemma Pearson. Gemma is the headteacher at Princecroft Primary School in Warminster, UK. Gemma talks about the carefully designed and rigorous literacy curriculum that has been implemented with great success across the school. I hope you enjoy the episode. Hi, Gemma, it's lovely to have you on the podcast.

Gemma:

Hi, Laura. Thank you. It's a real honour to be on today. Yeah, looking forward to it.

Laura:

Yeah. So could you start off by telling us a bit about your professional background, please?

Gemma:

Yeah, okay. So, as a child, I always knew that I wanted to teach, and I graduated in 2008, spent about six years initially teaching in North Yorkshire and did three of those as SENDCO before moving to the Midlands. I did a deputy headship there, where I led English for the first time, which was when I kind of truly realised that English was for me, and that was the route I wanted to take. My second deputy headship was at Prince Croft, where I am now in Wiltshire, and I was deputy for seven years before recently becoming head in January. And I led English then and wider curriculum, as well as a little bit of SENDCO and that kind of thing, really. So yeah, as well as that, though, I've been quite heavily involved in delivering training and that's both in house for our own teachers, but also other schools locally and nationally. We're a Sounds-Write training school here, and so we've led courses in that. Taster Mornings, for example, as well as we've done loads of training around curriculum and behaviour as well. And more recently I joined the Ramsbury English Hub. So, the English Hub Schools programme as a literacy specialist. So, I've been supporting other schools as well in our local area with their Sounds-Write journey.

Laura:

Brilliant. Thank you. And congratulations on your role as head. So you spoke at our recent symposium on speech to print, which I absolutely loved your talk, and when I watched it, I was like, we've got to get her on the podcast. So, yeah, I've asked you here today to discuss some of those topics that you talked about in that talk, and you told us a lot about your literacy curriculum at Princecroft, so I'd love to hear more about that for anyone who didn't come to the symposium. And about what drove your team to implement that kind of holistic view of literacy and what that looks like in practise and how it's evolved. That was a big question.

Gemma:

Yeah, it's a huge question. It's one that we get asked quite a lot as well, because so much has changed in the seven years that I've been here. When I arrived, we had quite a cross curricular approach at a time where subjects were all linked. So, you'd perhaps have a topic on something like chocolate and it lasts for twelve weeks. They went on for far too long. You'd do a bit of melting in science. You'd design a chocolate bar wrapper, maybe an actual chocolate bar in DT. You'd read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and there was all these links. And the idea was that it was really fun and really engaging. And the reality is that those links are quite tentative and the children don't remember very much. By the end of it, everybody's sick of chocolate. All they can remember is eating it. And the actual learning that you want the children to remember isn't what's left. And that's what we call that episodic memory, isn't it? You're remembering those experiences, you're not remembering the learning. And so the very first thing we so, as I've said, we're a Sounds-Write training school and Sounds-Write came first for us. It was a big wake up that children were going to be able to we wanted every child to be able to read and so we put Sounds- Write in place first. But alongside that was the reading diet, that reading offer, and that entitlement for every child and making sure that was absolutely right. So before any other area of the curriculum, we had Sounds-Write, which had the greatest impact ever. And then we started to build our reading curriculum and we chose the texts that were going to form our reading spine, and that came first. And they were texts in their own right, like good quality text in their own right, not just because it was a teacher favourite or anything like that. And then in terms of links, we would structure the rest of the curriculum around that in some instances. So, for example, in history, if we had a text that was set in World War II, so we have Letters From the Lighthouse in year five, we would ask ourselves, what's the key knowledge that children need to have to be able to access that text? And so then we started to have the idea of chronology. We'd read The Lion, the Witch And the Wardrobe in year four, we'd do a World War II unit, then we'd do a geography unit on Europe, then we'd come back to Letters From the Lighthouse so the children could link all of that learning together and have the background knowledge needed to access the text. It's really quite complex and we've tried to map it out in so many ways and it's really difficult to put on a piece of paper, but there is a strong rationale for why each unit is in the place that it is. And so it's not cross curricular, but there are really strong, rich, meaningful links to build schemas, to build wider understanding for children. And that comes back to Sounds-Write too, because we teach classics as our language, so Latin predominantly, and when we're looking at Latin and Greek roots and we can bring that back to Sounds-Write approaches. Lesson 15, for example, where you're really analysing the etymology of a word, where that comes from, and the roots that children can use in different contexts. But when we bring that back to our reading curriculum in year five, the children read Beetle Boy by M. G. Leonard. And within that text, the word'bioluminescence' comes up a couple of times. And without that background knowledge, a word like that, it's really difficult, isn't it, for children to, first of all, read it and second of all make any meaning from what that word is. And it's our job, isn't it, as teachers, to be explicitly teaching that vocab, but where there are those rich links, it's really important. Another example is in Skellig by David Armond - archaeopteryx. So archaeology, they can make that link to old and the children are fascinated by it. And whilst we only teach classics in key stage two, even in reception, when they do their space topic, they learn that astronaut means star sailor, and it's really quite poetic, isn't it, that sailor of the stars. But children love words and so it's less of a cross curricular approach, but making sure that the literacy is like a driver, if you like, so word level, but then also that enjoyment of text and that ability to read. We also make sure that there is reading in every subject. So there's a session in all of our science lessons, all of our art lessons, where it's not about learning to read, but now we're reading to learn. And there's a session called Everybody Reads. It might be a whole comprehension text higher up the school, but it might only just be a paragraph. It depends on what the focus of the lesson is, really. But the fact that reading features in all of our subjects before, we would never have considered that art might have an element of reading to it, but it's had the biggest impact.

Laura:

Brilliant. Yeah, I've been reading Closing the Reading Gap recently, and that talks about the learning to read and then reading to learn, and it's not something I'd really ever considered before, actually, that's a skill in itself is learning how to unpick texts, to understand particular subjects and get different things out of different texts. And I think what you said there, you said that it was quite a complex process and it sounds it's, I think, quite an amazing thing to do to be able to map the kind of whole curriculum out in that way. So hats off to you.

Gemma:

Yeah, I think it had to be overtime and you have to dedicate enough sort of staff time to it as well. But what we say to all of the schools that come to visit us is we did not do that all in one go. As I said, we set the reading spine first, but then we took a subject at a time. It wasn't like we then did the rest of the curriculum, so we started with history, we spent probably about six months making sure that the progression was right. Then we looked at geography, how's that going to fit in over time because it's been a work in progress of about seven years and you're never done, are you, I don't think.

Laura:

Brilliant. And as you mentioned there, you know, literacy is not just about learning to read and write or word recognition, as we know from, for example, Scarborough's Reading Rope and a whole host of other literature. The skills associated with comprehension, for example, are vital for becoming skilled readers. You know all of the top half of the reading rope and it sounds like this is also at the centre of your approach to literacy, as well as putting Sounds-Write first, of course. So how do you make sure that students are learning those skills that make up that top half of the reading rope?

Gemma:

So, first of all, I think teachers need to be knowledgeable. They need to know what the reading rope is and that features in lots of our training, lots of our staff CPD, but also the simple view of reading quadrants as well, by Gough and Tunmer, because I think sometimes we can just see children as those that can and those that can't. And actually there can be very specific reasons as to why children struggle and we've got to be forensic and we've got to know exactly why they're struggling and not just put them in a group with everybody else that struggles for extra support and intervention. Because if it's not right and it's not tailored and specific, it won't have impact and then that's a lot of time and money wasted and the children aren't getting better as a result. But I think you're absolutely right and as the literature shows us, reading and writing has there are so many elements to it, it's like a massive plate spinning act. And for children that are right at the beginning of that novice expert continuum, they're having to juggle so many things and the goal for us is getting automaticity with those really key important things that you just want to become. Yet, as I say, automatic, really. So the decoding, word recognition and handwriting in their writing as well, we don't want children to have huge working memory overload because they're focusing on those things. You can only lock that comprehension and that understanding really once those things are automatic. So that's a huge part of it, first of all, and a commitment, like a relentless commitment to making sure that that's not holding anybody back. But also another thing is not assuming anything, and that sounds really silly, but when you hand a child a book, we don't assume that they at first know that they have to turn the pages from left to right. We don't assume at first that when you say turn to page four that they can do that, or if you say turn to page 20 that they're not going to turn over every single page in order to get there. We don't assume that children can skim or scan text, which are two different things, and it's about teacher knowledge and it's about making sure that teachers are very precise in their instruction and that everything that's modelled is of the highest possible standard. If we model excellence, like what we show you is outstanding, what we expect back is outstanding from you. And so there's loads about that culture, those expectations and teacher training for sure. But I think, as I've said before, we built our curriculum around what we wanted our children to be able to do, what we wanted them to be able to know. And it's a knowledge based curriculum, so much so that we talk about procedural knowledge rather than skills. So declarative knowledge, knowing what and procedural knowledge, knowing how. And we've got a map of what that knowledge looks like all the way through. And we also make sure that we're doing those low stakes regular quizzes as well to make sure that children have retained that knowledge. Lots of our children at Princecroft come in well below the expected standard for their age when they start with us in reception. And so we've mapped out a vocabulary progression, we've mapped out sentence stems, as in our language structures as well, that we teach children at certain stages. There's a crossover there with Talk for Writing, which we do use. We have changed it slightly over the years. But again, like I said, that really clear map of what children are going to learn by when and also when that is reviewed, when does that come back, when do we get to retrieve and practise and really embed that learning? So, with the vocabulary, we know for every unit in every subject exactly the words that they're going to be taught, we know exactly which words they've encountered before, which ones they're learning brand new. And then the expectation with oricy that we expect children to speak in full sentences. Because if we can say it, we can write it. If we can't say what we want to write then actually that internal dialogue we're having in our head with ourselves about what's going to come next is really difficult to get out on paper if we can't articulate it in a sentence. Comes back to just a real focus and awareness and intention of every teacher about what they want to get out of every part of learning. So that it's really clear nobody is winging it. I trust our staff, I don't have to go around over monitoring as such. Of course, we do check that things are at the standard we want them to be, but it's more about consistency, and it's more about enabling teachers to be the best that they can be. In terms of the background knowledge, though, that children need to have, because it's not just vocabulary they fall down on or being able to formulate sentences and speak with clarity. There's also background knowledge. So for a lot of our children, again, they come in without having a huge array of wide experiences. Not all, but there are some that for sure are lacking in some of those experiences you would expect most children to have had. So we have something here called our eleven by eleven as well, which is part of our personal development offer, but also plugs huge gaps in that wider context understanding. So it links to the curriculum, too. One of them is that they've read over 40 classic or contemporary pieces of literature. One of them is that they visit sites of historical significance. So we take all of our children to Stonehenge. It's just up the road, but loads of them have never been. The Roman Baths is another one, Hampton Court, when they study the Tudors. And we do things like most schools will take their children at some point to the seaside. But ours going back to that chronology and that structuring of units. We teach the children in Year Two about Mary Anning as part of their history work. Then they visit the Jurassic coast and go fossil hunting and visit the Mary Anning Museum to consolidate that knowledge. But then they move on to a geography unit on coasts, because then they've got real life firsthand experience of being there and seeing like, Durdle Door and the formations of rocks and things. And actually there's then that schema that joined up learning across a sequence of things that they've experienced. So, yeah, cleverly sandwiched between key learning that we do in school, and there are loads of other ones as well. We take them all to sing at the O2 in London for Young Voices. Yeah, lots and lots of different things, really. But loads of those experiences are providing that background knowledge where we can tap into with children. Remember when or you remember last year when we did this? And that's really important, too, is for teachers to be able to make those connections across year groups, across subjects. And the idea of building a 3D curriculum, almost.

Laura:

Yeah, I love that 3D curriculum. That's brilliant. And I think what you were saying earlier about vocabulary and all of those kinds of things, that actually children might come into school without as rich a vocabulary as some of their peers. And I think traditionally that was thought of as the kind of the parent's job or the carer's job to do that. But actually, I think it's brilliant that your school have really taken that on, as it should be the school's job as well, and part of the curriculum, even. It makes me think of, actually the Phonic Screening Check this year contained the word 'tailor', for example. And it's basically things like that, that if you've never encountered that kind of vocabulary, how can you be expected to read words like that?

Gemma:

Yeah, exactly. So that there is that, and children obviously approach what they call alien words in a very different way, don't they? Because they're thinking, actually, I'm allowed to use any plausible sound spelling correspondence. If they don't know the word, they're likely to do that, aren't they? It's really important that they do know the meaning of words. And 'currant' was in the year six spelling as well, but actually the fruit not the one that would probably come up with not like the current in water. So it was tricky.

Laura:

Yeah. So you've talked earlier and you talked about this quite a lot at our symposium about the concept of a reading spine. Could you tell us more about what that is and how that works across the school?

Gemma:

Yeah, absolutely. So, starting out in nursery, so we have our own nursery on site here, which we're actually reducing the age to two from September. And that looks very different because, of course, when they're that tiny, you just want children to be immersed in stories. And so we do have core texts. They do learn Talk for Writing style text maps, so that they're internalising language structures and stories, but yeah, and we map out the key text that we absolutely want children to know. You can't leave reception without... Sorry. You can't leave nursery without knowing The Very Hungry Caterpillar, for example. And that's something that they do every cohort that comes through. But I think the nature of story time and things in EYFS is that you don't just have different texts terminally even weekly, but daily. And we've started building things like Books We Know Boxes, where children can really become familiar with some of those favourite stories that have been tailored to children's interests, as well as what we want them to know. But from years one to six, it looks much more formal. And we have a reading spine of seven main texts per class, and every year begins with a picture book. And the rationale there is that it levels the playing field when you're getting to know a new teacher. We don't want any children to feel like something's too difficult, and it makes it about book talk and about setting the culture for those reading lessons that are going to continue throughout the year. And there's a focus on inference, which they can be using picture inference for as well. Those text to text links, text to self links, text to world links. So building the child as a reader, and nothing is a silly answer, nothing is wrong. As such, we're teaching them things like navigating a text, we're teaching them about noticing in some picture books, where the illustrations are so beautiful and so detailed, each time you look, you notice something else. And it's training them that text is like that too. If you go back and reread, you'll notice something else. And so it's building all of those expectations, but with a text that isn't overwhelming and is quite fun. But there's a real method to that and the reason why we've put that there, the things that we're not taking for granted that they can just do, then we move on to six texts, six main texts, one per term, and those are studied in depth. And to build those, that was a lot of fun. We pulled the whole staff team together when we were building our reading spine, and I had some ideas about what I would want to be on there, but then consulting with that and actually we had teachers that would go against each other with justifications as to why this one should be there over that one. And we made it really clear it wasn't about teacher favourites. And there had to be a reason for including the text that we did, because these aren't things that are going to change every year. Every now and again, we might add something and swap something out. But there have been minimal changes in those seven years that we've had our spine. We used Doug Lemov's five plagues of the developing reader as well. So we looked at our choices. Have we got examples of archaic text? And we have, we've got Alice in Wonderland, we've got A Christmas Carol, so some really quite challenging texts in there. We've also got things like resistant text. He's got five things that he sets out and like complex in terms of plot and then just that use of dual narrative where it's from different narrators, things like that. And we just made sure that there was exposure to all of those things, because if children don't encounter them with us, they go to secondary school in a place where they can't really engage with Shakespeare, because archaic text is brand new to them and that's really difficult for them to understand. So that's certainly part of it. We also looked at making sure there was a range of male female authors, male female protagonists in our text choices, as well as historical, cultural, lots and lots of different genres, really, and different reasons for including the text that we have. But whilst there are 42 core texts that don't change very often, we've also started to introduce linked text that can be used in tandem, like alongside. So you might be doing some direct text to text comparison, or just a one off day where there is a picture book that links to the text that you're studying. And so in total, that's 294 texts, high quality texts that are used from year one to six. And children love making text to text links as well. So if I go back to The Lion, the Witch And the Wardrobe in year four, we link that back to The Worst Witch, which they do in year two. When we get to year six, we come back to both of those again when we read The House with Chicken Legs, because then we look at the folklore around Baba Yaga, and then we move towards looking at what a stereotypical witch is compared to the presentation of the White Witch, for example, who is not in a black pointy hat and doesn't have a cauldron and those sorts of things and how different authors present that characterization in different ways across different pieces of literature. And to add another layer to that, we study each text with a lens because we go with what the children need in that cohort, but also with what the text lends itself to. So holes we do in year five now used to be a year six text. And it is quite complex in plot because you've got three storylines going on at the same time in holes, but it's actually quite easy to read. But the lens there is Crime and Punishment, which is probably quite an obvious one. For the House with Chicken Legs. We look at Legacy and the idea that Marinka, her destiny, is set and she's trying to break that mould and change that. In A Christmas Carol, we look at Redemption, which we link to PSHE and things like that as well. And we look at Boy in the Tower in year Five as well. And the lens for that text is Hope. And in terms of those linked text, if I give you an example of what that looks like, if Hope is the lens in Boy in the Tower, and we're examining that as we go and building examples of how that's woven through the story, we also look at the lyrics, the song lyrics to Hope by Natasha Beddingfield. We also look at the classic poem Hope is a Thing with Feathers by Emily Dickinson. And then we link back to Pandora's Box, which is one of our writing units in year three because Hope is obviously the last thing that comes out of the box. And everything's joined and linked, but not in a way that we have to rush in like chocolate and do everything all in one go. It's carefully sequenced that we come back and that sort of retrieval and that spacing between things is planned and deliberate. So it's like golden threads, really. They're not tentative at all, but they're just really rich, meaningful connections. And it builds those schemas like I was talking before, and improves that background knowledge and that understanding.

Laura:

Brilliant. And 294 texts covered. That's amazing.

Gemma:

That's just in reading, too. So in writing there are more.

Laura:

Wow.

Gemma:

Yeah.

Laura:

So topic that I've been quite interested in recently and that we've been talking a lot about internally at Sounds-Write, is the kind of anxiety and the trauma that children experience when they've struggled to learn to read and write and tutors and teachers will know that's that face that children have when they're faced with reading and they've had struggles in the past, that anxiety that they associate with reading and writing. So it sounds like you place a huge emphasis on encouraging a love of reading. So how do you go about fostering that in those children who've struggled the most?

Gemma:

Absolutely. And I can talk now and rave about how they love it now. So if I go back a few years to when we first started to introduce this model, I sort of shared a year five, six class with one of our teachers here. And there was a little boy who'd never been part of the class reading lesson. He had a separate intervention based on where he was because the feeling was he couldn't access what they were doing in the classroom and we kind of made a bit of a radical decision around that. I was like, well, he's obviously excluded from that. And so from this unit, he's in class every day. And what used to happen was he would still have his intervention at a separate time, and the TA would read him the pages that had been read in class. And so, actually, for him to come into the classroom, he was full of ideas. He could talk about what had happened and the links that he could make. And for the first time, you could almost see his face when he picked up the book, and he sort of looked up, and it was as in, I can't believe I'm here and I've got to read this. But it wasn't a daunting look at all, it was as if he couldn't quite believe that he could be part of it and this was a child who there were some behaviour issues with and they almost just disappeared. Not completely, but the dramatic improvement was incredible just by having him in the room, accessing what his peers were accessing and enabling him to do so. But I don't think in terms of now, I don't think there's anywhere you turn in our school where you wouldn't see a book. So that's the first thing, is that it's everywhere. And we want to develop that intrinsic. Love of reading. Not just because you get this certificate if you do it, or because you have to. It's got to come from a want to and the fact that it's enjoyable, genuinely. If you ask our children in school now, their favourite lesson, a lot of them would say reading and we know that through pupil conferencing. It didn't used to be that way, for sure and it does help that the teachers are so passionate about it, in fact, doesn't just help, I think it's essential, it's building that culture over time and level... Yeah, I talked about levelling the playing field earlier. Everything you say is going to be taken seriously. Sometimes there are right or wrong answers, but we want every child to feel like they can be successful and to feel that what they have to offer is important and valid. So in daily reading lessons, everybody is part of that lesson. Any additional support now for any child never happens in that reading lesson. They belong there and. Their views are respected. And Aidan Chambers talks a lot in his book. It's a really long title, begins with Tell Me, doesn't it? And he talks a lot about book talk, but book gossip as well, which is not the formal right wrong answer stuff. It's actually just have you read that? What did you think? That kind of informal, just chat around books with children and nobody is ever too busy to talk to a child about a book. But phrasing questions as well with 'tell me' or 'what do you think?' It just opens that up. Then you don't feel as put on the spot. You don't feel like there's going to be a right or wrong answer. And it encourages that open dialogue without that judgement. But talk is so rich. Children are seated in talk partners and as a rule, we would order our children from the best reader to the weakest reader, cut that list in half and marry them up. Because that you don't want to be pairing two brilliant readers together with two really weak readers over here. But equally, you don't want to be putting your best with your weakest either because that gulf is too wide. So we try and match those pairings really carefully so that there is an element of support within those discussions. But we also do consider our personalities as well, of course. And they do move quite regularly too, but that's really important, that dialogue. So it's not about picking on people, but they do loads of discussing in partners, then we can go and it's almost shared views then and so and so forth. We do pairs to fours where they share in bigger groups, so lots of it is discussion based. We also like Aidan Chambers' likes, dislikes, puzzles and connections. And that really changed some children's views around reading because they were allowed to not like something. They were allowed to say, 'I didn't like that really, because' whatever reason they have or the puzzles, 'it's okay not to know.' It's okay that we're not sure yet and we need to read more to find out. And that's a different way of looking at things for the children, I think. But they are hooked when you go into reading lessons now, it is pure joy. We use the whiteboards really well as well. So just like a working whiteboard. And I've seen teachers do beautiful things like give the children postit notes and they're adding clues onto the board as they go and they're building a picture of a plotline and what's happening. If it's a mystery, my goodness, they've got clues that they're piecing together and they're just so animated about it. And if you happen to walk in when they've just discovered something where the penny drops and they make that link to something they've read previously, it is joyous and very loud, but in a really controlled way because they're just really excited about what they're reading. But yeah, it's easy to say we want them to love it, but we've got to walk the walk and if teachers don't make the time for it and teachers don't prioritise it and are championing reading, then you don't get the result that you want and every moment counts. If they leave, it sounds really dramatic this, but if they leave reception below the expected standard, they haven't met the good level of development. We are saying, or research is saying that those children will experience higher levels of mental health difficulties, will struggle to find a job and will altogether have a worse quality of life as a result when they're adults. And I don't think that's okay, we've got to do everything we can to prevent that from happening. You mentioned earlier about parents and how it's viewed as the parents job. Well, yes, there is an element of you want that to be a language rich environment at home and that they're read stories at home, but if they're not, and also the fact that we see them for the best hours of the day, it's our job to do that and if we don't do it, nobody else will. We want 100% of our children to achieve that and so unless there's a profound special need that prevents it, that's our expectation. We don't want that self fulfilling prophecy to keep happening for those children and we can't use phrases like'oh, they're just not there yet' or'they'll catch up'. They won't. Research shows us that they don't. So the interventions that we're putting in place there's that restless urgency around the fact it won't wait and the fact it has to be daily and if something's going to give, it's not that it's there every day. So children all have their daily Sounds-Write lesson. If they need additional it's on top of that. And they're heard read daily if they're behind as well. And everyone is trained to read with children. Even our office staff have done the Sounds-Write training because it's important that there's just that same approach and the same error corrections with whoever it is that might be reading with a child. Looking back to the reading rope though, and the simple view of learning I said before, didn't I? We have to ascertain where that struggle is. We have to know specifically what they need help with because if we want them to make accelerated progress, we don't want to be banging on about something they can already do. It's just making sure that we were absolutely clear in terms of what they need in writing. We also introduced kinetic letters recently, which has had the biggest impact for children's spelling because they're not thinking about forming their letters, they're using their Sounds-Write. And both of those things have freed up that ability for them to focus on the main thing really. We do all the usual stuff as well. Like it sounds like I'm talking loads about lessons and interventions and things. We still do all the Book Week and the Reading for Pleasure. We do Reading Breakfasts, but it's about that they want to fall in love with the daily bread and butter, not just those exciting things that you do once in a while, because you won't change intrinsic beliefs with just a few one off events. We do something really nice, actually, that's only just started to feature in our week. We do a Reading for Pleasure Assembly. The whole school go into the hall and teachers take it in turns to read a picture book. And I've had people say, 'oh, how do you pick something that's suitable for everybody?' Even year six in July are loving reading assembly, and it is a picture book and it's not at their reading level, but it's lovely and it's another way of showing how much we value it.

Laura:

Brilliant. I love what you said there as well. I remember when I was at primary school doing things like Book Week, and you'd come in dressed up and actually there were some other children who would come in dressed as a book character, but they would never read. And so it's all well and good doing that kind of one day where you celebrate reading, but I think this approach of building it into everything and building that love of reading every day is amazing.

Gemma:

Yeah.

Laura:

So I think lots of literacy leads or headteachers are going to be listening to this podcast and wondering how they can follow your lead on this. So what's the key piece of advice that you'd give to those people who are looking to improve their approach to teaching literacy across their school?

Gemma:

Sure. First of all, implementation planning, so putting down some key actions, but then organising that into a bit of a timeline. We use something called five by five a lot. So what's going to be different in the next five minutes? And that's about mindset. What's going to be different in the next five days? So in the next school week, what can we do differently? Will it be that somebody's going to trial something in their class? So nothing huge, then? What will be different in the next five weeks and the next five months? Which is like half a school year, isn't it? And then the next five years, where are we getting to? And if you map out those things with a bit of a chronology, a bit of a timeline to it, we have to realise that we can't do everything all at once. I know that when I've spoken to people about the journey that we've been on and we are not there yet. We've got so much that we need to tweak that we need to develop. But it's a number of years, and it's been a number of years of a real commitment from everybody and some considerable time and a huge amount of effort, of course. And you can't put that in place quickly. So you have to be involved is the first well, the first thing is the implementation planning and having that sense of time. The second is that you have to be involved in it as a head. It's not good enough to just delegate that to a member of your SLT or an English lead because you're already kind of passing the back to somebody else. Yes, it's not the head's job to lead English, but it is the head's job to oversee the priorities in the school. And so you have to be out there, you have to be in classrooms, living and breathing it and walking that walk. As I said before, it's all right saying we can talk the talk, but we have to show the children how much we value reading as well as the head. You've got to be trained and knowledgeable. Like, if it's a head that hasn't done the Sounds-Write training and you're a Sounds-Write school, do the training. There's no other way to know than to do it yourself. But then knowing your team is really important. Knowing their strengths, making sure everybody's trained and making regular time for CPD so that you can keep coming back to things. It's like anything teachers are so busy and they work really hard. It's not that anybody's doing anything wrong, but if they've got so much to think about, things slip and we have to keep coming back to it. And it's not so much monitoring as it is that continuous CPD and that continuous we're growing together as a staff and over time, that commitment. We're going to get better and better. Factoring in things like visits to other schools. We're always keen to have people to come and visit us here, but we've been out to a number of other schools too. And I think that's important because sometimes stepping out of the building, seeing it in practise somewhere else, can just refresh some things for you and you can go away and reflect on that. And not everything you see will be things that you want to do, but it's really important that we do that as well. So empowering the English leader, getting alongside them, not bearing down on them, trusting them, but having that idea that you're a team, regular catch ups. It's so important that the English lead has time to fulfil their role too. It's massive and there's so much to yeah. Having Sounds-Write or your effective SSP in place is paramount, and then everything moves from there. If you're at the beginning of a journey, it's keeping it in perspective. It can feel like you're standing at the bottom of Mount Everest and looking up, can't it, when you've got so much to do but keep those actions really short, but manageable and measurable. But keep coming back to that goal, keeping it in sight. And that's where we're going. Yeah, I think that's the biggest thing really not letting it fall off the radar. When I've been in other schools, I've heard so many things about being time poor or that we haven't got enough money for that, or we can't release Mrs so and so at that time for coaching. Is it really can't or is it that we haven't thought outside the box? Really? If we're prioritising it, we have to make it happen. If it's going to make a big difference to the children and their outcomes and what they achieve, then we're going to do it regardless. We're going to make it happen. And if it's tricky, let's get out the timetable, let's look at who we've got, let's look at... Call your business manager in, let's have a look at the finances. Is there anything we can move around? Because this is a priority and we have to make it happen because it won't wait. It's about changing the narrative, and if we don't change the narrative, then the outcomes won't change either. So, yeah. In terms of today, though, what would the takeaway be? Yeah, what will make the biggest difference tomorrow? Do that.

Laura:

Great. And last question, what are your must read books for those heads.

Gemma:

In terms of reading and reading curriculum... Because we've read loads here around cognitive science and sort of wider pedagogy about retrieval and things like that. And that's really, really important, too, but specific to reading the Art and Science of Reading by Christopher Such. He's all over Twitter as well. That's great. Closing the Reading Gap and Vocabulary Gap. You mentioned that earlier, didn't you, Laura by Alex Quigley. They're really good and also quite easy to access to. Tell Me by Aiden Chambers. It's quite old now, that one, but it's got some really good stuff in there, really great activities that are useable. You can dip in and out of that one as well. Reading Reconsidered by Doug Lemov is great. It's quite heavy going. He's secondary and American, but the five plagues of developing readers is really good and we pulled that out. And things that there are techniques as well, such as leapfrogging in text and stop and jots and things like that, that we took from him that are really useful. And for vocabulary Bringing Words to Life by Isabel Beck. I know, et al. Three authors there, isn't there? But loads of people talk about that one, and that was quite key for us when we were thinking about developing our tier two and tier three vocabulary offer.

Laura:

Lovely. Thank you so much. This has been brilliant. I've really enjoyed recording this podcast with you. It's been amazing to hear about everything that you do at Princecroft. And I know that you said earlier you welcome visitors. So if anyone based in the UK wants to go and have a look, I'll link the website below in the show notes.

Gemma:

Yeah, that'd be great. Thank you so much, Lara.

Laura:

Thank you. All right, bye.