Supporting children’s literacy development across South Ayrshire
The ReadingWise collaboration with South Ayrshire Council (SAC) is now in its seventh year - a perfect time for reflection. We recently had the opportunity to chat to Douglas Hutchison, Director of People & Depute Chief Executive, Ian Leishman, Coordinator (Inclusion) and Fiona Priestnall, Principal Teacher Inclusion (Learning and Teaching), to explore why ReadingWise has been so effective for the 52 schools in the authority.
Community Manager Caroline Shepherd looks back and summarises the successes to date from the ongoing collaboration.
In 2015 two schools in Edinburgh were piloting the ReadingWise online Decoding intervention programme. Having achieved some very promising outcomes, a teacher from one of those schools - Forrester High School - presented at an Improving Literacy in Schools conference on the experience of her young people with ReadingWise. Her passionate discourse and impressive outcomes led to SAC requesting a 5-school pilot of ReadingWise Decoding.
At a point when OECD was evaluating the improvement journey in schools in Scotland and use of data, research and evidence based approaches were identified as one of the keys to closing the attainment gap; it was a timely meeting.
Helping to close the gap in over 50 schools
This successful pilot led to ReadingWise Decoding being embraced by SAC and rolled out to all 52 schools. Initially for three years and subsequently for another three years, it is now in the 7th year of ReadingWise Decoding in the authority.
The resources are a core of reading intervention in the authority - no one resource solves all reading issues for all learners but ReadingWise Decoding is the first stop intervention and helps close the gap for many young people.
"As a structured, progressive approach to supporting children's literacy development, it has worked for us so I would have no hesitation in recommending it to other senior officers." - Douglas Hutchison, Director of People & Depute Chief Executive, South Ayrshire Council"
Communication and Training
There are inevitable challenges to working with over 50 schools which are geographically and socio economically diverse, as well as having significant variation in roll and staffing. It was critical to identify ways to communicate with schools as individual entities and to give the support needed to get the online resources used to best effect.
Our training for schools has been informed and influenced by research we carried out with the University of Cambridge and Professor John MacBeath: Reading More Wisely. In the training we outline optimal ways of embedding the programmes and then work with individual schools and staff to adjust use of the resources to suit the context and needs of the school population. This approach has evolved and improved over the years leading to an efficiently scalable but still bespoke offer.
As an organisation we are constantly looking for ways to support young people with reading difficulties - we do not believe we have all the answers but we do listen to teachers, learners and others and if we can, enhance or build new resources to help tackle issues.
From Decoding to Comprehension
Following the successful implementation and outcomes of the Decoding programme the council was keen to pilot our new Comprehension intervention programme.
Supporting young people with improving reading comprehension is more nuanced and often more complex than tackling decoding difficulties. We ultimately developed a reading comprehension intervention programme using the benefits of an online, individual approach but structured within a small group setting and incorporating comprehension strategies and collaborative discussion at its core. This way pupils bring their own understanding to text individually at their own pace with the online resources, followed by group discussion to bring the text alive.
Following development of the core comprehension programme we incorporated extracts from classical and contemporary literature. These are used both with targeted intervention groups and wider literacy groups:
"The Dulce et Decorum Est poem about WWI I did in class literacy groups, our topic last term was WW2 but it gave the children an insight into the horror of war. The children really enjoyed doing this as a group activity. I will be doing the same in December for whole class literacy with the Christmas Carol extracts. The children love doing the quizzes at the end" - Margaret Thorrat, working with P7s,Tarbolton Primary School
Delivering effective vocabulary resources
2021 was for us the year of vocabulary… We’d been researching and contemplating how to tackle the complex and fascinating challenge of meaningfully supporting the acquisition and broadening of vocabulary and used the COVID years to tackle this head on.
Having developed an initial approach we asked our partner schools to pilot the first iteration. 32 schools, including some from SAC, came forward and despite the challenges presented by lockdowns and other COVID complexities we received positive feedback and some excellent suggestions. We incorporated the best of these and in April 2021 launched our Vocab programme which has been very well received. Central to this is how pupils take the vocabulary they learn and use it in conversation and in their writing over time.
"ReadingWise really is value for money, and is a big investment across the Authority. There's so many aspects from Vocabulary and Decoding to Comprehension and the texts, and the fact that each school can pull aspects that work for them." - Fiona Priestnall, Principal Teacher Inclusion (Learning and Teaching), South Ayrshire Council
Moving forward
We look forward to continuing our close collaboration with South Ayrshire Council and invite other authorities to get in touch. I hope you enjoy listening to the voices of representatives from the Council in a series of short videos they have been kind enough to allow us to share. The mantra we hear from SAC is “we want to voice the successes and help you share these because ReadingWise really does work, we have evidence of this and other schools and local authorities should know about ReadingWise”.
If you would like to see Decoding, Comprehension or Vocab in action, please drop us a line and we can organise a 15-20-minute run through of the programme with one of our team.
