Fluency is undergoing somewhat of a revival in England. It has long been the poor relation, the magnolia paint let’s say, of reading; a general stage the ‘typical’ reader will attain when s/he reaches about a quarter past seven years old. Prior to this, children are slow readers, they are laborious decoders; they are – after all – learning how to read. Or are they…?

Don’t we already focus on fluency? Surely we aim for children to become fluent by, say, end of Year 2..? Well, one perception has been that children ‘become fluent’ after they have learnt how to read. In other words that whilst they are learning the myriad of GPCs, alternative spellings, and sufficient HFW they are bound to be slower readers. In fact children can, and indeed should, be fluently using their skills at any stage of reading. Think of fluency as a continuum, a sliding scale – rather like the old-school Hi-fi control sliders if you will. When a toddler is starting to recognise the golden arches of MacDonalds, at first the logo may need pointing out, then they may be about to shout out what it is just as the adult says, then they may get in there first, until finally they call out spontaneously ‘MacDonalds!’ In this sense, a really fluent recogniser would see an ‘m’ letter shape and call out MacDonalds, regardless of context. When a nursery-age child thinks they’ve recognised their name on a coat peg, when in fact it’s another child’s name, who just happens to share the same initial letter, they are at least fluently recognising a letter shape. This is known as the ‘logographic’ stage of reading (Frith 1985), and is a crucial step on the road to understanding and using phonics in the typical sense.

It’s like the NOFAN assessment principle (Never, Occasionally, Frequently, Always, Naturally), when we look for not just ‘frequently’, or ‘always’ using – say – full stops, but naturally doing so, to the extent it is effortlessly done and without need for proofreading. The brain is then freed-up to think of higher-order things, such as the content in writing or reading, for example, what I think the character is going to do next based on what has happened so far, things I know about him and clues the author has laid out about setting and time of day. I can connect, infer, and osmose into that world a little. Conversely, without fluency the brain is far too taxed to take in, retain and consider what is being read, let alone make inferences from it.

“Creativity floats on a sea of automaticity.” Pollard (2014)

But why is it so important? Isn’t fluency a desirable extra, something that’s more about entertaining an audience, performing and showing how much you understand about ’doing the voices’ than anything else? Wrong. It’s so much more. And it’s now been shown to actually help children become better decoders (Cunningham 1990; Whalley & Hanson 2006; Tunmer & Chapman 2012; Holliman, Wood & Sheehy 2012) and therefore potentially also has the power to reverse some types of literacy difficulties.

The commonly agreed key factors of fluency are:

• accuracy
• prosody/expression (pauses, intonation)
• automaticity (or rate)

One of the really effective ways of increasing capacity for retaining what has been read (in other words, comprehending) is to teach children to ‘parse’ their reading. This involves them ‘scooping up’ in chunks of meaning or phrases, and becomes especially vital the longer the sentences become. Teaching children to read in phrases of two, three or more words helps them to scoop up and load in swathes of meaning, without putting so much load on the memory, and helps the brain focus on the main ‘big picture’ elements. Readers who are reading at a word-by-word level are unnecessarily challenging their working memories and comprehension and will struggle to have capacity left to infer and deduce. Or…they may be ‘stuck in the mud’ with slow decoding/sounding out because they are under the impression that this is what we want them to do ALL the time. If after all that slow brain-work they can still retain what the message was, they are likely either doing this for our benefit or to keep control in their ‘safe zone’; they could probably cope with speeding up and should be prompted/taught to do so. (This is where easy-reads come in handy.)

One rather exciting thing that fluent reading does, is to get the brain ‘firing on all cylinders’. This means that for children with a poorer working memory, attention-span etc, who may be at risk of reading difficulties, this can help to effectively pump up those weaker areas. New, faster, stronger neural networks can be laid down making retrieval, organisation etc much easier.

“Neurons that fire together, wire together”. (Donald Hebb, 1949)

This is why some intervention support focuses on ‘over-learning’ so that knowledge and skills become habituated. Opportunities to revisit previously-read texts let you feel good about your successful reading and there is also something rather neurally clever about being able to unconsciously predict (not guess…deduce!) what is coming up. The eye and voice come together in space and time; brain pathways reach out to connect up, creating information superhighways.

But some children just read slowly… don’t they? What if there were some main, identifiable, controllable differences between more fluent and less fluent readers? What if more fluent readers tended to be given books to read that were generally easy to decode and therefore regularly had practice at becoming more and more automatic and accurate, while less fluent readers were given books that were too hard?

Number one controllable factor: check the book is the right match for decoding ability and therefore accuracy (NC 2014, Ofsted 2014). A quick Running Record/Miscue Analysis carried out by the class teacher will identify not only whether the book is the right match but also (crucially) the next steps for precision teaching, foci for guided/individual reading etc. For more information on this valuable tool, see PM Benchmark Kit, and further guidance on matching texts in the HfL Guided Reading booklet.

National Curriculum 2014 is clear: if word reading is below age-related then children must be helped to catch up quickly, including using closely-matched texts. They are still taught age-related comprehension skills in whole-class situations, and on the texts they read, but the texts they read must be closely matched. This can mean taking the decodability/difficulty level down a notch or two. Don’t worry. Trust what you know about learning and you will see them ‘prune back to steam on’, as they remember what it feels like to understand, enjoy, successfully problem-solve and to regain some automaticity. For some children this simple revelation unlocks the ‘thrill’ and ‘will’ needed to improve the ‘skill’.

Number two controllable factor: emphasise, and teach, aspects of prosody…

“The book is talking to us.”

I can still remember so vividly the conversation that really brought the Simple View of Reading to a new reality for a vulnerable six-year-old reader. He had done a good job of decoding, even working well on alternative pronunciations, but it was still mud-like, waiting for the book to tell him the answers. He had grown from depending on others to help him, to now the book; he needed to know he already had every resource he needed within him to be a successful, active, reader. My targets for him: to re-read, putting it all together, pausing at punctuation and adding more lilts in his voice for the longer sentences to make sense.

“Does that make sense?” …led to a confused face.

“What would you say if it was you?”…still confusion.

“The book is talking to us. If you were the book, how would you say this?”

He got it. He knew what I meant. His eyes widened though, as if I had asked him to disobey a school rule. He had sounded out, he had told me what the words said, but that seemingly wasn’t enough for this rather persistent pedant sat next to him right now. Glancing up at the print-out of Superman with his laser vision from our early focus on steady eye-pointing, he looked at me and had another go. Better.

Okay. Time to get radical. I covered the book and had him repeat the sentence after me, phrase by phrase, rehearsing the voices, lilts and swoops. The spark grew in his eyes. With a warmed-up oral rehearsal fresh in his mind I revealed the page.

“Try that again.” I said.

Whoosh. Scooping almost in hesitant disbelief at times, he read. He went on, gobbling up the page as if it was a feast of tumbling visions and no longer words. For a moment we were there in the book in that moment with the character.

Number three controllable factor: increase opportunities for developing automaticity.

“Easy reading makes reading easy.” (Tim Rasinski)

When re-reading texts or reading easier texts, children are then freed up to comprehend, infer, internalise new vocabulary encountered etc. It has also been shown – along with letter-name knowledge – to have huge correlation with spelling accuracy. Brooks (2013) showed that a fluency and comprehension-focused intervention had a bigger impact, especially for disadvantaged children, on spelling ability at Y6-7 than one based on discrete phonics alone.

“Spelling and reading build and rely on the same mental representation of a word. Knowing the spelling of a word makes the representation of it sturdy and accessible for fluent reading.” (Catherine Snow et al, 2005)

Other ideas for developing automatic decoding and improving rate or pace:

• Repeated readings of books or passages (could be timed)
• Take turns reading page/sentence etc so they hear a fluent model
• Reader’s Theatre/playscripts
• Poetry reading
• My turn, Your turn – get them to repeat a sentence the exact way you read it, and if it’s not the same, re-model and ask again. Get them to reflect: “Did you sound good to listen to?” “Did it sound like talking?”
• After decoding ‘work’: “Now put that all together so it sounds smooth/good to listen to/like talking.”
• Encouraging decoding into chunks before going down to individual phonemes, e.g. use of syllables, morphology
• Finger frame a line: “Read to here, like talking.”; “Make it sound good to listen to.”
• Have them use a Speech and Language Therapy ‘phone’ (try TTS) so they can hear themselves amplified. [These can also be good for those struggling to sound out when spelling, e.g. confusing vowel sounds.]
• Try recording them and playing back for review as above
• Practise spelling words that were hard to read, and will occur again frequently. If using a ‘Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check’ method, ensure you have them look for the tricky bits and self-check after each go.

References:

Bodman, S. & Franklin, G. (2014). Which Book and Why? Using Book Bands and boo

Join our next cohort of the Reading Fluency Project

‘Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.’

Maya Angelou – I know why the caged bird sings

Highlights, key learning and juicy tips from the session – written by Penny Slater

• Begin each reading session with a fluency exercise (aka a song!). Why? It’s reading! When children sing a song with the words in front of them, they are accessing great material to develop their fluency. Also, children love to sing (as do most adults)!
• Make good use of poetry. Many poems are short and accessible and can do wonders to boost the confidence of weaker readers.
• Fluency instruction sits between word study and comprehension, hence the reference to it being a bridge. Some children can traverse that bridge by themselves, whilst others need a helping hand to get across. To begin the journey, children need a good foundation with words. Word Ladders are a great way for children to get playful with word-based learning, whilst at the same time bolstering their vocabulary knowledge. Resource: Daily Word Ladders
• The goal of phonics instruction is to get readers to the point where they do not (consciously) need to use phonics! Aim for ‘automaticity’ – reading words with no apparent mental effort so that we are releasing mental resources for the task of reading comprehension.
• Phrasing matters - children who read words within sentences word by word will have a hard time extracting meaning. Pay particular attention to children who voice generic words e.g. prepositions, or perhaps determiners (for example, a child who reads the word ‘the’ in isolation from the words around it when there is no good reason for that emphasis).

Instructional tools for teaching fluency:

• Model fluent reading: in order to become fluent, you have to know what fluency sounds like. The answer lies in reading to our children.
  • Top tip: When discussing a text with the children, be sure not to just talk about the story, but how the story was read to them!
• Assisted reading: reading alongside the children in unison so that they can hear your voice and follow your lead.
• Practice:
  • Type 1: Wide reading practice – encouraging lots of reading of a range of different genres and text types. As opposed to little and often; aim for lots and often!
  • Type 2: Deep reading practice – repeated reading of the same text until adequate fluency is achieved.
  • Top tip: To encourage repeated re-reads, invite children to perform the text they have been practising to as many ‘Lucky Listeners’ as possible. Each Lucky Listener can sign the back of the text. PS. Dogs make great listeners (Cats? Not so much!)
  • Further reading: Repeated Read Alouds May Lead to Reading Success for Young Children
• Focus on phrasing: Teach high frequency words within phrases, rather than as individual words (see point above about the word ‘the’). Use text marking to guide a phrased reading. Aim for the children to ultimately ‘perform’ the text without the text marking to guide them – by this point, the phrasing should be internalised.
  • Further reading: Building Fluency through the Phrased Text Lesson, Timothy Rasinski, Kasim Yildirim, James Nageldinger

Tim ended the session with a poem:

The Definition of Success by R W Emerson

To laugh often and much;

 to win the respect of intelligent people

and the affection of children;

 to earn the appreciation of honest critics

and to endure the betrayal of false friends.

To appreciate beauty;

to find the best in others;

 to leave the world a bit better

whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a

 redeemed social condition;

to know that even one life

has breathed easier

because you have lived.

This is to have succeeded.

Thank you for this inspirational session, Tim. You certainly earnt our respect, as well as our gratitude.

Ways to get in touch with Tim:

www.timrasinski.com

On Tim’s blog site, you will find a blog written by Penny Slater and Kathy Roe about the HFL Education Reading Fluency Project: strategies and outcomes.

Twitter @timrasinski1

Tim posts three lessons a week on Twitter

Tim is author of award-winning text: Mega-Book of Fluency

September: return to work; note the chill in the air; resist the urge to swap too many anxiety dream stories; present at ResearchEd. Those last two may be related .

Last year I had the privilege of presenting at the ResearchEd national conference with Megan Dixon (@DamsonEd) and the sadness of not presenting with Sinéad Gaffney (@shinpad1), our absent co-author. There we considered the dominant approaches to reading instruction in primary schools, weighed them up against each other, and found that they are all quite handy actually. We are rather keen on this outcome. It’s comfortingly old fashioned for teachers to have a range of teaching approaches to draw upon as they refine their instincts and make the daily choices that only they can make. The year before that I had spoken about reading and grammar and the links cover those sessions sufficiently well to be getting on with.

This year, my session was titled 'What do we mean when we talk about reading (and writing) fluency?' The session took as its focus the following key strands:

• defining reading and exploring some conceptual frameworks that begin to account for the underlying/constituent processes that come together in proficient reading and on the journey towards it;
• a brief and tentative exploration of some of the potential causal factors in dysfluent reading;
• a brief, far less tentative exploration of how policy and online discussion of reading can sometimes be less helpful than intended;
• a recap and update on what we mean by reading fluency, why subtle distinctions in how this is defined can have serious consequences, and some suggested approaches and reading to support the development of fluent reading;
• a discussion of some recent work exploring how to make the links between reading and writing more seamless for our students, so that work on reading fluency more efficiently informs work on writing development – composition and authorial intent in particular.

There are too many slides to share here – it really was a packed session – so I have cherry picked those that are either central, or that seemed to draw a lot of interest.  For the sake of space-saving, I have grouped slides and then provide a short commentary below them.  Please feel free to get in touch if you would like further details or a PDF with a more comprehensive set of slide images.

The session began with introductions and a credit to key collaborators and fellow reading warriors Megan  and Sinéad who have done much of the thinking that informs so much of this work.  It’s important to credit, especially in reading where messages sometimes seem to be bent out of shape almost as quickly as efficient word reading.  

As in all the sessions that I share with Megan and Sinead, reading was defined to some degree here, as that seemingly simple term (“it’s just reading, isn’t it?”) can mean different things, in different contexts, and according to different perspectives.  Note the shared thread of complexity: Stuart and Stainthorp take care from the outset of their book to make clear that whilst key components of reading are necessarily outlined and discussed in isolation, reading is an integrative act.  Think of Scarborough’s reading rope and the way that it cleverly illustrates the increasingly interwoven threads of reading as the developing reader moves towards proficiency.

 Incidentally, Stuart and Stainthorp’s book is an extremely helpful title, which really should be receiving more recommendations, relative to some of the books enjoying greater currency on Twitter and other platforms, particularly given its attention to the whole journey of learning to read.  Also recommended is the paper cited in the right-hand slide, a well-structured and comprehensive overview of much of the most up-to-date thinking around reading.

Given its influence in the literature, and in the way that it underpins the curriculum, there had to be a discussion of the Simple View of Reading (SVoR). First, we explored how the SVoR works as a conceptual framework.  We discussed how there are two components at play – language comprehension processes and word recognition skills – and that both have to be at play for reading to happen.  It is a multiplicative model.  If one aspect is missing, the effect of multiplying by 0 holds true here.  The act of reading, as defined for the purposes of this session, has to include both the act of decoding words (or "lifting them off the page” as often seems to be said) and understanding what the words, phrases, clauses, sentences (or lines and verses, say) come together to mean.  I have tried to word that carefully, but I am equally mindful that this is a blog and not an essay.  A significant part of my 2017 session was spent on exploring how much mental work is going on in order to read the words, integrate meanings across word and phrases, and then to make similar links across sequences of sentences, across sections or paragraphs, and ultimately across texts.  It should never be forgotten quite how staggering  this routine achievement of reading actually is in terms of human evolution.  Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid remains possibly the most beautifully written account of reading, in these terms.

To further dig deeper into reading, Kate Cain’s very helpful diagram was used.  Megan, Sinead, and I particularly like to use this model as it is non-threatening (some diagrammatic representations of reading  are not so digestible on first sight) and more particularly, because it works with the simple view of reading . Note the top floor of the house. However, this representation is carefully constructed to work up from the ground floor with the implicit understanding that each successive storey rests on those lower down.  No ground floor?  You won’t get a good night’s sleep in the upstairs bedrooms.

I’ve spent too long thinking about the Simple View of Reading over the past four years.  In the course of that thinking, I have been able to observe less-than-effective reading practice that, on occasion, has happened because of the simplicity of the framework.  There is a surprising degree of scope for misapprehension.  Simple is sometimes best; sometimes it is simply misunderstood. Rather than take up too much more space on this here, let me get to my central point.  We want as many of our children to achieve fluent reading as humanly possible, and as efficiently as possible.  It is increasingly agreed now  that fluency is not simply rate and/or accuracy, but also incorporates expressive, phrased reading. That is, the reader demonstrates prosodic awareness and in doing so attends to meaning as they read, adapting the way in which words (and word parts)  are stressed, grouped, pitched and more, to reflect the dynamics of spoken language and, where necessary, the voice that is called for in the sad part of a story, or in delivering an important speech.

 Or the breathlessness of a packed ResearcEd session.

If fluency rests on an appropriate pace, and accuracy – often discussed as components of word reading – as well as prosody – more obviously related to meaning - then fluency extends across both dimensions of the Simple View of Reading.  I’ve tried to represent what I mean here:

The yellow arrow indicates how fluency is often discussed but even here we have a problem.  To be fully accurate in terms of pronunciation (or phonological representation) of homographs (words with the same spelling, but different sound patterns and meanings)  we often need to draw upon the context in order to read the word accurately.  So for example: “To read this carefully will lead you to rhyme ‘read’ and ‘lead’ with need”.   That use of context or syntax forces us beautifully, and hopefully, smoothly into the realm of language comprehension, and ideally, language comprehension on-the-run so that reading is smooth, responsive and only occasionally needs a “go back and check that bit” moment. To wrap up this section, it might mean that  the fluency ‘room’ in Professor Cain’s house might need to be extended into the ‘Language Comprehension wing’ depending on how fluency is being defined. 

I would just now like to share a link to a paper by Kate Nation that is happily available for free access and that goes into far richer detail about why the Simple View of Reading may benefit from a degree more complexity: www.tandfonline.com/. Let’s just say this paper has scratched some longstanding itches, and move on.

The next section explored the research around difficulties in comprehension.  This is a complex area that I cannot hope to do any kind of justice to here.  However, I would flag that all too often, those that might be vulnerable to comprehension difficulties are not identified until texts become sufficiently complex and require integration of more elements, of increasing complexity. It worries me a great deal when I read that you 'cannot teach comprehension' on social media.  I think that is hard to argue with if you take that statement very literally.  Comprehension is the product of reading and you cannot directly teach what form(s) that takes, or doesn't take, in the reader's mind. Nor should we.  Reading is not the transfer of a single idea or interpretation from writer to text, text to reader.  These impressions, or the gist, or the mental model to be more complete, sit, unhelpfully or helpfully depending on each reading experience, in the reader's mind.  We can try to dig it out, unearth it, bring it to the surface, but our tools are not always as sharp as we would like them to be and things can be lost, distorted, or broken in the process of excavation.  There is also the issue around what we even mean when we use the term 'comprehension'.  Are we talking about what a reader comes to understand of a text, or something even bigger?  Less helpfully, are we talking about a form of reading exercise, much like SATs, in which reading is followed by a series of questions, often organised to reflect assessment domains?

If we are talking about the latter, we may not be attending to the sorts of activity that help to develop confident, actively responsive readers.  Wayne Tennent  has spoken and written (see his 2015 book) on the tensions between where research suggests we might best direct our energies, and where energies are often directed largely due to the messages inferred from accountability measures for reading.  I discussed this tension in the session: how we should look towards developing 'automatic' or 'online' inference-making (occurring in the act, across a given text) over 'controlled' or 'offline' inference-making, promoted by  exercises that occur once the reading is done, such as a SATs style practice exercise. Back to my concerns about whether or not we can 'teach comprehension'. We could discuss this over the course of endless blogs, but life is short, and blogs are meant to be too.  However, there are plenty of things that we can do to support those that might, or do, struggle with comprehension and I worry that we might sideline these needs in pursuit of yet another simplistic view of reading. Having said all of  that, we turned to the practical. One such aspect of our work that should be supportive of enhanced comprehension is to work to develop fluent reading and to provide opportunities to experience what it is to read with fluency.

In order to provide practical solutions, the slides above formed part of a longer suite of around 12  slides that were used to explore time and cost-efficient strategies for developing fluency in reading. We deliver a range of exciting Reading Fluency CPD and projects now across KS1, KS2 and KS3.  You can find out more details here. Some of the headline approaches are detailed below.

The session then moved on to explore some of my more recent work on the links between what we can learn from some explicit work on reading fluency, and how this might complement our work on writing composition.

As you can see from the top left slide, I have adopted the Möbius strip as a symbol of the seamlessness with which we want the development of skills, knowledge, and understanding in both reading and writing to inform each other.  They are inextricably linked, reciprocal sets of processes and are both shot through with language learning. Yet some children (and adults) are quick to decouple them to varying degrees without realising that they have done so.  One of the propositions of the session was that perhaps we could take what we have learnt from our work in developing fluency (read it like you mean it)  and then take a step back further to ask our young writers to consider the needs of their intended reader (write like you mean them to read it).  Donald Grave’s once referred to “selfish” writers and asked that we work to guide the development of “selfless writers”.  Writers that keep their intended audiences firmly in mind, not just in terms of sometimes tokenistic, or even statutory talk of ‘audience’ and ‘purpose’ but in terms of envisioning how the reader will be served, or toyed with, or manipulated, or informed,  or simply kept interested.  In this, it also builds on a programme of extended CPD that my colleague Jane and I have been developing. 

Back to the ResearchEd session, the slides acknowledge the importance of developing automaticity in both spelling and handwriting, if only in terms of motivation to write. Please note these are huge factors for many, if not most, reluctant or wary writers.  The central theme I then went on to develop related to chronology and cohesion, and how some carefully sequenced work on these aspects of writing might help to develop our young writer’s own sense of what it feels like to write fluid text.

As in some of my earlier blogs, the influence of Myra Barr’s and Valerie Cork’s The Reader in the Writer (CLPE, 2001) extends into this work.  One aspect of this influence manifests in the encouragement to focus not just on a linear written journey from A to B to C, but a journey that might meander (purposefully of course) forwards, backwards, or sideways in time.  Or that perhaps lingers just a little longer here or there, providing the right kinds of detail and space for the reader to conjure up a more fully realised mental model that draws upon fluent skilled reading: making inferences, speculating, and receiving cues: this is a sinister part – please whisper; this is action – please shift gear.  As such, we have strayed into the endlessly fascinating realm of narratology. We also talked about some of the science involved in negotiating such ideas as readers, but this blog has probably more than outstayed its welcome.

I wish I could spend longer outlining what we covered in the session but I am heading towards a deadly word count.  If you have unresolved questions or points that require further clarification, please do get in touch with the Primary English team.

Kirsten Snook, English Adviser and course trainer for ‘Becoming a Highly Effective Subject Leader’, reflects on what makes the biggest differences to increasingly busy subject leaders and with increasingly tight budgets. Drawing on feedback from course delegates, she outlines some top tips that have helped them this year to really see the fruits of their labours.

As we near the end of this academic year and look ahead to the next, it’s a good time for subject leaders to stop, take stock and reflect on how the year has gone. For subject leaders, often the measure of your impact is through pupil outcomes… percentages, data, ITAFs, SATs etc. But don’t forget all the other angles to your role – the leadership skills, deep subject knowledge and getting strategic when improving teaching and learning. All these things have a massive impact on pupil outcomes too. In this bite-sized article, I summarise the key thoughts and reflections of the fantastic subject leaders I have worked with over this past year, in the hope that some practice-sharing tips help you to get in the mood for next year.

1. Don’t try to fix everything at once!

You may feel that everything needs sorting at once, but it is so much better to do one thing really well and to be able to sustain the change than to scrape the surfaces of many things and find nothing embeds. Remember what conscientious creatures we teachers are – we will never feel finished, no matter how many late nights we put in. On our subject leader training we ask colleagues to identify the one thing they want to see a change in over the year, and then weave that through everything they do, from action-planning to coaching.

Ensure you are happy that you are seeing change in a key aspect, that this is across the board, well-embedded, well-evidenced and that this will be sustainable. The changes you see will improve that area of practice but also there will be transferable benefits such as increased reflectiveness, openness, willingness to change, and aspects of pedagogy that can also be applied in other areas or subjects. You will also get people on board if they feel they are not having millions of demands made of them by the one subject leader… they will want to ‘get on your bus’ and come with you!

2. Do some ‘quick-win’ monitoring activities

Yes, a thorough trawl of pupil books or full-on lesson observations are sometimes necessary, especially at the beginning of the year or when you’re new to the role of SL, or even when doing a full ‘stocktake’ of how English currently fares in your school. But sometimes, and once in role, you know what you’re looking for or checking up on, and so you can make targeted use of your time. Ofsted prefer Learning Walks these days, which is a great ‘3-in-1’ way of getting a flavour of lessons, having a quick flick through some books and talking to the children about their learning. We would normally call these activities Lesson Observations, Work Scrutiny and Pupil Voice. How much nicer ‘Learning Walk’ sounds though! There will be times you need to share difficult messages – make this one of those times when your approach can be less judgemental and more developmental. It helps everyone feel more relaxed, respected and able to go about their usual brilliant business. Subject leaders often comment on how freeing this form of monitoring can be, and are supported throughout the course to use the proformas within our PA+ website here.

3. Don’t forget to evaluate!

Sounds obvious I know, but one of the big benefits of taking a lighter-touch approach to monitoring, as described above, is that it tends to leave you with more time to think about the ‘so what’ and the ‘what next’. You want the monitoring activity to serve its purpose of helping you to find out the strengths and improvements in the aspect you’re developing – and we can often overlook these – and the bits that could be further developed and how you know. Make sure you then leave time to think about the ‘what next’. Precisely what do you need to do next, with whom and when will you do it? That is the crucial part in terms of taking your subject forward. Would someone benefit from support with planning? Bundling in with you in your Guided Writing session?  Or even helping lead a tiny bit of a staff meeting on something you’ve seen them do well? Invest time in plotting these into calendars, annotating your action plan and you will really start to feel on top of things.

4. Walk the walk

Lead by example; if you are asking colleagues to make a change to their practice (eg adopt a new strategy) make sure you do it first. After all, it may not even work in your school – you won’t know until you trial it. The best next step is to ‘scale it up’, eg ask a friend or two to try it out for a period of time, and feed back to you warts and all. What needed tweaking to suit their style? Which tweaks affected impact and in what ways? What degree of licence/autonomy can be taken when implementing the strategy?

After this, and with a wealth of pros and cons, feedback and evaluation you’ll have considered and acted on, you are in both a strong position to roll out your change and also to know how to support colleagues with implementing it. See the Education Endowment Foundation website here for more on this process of ‘scaling up’ before ‘rolling out’.

5. Be prepared to switch between support and challenge

Yes, we want to support our colleagues (who are often our friends too), but we must remember we have a job to do. We are primarily there for the children, and if you ask any colleague who maybe feels resistant to a change why they are there, they should agree. Some things can help smooth the way for challenge though, such as the point above and things such as clear deadline dates, reminders, examples of What a Good One Looks Like (WAGOLL), and differentiating approaches to differing personalities… you know, the kinds of things we do with other, smaller-sized learners. New learning can put anyone at any age outside of their comfort zone so think about what you know works with little learners and how you can apply this to older ones. The key differences being emotional baggage that older learners may well have (“I can never get this right!”) and seeing through patronising talk (“Oh I see you’re just trying to make me feel valued”). Get genuine. Get personal. Level with them a little. Then gently let them know that everyone does need to do X, and why, and that you are there for them if they need someone to do it with first.

6. Make your action plan your friend

Oh, they can be a pain to write at first, but wow can they be useful for keeping you on track, not trying to save the world too much and also for being able to reflect on how great you actually are at your job. A tight plan enables you to do more of what matters, broken down into specific objectives and with clear success criteria and milestones. Make sure your planned actions are high value: how will you enable improvements in the focus area? We recommend the ‘actions’ section is primarily about CPD, focused on the subject knowledge or pedagogical gaps that need to be addressed and using a range of strategies for how you will address them. Tip: if it’s all about the staff meetings, think outside the box. In what other ways can you make a difference (and often a bigger difference)?

One of the threads running through this year’s Subject Leader training was about coaching a colleague in their school. They looked at children’s work, assessment information and used their other monitoring outcomes to identify who to work with and on which areas. Then, through a combination of planning support and often team-teaching too, they have helped that colleague improve their subject knowledge or pedagogy, or both.  In this way, SLs were able to really pinpoint the key changes they were seeing, celebrate their impact and to refine their own coaching skills as well.

7. Stop counting books!

No, I mean it. Stop. If you are the one counting how many books in the Guided Reading sets per year group then your talents are going to waste. Can you delegate? Are there some volunteers, or even keen Y6 children, who can do these sorts of tasks for you, once shown how? Yes, you need to keep an eye on resources and replenishment/gap-filling, but really and honestly the biggest (and most expensive) resource in a school is the human one: people’s brains. You need to reserve your precious time for working with people, helping them reflect, evaluate and move themselves forwards. My course co-trainer, Theresa Clements, reminded me of a brilliant quote:

“Leaders don’t create followers, they create more leaders.” (Tom Peters)

This really spoke to our subject leaders on the course, as all the way along they have been thinking ‘How do I enable this colleague to carry on doing X independently, after my support?’. That’s what you’re after really isn’t it? Show them your planning (for example), have a go together, now let them go it alone. It’s the same scaffolding model as when we work with little learners too: I can, we can, you can. When embarking on a piece of support always think about how you will enable them to carry on on their own; have an exit strategy.

8. Be positive

It’s not all doom and gloom. No matter how much still needs to be done, there are always green shoots of your impact if you look for them. Maybe keep a little note-book of things you have seen, times when that chat over the coffee urn has paid off and ‘thank you’s from parents or colleagues etc. It’s motivating for your colleagues – and for you! – to keep remembering all the good things going on, and it really helps pave the way for other favours you may need to ask, so remember to say thank you or well done to others yourself too.

9. Build capacity

Just as attending the BHESL course was an investment in capacity-building by the headteachers, fully participating in the course is an investment for the SLs too; investment of time, trust and commitment. It works because we weave the whole course through the school improvement cycle, helping SLs to carry out the very tasks they would be needing to do for themselves anyway but in a collaborative and safe atmosphere where they are supported to go for the hardest parts of the job and constantly encouraged to keep challenging themselves. It’s a unique course. It’s a course people always remember. I recall attending its Grandpappy ‘SLIPs’ (Subject Leadership in Primary Schools…anyone else remember that from c.2005?!). It’s the kind of course where it changes you as a leader and sets you on the right path to doing the things that matter, getting into the right habits, and developing your own skills as a leader. Who knows where it could take you in the future! I often speak to deputies and heads who fondly remember coming on SLIPs in the past (“It totally changed me” said one). Well, it has evolved, quite rightly, into something very robust, very reflective and very much geared towards the higher expectations of NC2014 and Ofsted schedules of today.

10. Plan ahead

Start thinking now about ‘what about after I’m gone?’. The real proof of the pudding about any of your initiatives, projects, or policies will be whether the impact continues after you move on. Will people forget how to do x? Will the edges be rubbed off y? Are there systems built into the school year to ensure things are not forgotten and don’t fall off the radar, or do these improvements you’ve worked so hard to achieve depend on you being there? Again, thinking about how highly effective leaders “create more leaders”, have you instilled in your colleagues some new ways of thinking, so that they have not just the enhanced subject knowledge but also the skills and reflectiveness to sustain those continual improvements and to keep the school journeying ever-upwards..? Quite often on a school staff there is another colleague who is almost as passionate about your subject as you are. Perhaps they might like to shadow you doing some of your SL role, and maybe – just maybe – they could be the one to carry the torch when you are gone.