The pencil-shaped bollards outside St Boniface Primary in Tooting make it clear just how seriously the school leadership team take literacy. To help the children who find reading and writing harder they’ve bought in specialist literacy services for more than 20 years from the Wandsworth Literacy & Numeracy Support Service (L&NSS).
For the past seven years Josa Stephens, Specialist Literacy Teacher and Assessor, one of the eight member L&NSS team, has been working one day a week at St Boniface. Her main tasks are to offer:
- In depth assessment for literacy challenges including full diagnostic testing for dyslexia, a specific learning difficulty, and recommendations for onward referrals for co-occurring difficulties.
- Rigorous targeted support to accelerate literacy progress for key pupils.
- Collaborative support for teachers and TAs to ensure that specialist literacy strategies are in place to support pupils in class and with any interventions.
- Training and advice for the school community.
If pupils are struggling to link sounds and letters and falling behind in literacy, discussions will be needed on how to help them on their literacy journey. Often this will be when Josa Stephens from Wandsworth L&NSS will be brought in to help devise a learning pathway in tandem with other professional agencies including educational psychologists, speech and language therapists and occupational therapists.
“Multiple learning differences can lead to literacy challenges. A lot of our children have difficulty in other areas besides putting things into long-term memory,” says Anna Gordon, SENCO teacher at St Boniface who is hugely enthusiastic about working with Josa.
Josa currently supports four pupils one to one, taking them out of their class to work in the cosy intervention room every Wednesday, and coaches the TAs of two pupils. Josa is a big fan of using what pupils can do to scaffold what they can’t do to move their progress on. Little and often is the aim.
We prioritise spending on the service to ensure that those children who are most at risk of leaving in Y6 well below in reading and writing are supported to close gaps and become more literate.
Lisa Platts, Headteacher
Josa, as a literacy specialist from L&NSS, also helps parents at coffee mornings debunk literacy myths. She encourages parents to stick with one book, ask their child questions about the story and value the way repetition embeds skills and teaches patience, resilience and stamina. “You need four exposures to learn new words as a minimum to be able to reliably recognise it four days later,” says Josa who trained as a barrister before becoming a teacher and starting work for Wandsworth.
Anna is hugely supportive of Josa’s work at St Boniface, telling her: “Teachers love the fact you say we can adapt this lesson and make this book accessible. You come in with resources and give so much to the whole community. Our targeted students make amazing progress.”
“My personal joy is taking someone who isn’t accessing classroom learning and is withdrawing from reading or spelling activities to a space where they begin their journey on the literacy continuum. In six to nine months that child is reading and is confident. The specialist rationale for teaching and learning is evidenced based, and it works! After learning how to apply phonic knowledge and build reading fluency skills, pupils begin to express themselves confidently in writing and engage with supportive technology,” explains Josa who personalises learning during teaching sessions.
“It is vital for success with learning that these pupils build skills around their areas of interest, so if they love Lego, I will find books about Lego, or about animals etc., and try to make lessons as multi-sensory as possible, to reduce the fear of engaging at the word level. We also gradually build automaticity with common words for reading and spelling. We might have five common words, that children should recognise instantly. Those words go into the classroom twice a day to be rehearsed. Then I drip them into a short paragraph about what the child is interested in to give further weekly practice encountering these target words. Having a grasp of these most common words really makes a difference to the child’s perceptions of themselves as learners and they begin to feel ‘I’m reading’.”
It’s money well spent every single year. Josa’s impact is clear to see.
Lisa Platts, Headteacher
Patience, fun, repetition helps the students ‘get’ reading at St Boniface. “Children who have persistent literacy difficulties, need so much repetition, over and above what their class teacher can give. As a class we will look at the use of ‘its’ and ‘it’s’, when many children have got it, we can’t keep revisiting with the whole class, we need the class to keep moving on. So, if a child has a particular literacy difficulty, our words will be on their desk. It’s about getting into children’s long-term memory. For a lot of children their memory is a real challenge, and they forget. They need the repetition of words and Josa’s picture cues really help with retention,” says Anna.
“When working on phonic knowledge, which is essential for reading and spelling success, I teach children not only to recognise patterns, but to understand them. Language is a big puzzle or jigsaw … suddenly children get the penny drop moment and begin to understand language rules and be inquisitive about the language code.” explains Josa.
It’s the way students progress that keeps St Boniface using L&NSS. “It’s terrible if children leave primary school illiterate. We want all children to read and write to functional level,” says Anna. Another colleague sent a message to say, “In addition to the support and self-esteem Josa provides children, she is always happy to share her expert advice with teaching colleagues. Despite her time being very tight, she always finds a few minutes as we pass each other in the corridors, or via email to share strategies to reinforce spellings, a book choice that will work perfectly well for a student that is working at a different level to their peers, or a way to adapt a text so a child can access it in class. These insights are invaluable.”
SENCO & Inclusion Manager at St Boniface
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