LITERACY

1. LITERACY ESTYN: A strategy and guidance for inspecting literacy for pupils aged 3 to 18 years September 2011

2. Why? • What? • How?

3. Why? • Slow progress in improving standards of literacy over the past ten years and plateauing results over the past five years. • Significant differences in the performances of boys and girls. • Variations within schools and across local authorities. • Low results in PISA. • Too many pupils and adults in Wales with a weak grasp of the basics.

4. What? At all key stages • A lack of widespread recognition that literacy is more than the single subject of Welsh/ English, but is a group of competencies, which pupils need to acquire if they are to be successful learners in both school and adult life. • All teachers do not accept responsibility for developing pupils’ literacy skills in all areas of learning.

5. What? • Lack of forensic use of performance data to compare school performance with others and by LAs for monitoring and challenging schools. • Insufficient use of teaching styles that develop pupils’ thinking, including questioning, planning and problem-solving skills.

6. What? At all key stages • Not enough success in meeting boys’ learning needs. • Lack of challenging learning tasks for the most-able pupils. • Insufficient systematic tracking of the progress of pupils who are involved/have been previously involved in intervention programmes.

7. What? At all key stages • ensuring schools adopt effective ‘assessment for learning’ approaches that enable learners to understand fully how well they are doing and what they need to do to make progress; •  improving the quality of pupils’ reading and writing skills so they can apply them competently in work across the curriculum;

8. What? • insufficient identification and support for potential talent amongst pupils from less advantaged backgrounds who may be at particular risk of underachieving; • few strong and influential PLCs to share and improve learning and teaching practice; and • ensuring the literacy strategies and procedures of all schools and LAs take full account of effective literacy practice.

9. How? • Literacy is already a mandatory line of enquiry in all inspections. • Estyn’s strategy and detailed guidance for inspectors. • Major and minor approaches.

10. The key tasks for inspectors are to judge: • whether all pupils have the reading and writing skills needed to access the whole curriculum; and • how well the wider curriculum itself develops pupils’ literacy skills

11. Inspection Framework • In the Inspection framework, the most weight is given to literacy skills, as these skills underpin all elements of pupils’ learning. • Inspectors will focus in particular on the skills of reading and writing • The main focus is on outcomes for pupils, in terms of their standards of literacy and ability to use their reading and writing skills across the curriculum

12. An essential Toolkit for developing literacy (Carmarthen Literacy Strategy 2011 – 20013) • An effective and vibrant literacy environment to develop oracy, reading and writing • Provision that is experiential and developmental • Explicit teaching of oracy, reading and writing through shared, guided, individual and paired approaches • Ensuring learners are aware of purpose and audience in a range of texts across the curriculum • Immersion and modelling to develop oracy, reading and writing • Good whole school synthetic phonics teaching • Explicit teaching of reading strategies • Oral rehearsal before writing. Say it. Write it.

13. An essential Toolkit for developing literacy (Carmarthen Literacy Strategy 2011 – 2013) • Speaking frames and talk for thought • Ensuring that all teachers and learners know and can use the language features and text organisation of different text purposes • Learners are made aware of transferable skills in language: one language supporting the other • Ensuring that the principles of assessment for learning are understood and embedded so that planning is linked to assessment • The assessment of learning, as in tracking and progress, is rigorous