Reading checklist
Literacy is vital for success in school and later life.
Students who can’t read, write and communicate effectively are very unlikely to access the curriculum and are more likely to have poor outcomes across all subjects.
Literacy in secondary school is not solely the preserve of English teachers, or literacy coordinators.
Every teacher should communicate their subject through academic language, and put reading, writing, speaking and listening are at the centre of knowing and doing their subjects.
But knowing this is the case is one thing. Doing it is another entirely.
This week’s highlights from the We Are In Beta Community will have you bridge that knowing-doing gap.
We - Schools - Are In Beta - always learning (when we make reading a strategic priority at all levels)
This week
📚 12 step literacy audit tool
🗳️ Key dates for nominations and sessions submissions for Curriculum Thinking Week 2025
💼 Jobs with We Are In Beta community members.
📚 12 step literacy audit tool
Disciplinary literacy is an approach to improving literacy across the curriculum. It recognises that literacy skills are both general and subject specific, emphasising the value of supporting teachers in every subject to teach students how to read, write and communicate effectively in their subjects.
But how do you embed it in school practice at a) whole school and b) subject level?
One tool Future Academies use in their schools - to answer part a) above - is a whole school literacy audit tool which covers the following 12 steps:
All students are tested at least twice a year for reading age
Reading data is acted upon with diagnostic testing for pupils with SAS of 85 or below
All staff use their reading age data as starting points to inform teaching
Each local area team and colleagues delivering have attended training
Fresh Start has launched and colleagues delivering have attended training
Fresh Start launched and cohort list has been shared with key staff
Reading Lead has completed phonics training and has a strategy to train and cascade the training project
Phonics-based intervention is delivered by trained staff
An age-adjusted book spine is available in the library and SEND departments for lower reading ages
All students with a reading age below chronological age have been informed and interventions are planned, resourced and timetabled
Data and reading age from key assessments are used as a result to inform intervention planning and support (e.g. Fresh Start, Lexia, ARROW)
Data is regularly exported from key platforms to monitor progress and inform and used to inform next steps (e.g. Fresh Start, Lexia, ARROW)
If you’d like to learn more about how they use it, as part of the “reading for progress” work along side their “reading for pleasure” strategy, Georgina Charles, Senior English Trust Lead for Futures Academies will be sharing how they
get all students reading
train non reading specialists
use stories to address contextual PSHE issues and teach empathy
📆 Mon 19th May
🕔 5:00pm
If you’d like learn how they embed Disciplinary literacy across the curriculum at subject level, join us for the whole series, which covers:
Whole-school reading for pleasure (Mon 19th May)
Disciplinary literacy: high leverage reading across the curriculum (Thurs 5th June)
Disciplinary literacy: high leverage oracy and vocab (Mon 23rd June)
Disciplinary literacy: high leverage writing across the curriculum (Weds 2nd July)
Strategic interventions for reading for progress (Weds 9th July)
🗳️ Key dates for nominations and sessions submissions for Curriculum Thinking Week
Members have been busy nominating colleagues and submitting sessions for our Curriculum Thinking Week conference in June 30th to July 4th.
If you’d like to join the line up, here are some key dates:
By 4th June - tell us you'd like to speak in this short form
By 16th June - share an outline of your session in this form
By 20th June – create and upload your video, supported by your SLT
w/c 30th June – conference goes live! Jump in to meet fellow speakers, discuss sessions and learn from a wealth of ideas and resources on offer.
What are you (or your team) working on that’s making the biggest difference to your students’ outcomes in your subject?
Whether it’s… reading, writing, exam prep, AI, targeting groups such as SEND or something else…
…we’d love to help you show others what it looks like in your classrooms, celebrate it and get feedback on it for you.
💼 Jobs with We Are In Beta community members.
If you want to get your vacancies seen by the 23k school leaders and teachers who receive We Are In Beta newsletters across curriculum, pastoral and more, let us know here and we’ll send more info.
Senior Leadership
Director of Key Stage 4 - The Wren School, (Excalibur MAT, Reading). Apply here.
Middle Leadership
Lead Practitioner of Maths - Gloucester Academy (Greenshaw Learning Trust, Gloucestershire). Apply here.
Head of History - Gloucester Academy (Greenshaw Learning Trust, Gloucestershire). Apply here.
Head of Maths - Yate Academy (Greenshaw Learning Trust, Bristol). Apply here.
Teaching
Maths - Gloucester Academy (Greenshaw Learning Trust, Gloucestershire. Apply here.
Support roles
3rd Line IT Engineer - The Priory Learning Trust (North Somerset). Apply here.
On a personal note.
Running a large community of school leaders and teachers is a blessing and a curse.
One one hand, the size of our network, which is now approaching 20k, enables us to draw upon huge amounts of expertise and share it with more schools than I first thought was possible, when I launched the podcast in 2019.
On the other, as the community grows, its needs become more complex and diverse. This makes serving them all a real challenge.
This then - given the limited capacity of the team - presents a choice.
Either, run a larger number of events/sessions/pieces of content, which cover objectives with more limited scope, to address the diverse needs of smaller groups.
Or we find topics which address a need felt by a large number of our members and go deep into that topic.
The latter is something we have been looking to do more of lately.
So I was delighted - for two reasons - when our Master Class Host and in house curriculum expert, Julia Quick, teamed up with Georgie Charles to go deep on reading.
Other than attendance, literacy was the single biggest barrier schools cited in their Pupil Premium spending plans when we analysed them recently.
Partnering with Future Academies on this project is another example where We Are In Beta can offer MATs an opportunity to share what’s working for them, for the betterment of the sector more broadly. MATs we have also worked with on big projects include: Greenshaw Learning Trust, Chiltern Learning Trust, Bright Futures Educational Trust. With more to be announced soon.
If you’re a school / MAT are interested in sharing what you do to deepen your impact across the system (eg via courses, conference, content, etc.), join the growing list we work with, before we reach capacity for the year.
It would be great to discuss how we can help.
PS. thank you to every one who messaged me last week to share condolences and their experiences following my personal note last week. It means more to me than you can imagine.
Thanks for reading.
@NiallAlcock and the We Are In Beta team
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