Laura Lodge (One Education): Reading in Schools

In this episode, Claire meets with Laura Lodge, a former teacher and now a Literacy/English Consultant for One Education. She explains her experience with leading Literacy and supporting schools within her cluster. As a consultant, Laura continues to support schools predominantly around the North West as well as other areas of the country. Laura discusses her passion for reading and helping schools with English and Reading. Laura and Claire discuss the importance of understanding the different methods and strategies schools use and how diverse yet effective they are. They share their experiences of observing the different strategies employed within schools and how they work towards the success of the respective schools. KEY TAKEAWAYS Shortly after completing her NQT year, Laura worked as a Literacy and Key Stage 2 lead. She continued to work within these leadership roles to support her cluster schools as a Literacy lead. After some time, Laura decided to take a different route of supporting schools and became the Literacy and English Consultant at One Education. As a Literacy and English Consultant at One Education, Laura visits a variety of different schools on a weekly basis. As a former supply teacher and consultant, Claire and Laura discuss the opportunity of observing the different practices employed by schools. They discuss how this understanding has helped them within their teaching career and current job roles. One Education is an education consultant and services company. A company to support School Development. One Education helps schools to make change in order to support children. Laura mentions the four areas One Education is split in to, they are; School Business Management, SEND, Welfare and Teaching and Learning. One Education will try to support schools by providing expert advice from both in house and external agencies. They endeavour to provide specialised and focused support to each individual school. Although Laura is working at One Education, she continues to work and teach in the class by team teaching, supporting a small group, coaching or modelling lesson. She can spend between 90 – 100% in school each week. Reading Gems – One Education’s structure for teaching reading. One Education have adapted the content domains for Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 and have made them child friendly to support children when answering questions. These question stems can then be used in reading sessions such as Guided Reading. A simplified version has also been created for Early Years Foundation Stage by One Education. Laura mentions the importance of providing children the skills to read. Children should retrieve information and make predictions, but it is essential that they have skills for these tasks. Laura suggests when teaching children about inference it should be broken down into stages, for example what can be seen, heard, what they know? This can then be developed to what do they think? Reading award is a set criterion. It looks at good reading teaching. It is split into 3 strands; reading for decoding, reading for understanding, reading for enjoyment. Schools can work towards the award and use the criteria to inform their teaching. It promotes a holistic approach that covers the objectives from the National Curriculum. Over 70 schools are working towards the Reading Award around the country. Schools can work towards bronze, silver or gold for the award. Schools can choose the award they wish to work towards. It is One Education’s 4th Annual Conference. The Literacy Conference is on the 9th October 2019. The theme for this year is Literacy Across the Curriculum. A choice of workshops will be available on the day as well as the opportunity to listen to 3 keynote speakers. Every delegate will get to listen to the keynote speaker and attend 2 workshops of their choice. Details about the event are available on the website. LIFEWorkBalance – funding. If we can make sure our schools are sufficiently funded it will give schools the opportunity to make sure that staff can have less contact time, time to plan at work and meet, time to complete marking and feedback and make a difference to the children outside of their home life. Laura suggests giving all teachers 80% contact time but understands that this may be different for teachers with other responsibilities for example SENCO, English lead etc. She mentions that schools try very hard to ensure subject leads are giving their management time, but it is never enough. Schools should look at the teachers’ responsibility and ensure they have the appropriate realise time within the school day to be leading the subject effectively. They need the time to monitor, assess and support staff. Teaching is about everything you must do to support children every step of the way throughout school. The new OFSTED Framework has the capacity to be the biggest change. If the focus on curriculum and teaching of the individual child rather than data filers through it could prove to be a huge change in education. Education should more pupil centred. Presently, it is very much a child is a number. It should be a celebration of everything that child has achieved over school. As an education community, we should be working together to develop ideas on how to support the children, so they become socially responsible adults. The introduction of mental health is working in the right direction of supporting children. Building the awareness of mental health and issues that affect children is very important. Ensuring teachers are giving the appropriate training is vital.  BEST MOMENTS “Definitely! I really miss the kids.” “I learn so much from going into all different schools every day of the week.” “You pick up so much from each school no matter whether they’re good, outstanding or requires improvement or inadequate.” “In one school the things you do might not work the same way.” “It is good to see how other people do it.” “Our motto is – putting children first.” “Every single school I go into is completely different to another.” “We pride ourselves in being bespoke.” “We need to understand how it is for a teacher to be able to give them advice that they can actually run with.” “We believe that Guided Reading teaching it has to be about giving children the skills to read.” “Reading is such a fundamental skill. It is a key skill for life.” “Inference is not reading between the lines.” “Which is why it is so important to constantly model going back to the text.”  “You are always spinning plates as a teacher. You try your hardest to do  everything as equally well, but you can never keep all those plates spinning at the same time.” “I wish I had known how I wasn’t just going to be a teacher.” “It is so much more than teaching.” “I don’t think at the moment, our curriculum necessarily spends time on those social aspects as it could, for example money.” VALUABLE RESOURCES One Education - https://www.oneeducation.co.uk/ ABOUT THE HOST Claire Riley Claire, alongside her husband Ed, is one of the directors of Classroom Secrets, a company she founded in 2013 and which provides outstanding differentiated resources for teachers, schools, parents and tutors worldwide. Having worked for a number of years as a teacher in both Primary and Secondary education, and experiencing first-hand the difficulties teachers were facing finding appropriate high-quality resources for their lessons, Claire created Classroom Secrets with the aim of helping reduce the workload for all school staff. Claire is a passionate believer in a LIFE/work balance for those who work in education citing the high percentage of teachers who leave or plan to leave their jobs each year. Since February 2019, Classroom Secrets has been running their LIFE/work balance campaign to highlight this concerning trend. The Teachers’ Podcast is a series of interviews where Claire meets with a wide range of guests involved in the field of education. These podcasts provide exciting discussions and different perspectives and thoughts on a variety of themes which are both engaging and informative for anyone involved in education.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.