CPD and Training

Refresh the professional knowledge and understanding of your whole staff team, teachers, teaching assistants, reading volunteers, to give your chosen SSP scheme a confident pedagogical underpinning.

I can also provide an evening session for interested parents, carers and grandparents. I've very successfully done this for several years for an independent prep school's new reception parents.

Take your school's approach to writing well beyond the constraints of the statutory teacher assessment frameworks. Return to a consideration of audience and purpose across the full range of text types and genres as your assessment benchmark; reconsider the nature of the writing tasks you present to your children; map children's authentic writing experiences across the whole curriculum.

Improve the quality of children's (and teachers') writing by incorporating Professor Debra Myhill's 'Grammar as Choice' approach. Explore, discuss and consider how and where you can implement the principles and techniques of this research-informed and creative approach.

'... an effective pedagogy for writing should include explicit grammar teaching which draws attention to the linguistic choices and possibilities available to children and which has at its heart the creative shaping of text.' (University of Exeter, 2022)

Picture books can provide powerful starting points for discussion, thinking and learning for children in KS2. Carefully chosen texts can provide an opportunity to consider difficult themes from a 'safe' place. 

They can enrich learning across the whole curriculum, helping new concepts, ideas and knowledge to 'stick' and building authentic connections between subjects and disciplines.

We are all constantly bombarded by non-fiction texts which aim to inform or, more often persuade us. Social media, TV programmes across seemingly endless channels, film, advertising and packaging, web-based material presented to us by search engines all use words and images to manipulate what we believe to be reliable and 'true'. Real-life, everyday literacy requires us all to be adept at reading, understanding, critically analysing and producing non-fiction texts. We have a responsibility to ensure that children experience a balanced communication, language and literacy curriculum that provides them with the tools to work successfully with these texts.

'As part of making the judgement about the quality of education, inspectors will consider the extent to which schools are equipping pupils with the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life. Our understanding of ‘knowledge and cultural capital’ is derived from the following wording in the national curriculum: It is the essential knowledge that pupils need to be educated citizens, introducing them to the best that has been thought and said and helping to engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement.' (Ofsted 2022: para 206)

The interpretation of this statement in the Ofsted School Inspection Handbook has presented schools with some challenges; definitions of cultural capital have proved difficult to pin down. Explore the origins of cultural capital as a concept and secure your school's definition and curriculum intent so that they can be shared effectively with staff, governors and your children's parents. Review your curriculum to ensure that implementation is woven through your existing curriculum plans.