Research School Network: The New Guidance Report from the EEF: Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools How can we best support students with the literacy demands of secondary curricula?

Last week, the EEF released their much-awaited guidance report for improving literacy in secondary schools. The report succinctly conveys the research findings on how to best support students who struggle with reading, writing and communicating at secondary school where these literacy demands significantly increase.

The report highlights three fundamental aspects of literacy at secondary level:

• Teachers themselves can feel unsure about how to ​‘teach literacy’, and teachers may also have insecurities about their own grasp of some aspects of literacy. 
• Schools should take a disciplinary approach to teaching literacy, which means recognising ​‘that literacy skills are both general and subject specific, emphasising the value of supporting teachers of every subject to teach students how to read, write and communicate effectively’.
• As a consequence of the first two aspects, secondary teachers need support and specific CPD on how to teach literacy within their subject.

The starting point for getting to grips with the guidance report is the 7 recommendations. These offer a very useable summary for any secondary school that is auditing their literacy support provision. In addition, the seven strands provide a good basis for creating a shared understanding of literacy across a whole school whilst also encouraging and supporting the disciplinary approach.

1. Prioritise ​‘disciplinary literacy’ across the curriculum: This strand emphasises the importance of subject-specific support. It incorporates the need for all teachers to have a secure understanding of how reading, writing and communication works within their subject and effective pedagogical methods for teaching these specific skills. For example, the structure and linguistic expectations of a history report will differ considerable to those of a science report and as a consequence will require explicit teaching. 
2. Provide targeted vocabulary instruction in every subject: This strand explains why explicit vocabulary instruction is integral to helping students access and achieve academic success. In particular, teachers need to prioritise teaching tier 2 and tier 3 vocabulary through evidence-informed strategies. Explicit vocabulary instruction approaches can be easily adapted to a disciplinary approach by supporting curriculum areas to identify their own key vocabulary as part of a five-year plan. You can read about our approach to explicit vocabulary instruction at Durrington here.
3. Develop students’ ability to read complex academic texts: This strand suggests that secondary teachers will benefit from specific training on how to teach reading; this is an area that many secondary colleagues may feel cautious about and view as something mysterious achieved in the primary realm. However, there are key reading strategies that can be explicitly taught (to both teachers and then students) that open up this crucial aspect of literacy at secondary level, for example activating prior knowledge, making predictions and asking specific questions as you read. To find out more about how to support secondary students with reading non-fiction texts, for example text books, read our Durrington blog here.
4. Break down complex writing tasks: This strand ties in with an understanding of metacognition (which you can read about here) in that teachers can support students with writing by breaking a task down into planning, monitoring and evaluation and spending time modelling these three stages. In addition, fluency in writing is key for success and this can be developed through carefully planned collaborative writing tasks.
5. Combine writing instruction with reading in every subject: Combining activities where students have to read and write is likely to be very beneficial; this is because background knowledge will significantly improve both reading and writing outcomes. Furthermore, spending time explicitly teaching spelling, grammar and punctuation can support both reading and writing by aiding fluency.
6. Provide opportunities for structured talk: High-quality talk is crucial in its own right and because it will impact very positively on reading and writing. Classroom talk involving students can be a shady area and one that some teachers may feel trepidation about entering. However, when tightly structured and modelled effectively classroom talk can be implemented with great success. You can read more about structured classroom talk with our Durrington blog here.
7. Provide high quality literacy interventions for struggling students: In the final strand the guidance report highlights the importance of identifying and supporting those students who have specific literacy needs, in particular those in Year 7. This will require diagnostic testing so that accurate knowledge of the specific problems is clarified and then implementing tiers of support (rather than blanket approaches) so that those challenges are tackled effectively. Coupled with this, ongoing assessment is necessary so that the impact of the interventions can be monitored and altered if appropriate. This is a more challenging strand in that it requires specialist input as well as support from whole-school leaders as the approaches are very likely to comprise work with students outside of the classroom.
   
   Ensuring that literacy is top of every secondary’s school’s agenda is no mean feat but it is crucial if we are to continue closing the gaps between different cohorts of students so that they can all achieve their very best, both in school and beyond.

Join us here at Durrington for our three-day literacy training programme in 2019 – 2020. This will be an opportunity to explore the guidance and further research evidence on literacy at secondary level, as well as hear suggestions for practical ways to coordinate and implement literacy approaches at your school. Details can be found here.