Literacy at primary school: a social justice issue

In the first of a two part feature, Rob Green talks to Louise Johns-Shepherd, Chief Executive of the Centre of Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), about the charity’s work, its aims and how plans for a new library are set to be delivered, thanks to a shot in the dark at crowd funding.

IN an ideal world, every school would have its own librarian, supporting teachers and pupils. However, a perfect world and the real world are rarely the same thing.

Funding, space, political will, ambivalence and ignorance often conspire to make a school library low on the agenda. Even if there is a library, there may not always be librarian to go with it. This is especially true in primary schools – yet reading for pleasure at a young age is hugely important in raising literacy standards and children’s life chances.

Louise Johns-Shepherd, Chief Executive of the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), recognises the importance of trained librarians – but as a former primary head teacher, she is also acutely aware of the constraints facing schools. She is clear that CLPE has a role to play in helping schools discover the best tools and skills for teaching literacy, but is equally clear that “we do not want schools to think it is training a librarian on the cheap”.

Creative literacy teaching

The centre primarily offers training to teaching staff, helping to put the latest techniques, skills and the best resources into the hands of those working with primary-aged children. Louise says: “We are a school-facing literacy charity and we work almost entirely with primary school teachers. The way we aim to improve literacy achievement and engagement with reading is through those teachers. Everything we do is about teaching those that work in schools to teach literacy in the most effective way we know and in the most creative way, and being able to access the best children’s literature that is available to them.”

CLPE is part of a wide literacy framework, offering services that complement the work of other organisations. The charity works in three main ways to put literacy at the heart of primary school lessons – not just in English, but across the curriculum.

Literacy champions

The aim is to give teachers the skills, knowledge, resources and confidence to become their school’s literacy champion. Louise says: “Being able to read for pleasure at age 10 has a bigger impact on the future life chances of a child than almost anything else – including their parents having a degree. It is a real social justice issue and we want children to read and write for pleasure. The best way to do that is to introduce them to fabulous books. You have the technical aspects embedded within the literacy framework, but it’s really important that you have a range and a knowledge and understanding of texts.”

To that end, the charity has a number of free resources that are available online, including a curated library of core books, regularly-updated book lists and a book of the week – all curated by CLPE’s qualified librarian Ann Lazim.

Librarian-curated collection

“We have our librarian who curates our collection, of some 23,000 children’s books,” says Louise. “The main collection is an in-print reference collection and that is what we use in our training sessions. It means that if a teacher comes in, picks up a book and likes it, they can go out and order it for their school library.

“We have two archive collections – the first is the Traditional Tales, and that will not necessarily contain things that are currently in print. We include different representations of traditional tales – I think we have 45 different versions of Red Riding Hood and you can see where the origins are for some of the folk tales.”

Keeping poetry alive in schools

“The other archive is our poetry collection, and we try to keep everything in there that has been published since 1970. It’s not always possible but it is a large collection. Poetry is a central tenet of our work. We have a big set of free resources around poetry and children’s poetry, we run the only award for published children’s poetry – the CLiPPA. All of that is important for keeping poetry alive in schools, which we see as a key thing in teaching literacy. We champion it, because it’s the poor relation – both in publishing and what is taught in school.”

Louise adds that teachers are often more worried about teaching poetry than other forms of literature, and says a lack of confidence can lead to it being taught badly or not at all. “Poetry is often the gateway into reading and writing, but it can also be seen as the thing that turns children off if it is not taught in a creative and accessible way. But poetry is a really important, rich resource for us.”

CLPE also features lesson structures – which it calls Teaching Sequences; author, poet and illustrator videos that can be used in class; and access to research. All of the resources are focused on the English school curriculum, but there is enough cross-over for them to be useful across the UK education sector.

Training sessions

These resources are designed to support CLPE’s core training programmes, but are accessible to anyone. This ensures parents, librarians, and teachers who cannot make it to a CLPE training session can benefit from the charity’s work. CLPE runs three types of training sessions, one-day courses, subject specific courses, and its “Power of…(reading or pictures)” course, which provides four training days over the course of a year. There are currently 650 teachers on the “Power of…” courses this year, and CLPE has more than 3,000 face-to-face interactions with teachers each year through its training.

Teachers will share their own research, helping to build up an evidence base to support the aims and methods of CLPE. Louise says: “We also look at the impact of that work. Last year we had 98 per cent of those teachers saying that the work they had done with power of reading had raised engagement with reading. Interestingly 99 per cent of them said it had raised engagement with writing, which for us shows the interrelationship between reading and writing.”

Building a new library

The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education is based close to Waterloo in London. Its home is a former school, purpose-built as a special school in the early 1900s. It is leased from Southwark Council and has been listed because of its layout – which makes it accessible, and crucially for CLPE – difficult to convert to flats or other uses.

Earlier this year, the charity launched a crowd-funding plea to help it raise £30,000 in order to create a new library within its main hall. CLPE had already received grants worth £50,000 and had managed to save a similar amount. However, it still needed another £50,000 to complete the funding.

Louise says: “We really weren’t sure how we would do it. We had managed to raise a substantial amount, but it still looked like we wouldn’t be able to get there, so we decided to start a crowdfunding campaign.”

Helping the literacy community

The response has been wholly unexpected, according to Louise. Just weeks after launching the campaign, the £30,000 target had been reached. A few weeks after that, an extended target for the full £50,000 was reached.

Partner organisations that use the building, publishers, authors, illustrators and individuals all contributed to fundraising. Reaching the goal means work can be completed this year and the charity’s 23,000-book library can remain permanently on display – at the moment it has to be removed for some events. Louise says: “We will have this resource here that is available to everybody. It will generate income for its maintenance. Commercial organisations can hold events here and it is the ethical choice, because you will be helping not just us, but the whole of the literacy community.” IP

Look out for an extended version of this interview on the CILIP website later this month.