Bankside Primary is a large school, with 562 children on roll and provision for 104 in the Nursery.  It serves a population of extreme social and economic disadvantage in the inner city of Leeds, its makeup predominantly Bangladeshi (49%) and Pakistani (35%), with a small percentage of African Caribbean (4%).  Of the children attending the school 98%* are working with English as an additional language and each Ofsted report has cited the poor level of basic skills on entry into the school nursery.

The school is a highly effective one, no key issues, identified by Ofsted in January 2003.  In fact, since it opened as a primary school in September 1992 it was determined to promote the highest levels of teaching/learning to ensure that the 'playing field' became more levelled for this already multi-disadvantaged population.

When the literacy strategy was introduced, the school worked with it creatively and enthusiastically and it did help raise standards, 65% approximately of KS2 pupils achieving Level 4+.  In spite, then, of a myriad of 'remedial' strategies, homework and holiday literacy clubs, we recognised we had reached a plateau and recognised that if we were going to enable more children to cross the Level 4 threshold, we needed to be doing something different.

We did some research which culminated in us traveling to Kobi Nazrul school in Tower Hamlets to view the Success for All literacy strategy which we introduced, with other schools within our EAZ in North East Leeds.

The programme, as the name suggests, is devised to ensure the success of all children and to prevent individuals from falling behind at the outset.  The Foundation Stage programmes (Curiosity Corner for Nursery and KinderCorner for Reception) ensure all children receive an orally language rich curriculum, promoting accelerated/co-operative learning strategies, as well as ensuring they learn to read and write individual sounds and use these to build words.  Children have a set group time each day for working in literacy skills, ongoing throughout the day in Nursery and Reception, 90 minutes for the children in the Roots part of the programme (Years 1 and 2) and 90 minutes for children in the Wings programme (Year 2 to 6).

Key to the early years stage is that the children take home a small copy of the book they have been working on in their group, phonetically based, which the children can read. This practice continues until the children have built up their own home library of 40-50 books.  The impact of this on families, that in many cases cannot afford to buy books or have access to a local library, can be imagined.  Another unique feature of the programme is the formation of a Family Support Team, a group of staff allocated time each day to follow up attendance issues and offer support to families where the children are identified as not making the expected progress.

From Year 1 to Year 6 the children are organised for the teaching of literacy into groups with a six-month reading comprehension level.  In these groups, the children then work for 8 weeks, approximately and then are assed against the benchmark of expected group progress.  The groups are then re-organised, based on the result of the eight-week assessment.  It is therefore obvious which children are not making expected progress and the programme allows for a number of additional strategies to be applied:

• Referral to the Family Support Team
• Repeat of eight-week cycle
• One to one additional reading support etc.

This eight weekly assessment is a very powerful tool: making teachers publicly accountable for the progress of all the children in their group; giving all staff a very clear picture of each learner's strengths and areas of weakness; and enabling senior management with the SFA facilitator a clear whole school literacy progress map eight week on eight week.

At the upper Roots and Wings levels, children work with class sets of real books from all genres, so children have the experience of reading challenging whole texts, working as part of a co-operative learning group in a structured, dynamic pedagogy, which continuously promotes oral language skills.

I recently watched David Mills on the Dispatches programme considering the 'Dyslexia Myth' and Success for All ticked all the boxes, particularly with regard to meeting the needs of that fixed percentage of the population that are pre-disposed to finding learning to read difficult because of their inability to discriminate sounds within words.  With this programme, these children are identified in their nursery years and can then be helped to succeed.

Success for All is initially expensive to put into schools, but, as the Dispatches programme showed, at less expense than the costs incurred by 'reading recovery' programmes for the fortunate or the very real social costs incurred by failure of individuals to learn to read, e.g. percentage of prisoners who are illiterate.

With Success for All, our school is now achieving 75% approximately of KS2 children achieving at Level 4 and above.  If we can do this with children, coming from relatively impoverished homes, and working with English as an additional language, what could be achieved in the majority of the nation's schools?

I do commend this programme to you as offering an exciting, innovative and effective way of raising literacy levels in our country.

Sarah Rutty
Bankside Primary School