1 Special needs and the Literacy Hour: some general principles
Jean Gross, Ann Berger and Julia Garnett
This chapter sets out some general principles for approaching special educational needs within the National Literacy Strategy Framework, and seeks to answer some of the questions teachers and Special Educational Needs Coordinators most often ask about the Literacy Hour.
Introduction
The literacy hour and the National Literacy Strategy Framework have from the beginning been proclaimed as ‘for all’. Schools know that they are expected to include all children in the hour, but many have been thrown into confusion by misapprehensions about what this actually means. Others have wondered whether they have to abandon tried and tested support programmes for children with literacy difficulties, because they do not at first sight appear to fit into the new framework.
This book aims to address some of these concerns, and put straight some common misconceptions about the Literacy Hour. It will show how the framework of the hour can accommodate the needs of a wide range of learners, and give practical examples of how this can be done.
The examples, and the guidance, are based on the experience of one local education authority, which was amongst the first cohort to pilot the new national framework, and where the overwhelming feedback from teachers has been that - given hard work and careful planning on their part - children with SEN have benefited immensely from the introduction of the Literacy Hour, generally find it motivating and helpful, and are making better progress as a result.
The benefits of the Literacy Hour
Why have these children benefited? One reason is that the Literacy Hour provides a vehicle for quality teaching of literacy, with high knowledge levels on the part of the teacher about what it takes to become literate, and high expectations of what pupils can achieve. Other reasons include the element of structure and predictability of the hour, which is helpful to many pupils, and the regularity of the hour with its daily short bursts of focused teaching followed by practice and reinforcement.
The main reason for the success of the hour with children who have SEN, however, is to be found in the structure of the hour itself. As the National Literacy Strategy framework for teaching additional guidance puts it: ‘The structure of the Literacy Hour allows for class teaching that meets individual needs and provides for differentiated group and independent work.’ The pattern of shared work, followed by work matched to the needs of different groups, and concluded by a motivating plenary when children have the chance to show what they have done and learn from one another, allows the teacher to plan for a wide range of ability.
Elements of the Literacy Hour
The shared text work (the first 15 minutes of the hour) has many benefits for children with SEN, because they learn a great deal from the shared experience of texts being read and written by the teacher at a level above that which they can manage independently. Repetition, focused teaching and the support of other learners can provide less confident children with positive and enjoyable experiences of reading and writing as part of the community of literacy learners. Skilful questioning and commenting by the teacher can direct children’s attention to aspects of the text appropriate to their particular level and learning needs: class teaching can operate at many levels, and we will provide some examples of how this can be done later in this chapter.
The next section of the hour, word or sentence level work (the second 15 minutes) often involves a multi-sensory approach to the teaching of phonics for reading and spelling to the class, where children see and hear how words are made up, blended and segmented. This is particularly helpful to many children with special needs, who will also require a good deal of consolidation and reinforcement – planned for in the small group/independent activity time.
This small group/independent time is the part of the hour when this consolidation and reinforcement can be achieved through the kind of structured, systematic programmes which have been used to good effect in the past with children who have SEN. When the Literacy Hour was first introduced, there were widespread misconceptions that this part of the hour had to link directly with the shared text and the shared word and sentence level work in all cases and every day. Teachers feared that this might mean that some children were always working on objectives which were too far advanced (or not advanced enough) for them.
In working with the hour, however, it has become clearer that whilst the skilled teacher can plan differentiated activities following on from the shared text of the week and whole-class work, and will need to do this for some of the time, there must also be times when groups of children or individuals can do work which does not link to the shared class work, but addresses basic skills as detailed in children’s Individual Education Plans, for example. This work may follow on from the guided reading they do once a week in a group, on books closely matched to their ‘instructional’ level – the kind of follow up activities, games and worksheets which accompany many reading schemes designed to provide a second chance for struggling readers. Or the work may alternatively take the form of a structured programme designed, for example, to reinforce basic phonic skills.
The final part of the hour, the plenary, gives children opportunities for speaking and listening related to their independent work. The teacher can correct misunderstandings, consolidate, revise or extend learning, according to the needs demonstrated in this session. The plenary is also a valuable time for assessing learning, with consequent benefits for children with SEN.
But how do we do it?
Extolling the benefits of the Literacy Hour structure for addressing SEN is one thing. Actually ‘doing it’, making it work, is another. On the next few pages you will find a collection of some of the concerns and questions which teachers have raised about the practical implementation issues, and some of the answers which we have been able to come up with.
Questions teachers ask about SEN and The Literacy Hour
Table 1.1 High frequency words grouped by frequency and difficulty
These are the first 45 words in the Literacy Framework. We have ordered them according to frequency and difficulty. We suggest you might want to teach them in order – List A then List B etc.
Table 1.2 List 2. The next 154 Literacy Framework words for Years 1 and 2 in order of frequency and difficulty
Who does what?
Making the Literacy Hour work for children with SEN requires a team approach. The Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCO), class teacher and a range of additional adults who may be working in the classroom (Learning Support Assistants or parent helpers, for example) all have different but vital roles to play.
The role of the SENCO
The role of the SENCO will be to:
advise colleagues on how to differentiate their teaching during the Literacy Hour so as to meet the needs of a wide range of learners;
organise support staff to work in the Literacy Hour as effectively as possible with small groups of children, pairs or individuals;
coordinate IEPs so that they take account of the literacy framework and link with what will happen to the child during the Literacy Hour.
The role of the support teacher
Some schools are lucky enough to have support teachers to provide skilled help for children with SEN. Such teachers can work in a variety of ways, for example:
