Leading English in the Primary School

A Subject Leader's Guide

Lisa Baldwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351396141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Leading English in the Primary School is a comprehensive guide for both aspiring and experienced leaders of primary English. It supports you in navigating your way through the role and offers practical guidance to help you develop a clear understanding of how to improve the teaching of English in your school.

Written by experts with extensive experience of both leadership and the primary classroom, it explores skills required for effective subject leadership while continually considering the specific implications for English. With action and reflection points throughout the book, it offers a detailed introduction to:

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• the role of the English subject leader

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• implementing strategy and vision

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• adapting to new educational policy

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• methods for leading teaching and learning

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• how and why leaders evaluate and monitor progress

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• contemporary changes to the curriculum.

Rich case studies reveal how schools lead English in practice and provide real-life examples of English subject leaders' decision-making processes and actions. Grounding the subject leader role in the current curriculum, Leading English in the Primary School is a source of advice, support and inspiration for all professionals embracing the complex, challenging, yet fulfilling role of Primary English Leader.

Congratulations, you’re the English subject leader!

Lisa Baldwin and Liz Chamberlain

This introductory chapter will consider the personal and professional qualities required to be an effective English subject leader. There will be an outline of the many roles and responsibilities of the subject leader and the chapter will begin to explore the terms ‘leadership’ and ‘management’. Different models of leadership and descriptors of leadership styles will be discussed. There will be guidance and practical steps to support you in the early stages of English leadership, including keeping an English file and knowing where to go for advice. We will begin to raise the question – how do English subject leaders know where to start?

The role of the English subject leader

Leading English and taking charge of this subject are of crucial importance to primary education and improving literacy outcomes for children in your school. There is no doubt that leading this subject brings great responsibility, but with it comes the knowledge that you have chosen to lead a subject that offers opportunities for creativity and access to new worlds of knowledge. The acquisition of English skills is crucial to every child’s success across the curriculum. Ultimately, success in English ensures each individual pupil has access to life-long learning opportunities that reach far beyond their school life. In short, you will be leading a subject that is the very life-blood of learning.

In the current education world the stakes are high with regards to pupil performance and the stakes are highest in the most tested areas of the curriculum: namely, English and mathematics (Alexander, 2009; Moss, 2017). The current PISA (DfE, 2016; OECD, 2015) rankings dominate discourse around what it means to be successful in English (reading), and the success (or otherwise) of the reading test attainment of 15 year olds influences the direction of policy and in turn the practice seen in school. Your leadership role is therefore crucial to wider school success.

The role itself is likely to encompass a range of responsibilities. Your key duty will be to ensure English subject teaching is constantly developing to meet the needs of the pupils. Whatever the context and incumbent duties of your particular English subject leader post it is unlikely to be a role that stands in isolation. You will probably be a class teacher, you may have phase (or Key Stage) leadership responsibilities, you may be a senior leader and you may even be the head teacher. This chapter acknowledges that you are likely to be juggling subject leadership with a number of different roles and aims to ensure clarity about your responsibilities.

Duties and responsibilities

It is important to clarify what the role of English subject leader entails and the responsibilities you hold. You have to be passionate about your subject but you are not expected to know everything about English. You will need to be a hub of information but you are not required to write everyone’s plans, scrutinise their books or mark their tests. You are expected to know the targets and why they may not have been reached but you are not responsible for the Key Stage 1 or Key Stage 2 English SATs results.

There has long been debate about how to determine what it is that subject leaders should ‘do’, and at the end of the last century Waters and Martin (1999) drew on the Teacher Training Agency (TTA, 1998) standards for subject leaders to define the subject leader’s responsibilities:

• securing the high standards of teaching and learning;

• raising standards and achievement;

• supporting, guiding and motivating teachers and other adults;

• monitoring and setting targets for English;

• contributing to policy development within the subject and across the school.

(Waters and Martin, 1999: 14)

The list covers duties that can be broken down into four key areas:

• strategic responsibility;

• teaching and learning;

• leadership and management of the whole-school staff;

• organisational management.

(Adapted from TTA, 1998)

The strategic element of the role encompasses policy and practice development. Understanding pupil progress and teacher confidence in English will ensure you know how to improve outcomes across the school. It also encompasses target setting, monitoring, curriculum design and long-term planning across the school.

The responsibility for teaching and learning encompasses the need to secure high-quality teaching and learning outcomes for all pupils. This involves evaluating English planning and teaching to ensure teachers deliver high-quality learning. The subject leader has to understand pupil progression in English across the school, identifying areas for development. It also involves partnership working with the wider school community.

The organisational management of the subject encompasses the resourcing and management of the learning environment for English. This might include the development of new resources and the maintenance of existing ones. The whole-school library, book corners, reading, spelling and phonics schemes, intervention programmes, deployment of support staff and display are just some of the aspects that contribute to this area. It is important to understand that whilst these contribute to the physical learning space they also impact on the wider culture of English in the school.

The leadership and management of staff requires effective working relationships that offer support and guidance. The subject leader must lead by example, motivating staff to commit to subject development aims, adopt new practices and deliver high-quality teaching of English.

Consider the list of responsibilities in relation to your own role and job description.

• Is there a balance of strategic, organisational, teaching and learning, and leadership and management duties?

• Are there additional aspects to the role, unique to the school you are working in?

• The TTA standards were developed in 1999. Do you think they still have bearing on the tasks you’re required to do twenty years on?

However different the above list is to your own responsibilities, busy school environments often offer little time for planning, reflection or sharing good practice, so this book aims to support you in doing the role well and making the best, most efficient use of time to cover the range of duties. So let’s begin by thinking about both the professional and personal qualities that you will need to embody in order to be a successful leader of English.

What do we mean by leadership?

Effective ‘leadership acts as a catalyst for unleashing the potential capacities that already exist in the organisation’ (Leithwood et al., 2006: 15). The key is to understand that you cannot do well alone. You cannot find success in the role purely by the measure of your own teaching ability and expertise in English. The important resonance in the quotation is that you have to enable others. In order to become an effective leader it is important to unpick the qualities and attributes that underpin good leaders. Then you can begin to model these characteristics in your new role as English subject leader.

Consider a school leader whom you have worked with during your time in school, albeit as a trainee teacher or as a recent member of teaching staff. Reflect on the type of leader they embody by considering the following questions:

• What do you observe them doing or saying?

• What actions do they undertake?

• What procedures do they follow?

• How would you describe their personal qualities?

• What behaviours do they exhibit?

The answers to your questions will usually divide into two distinct attributes: actions in the form of organisation and procedural skills, and the individual’s personal qualities and behaviours. Let’s consider these two areas further.

Leadership: Organisation and procedural skills

When you listed the qualities of the effective leader you had worked with, you would have considered the actions and activities they undertook. Management of the subject requires different qualities and skills from the personal and behavioural requirements, but they are just as integral to effective subject leadership.

Although leadership and management are different, to try to separate leadership from management is to separate the means through which your goals will be achieved. Managing a subject requires (amongst other things) organisation, planning, target setting and resourcing. The task of management is often described as more procedural and serves to ...