In this episode, Claire meets with Laura Lodge, a former teacher and now a Literacy/English Consultant for One Education. She explains her experience with leading Literacy and supporting schools within her cluster.
As a consultant, Laura continues to support schools predominantly around the North West as well as other areas of the country. Laura discusses her passion for reading and helping schools with English and Reading.
Laura and Claire discuss the importance of understanding the different methods and strategies schools use and how diverse yet effective they are. They share their experiences of observing the different strategies employed within schools and how they work towards the success of the respective schools.
KEY TAKEAWAYS

Shortly after completing her NQT year, Laura worked as a Literacy and Key Stage 2 lead. She continued to work within these leadership roles to support her cluster schools as a Literacy lead.
After some time, Laura decided to take a different route of supporting schools and became the Literacy and English Consultant at One Education.
As a Literacy and English Consultant at One Education, Laura visits a variety of different schools on a weekly basis.
As a former supply teacher and consultant, Claire and Laura discuss the opportunity of observing the different practices employed by schools. They discuss how this understanding has helped them within their teaching career and current job roles.
One Education is an education consultant and services company. A company to support School Development.
One Education helps schools to make change in order to support children.
Laura mentions the four areas One Education is split in to, they are; School Business Management, SEND, Welfare and Teaching and Learning.
One Education will try to support schools by providing expert advice from both in house and external agencies. They endeavour to provide specialised and focused support to each individual school.
Although Laura is working at One Education, she continues to work and teach in the class by team teaching, supporting a small group, coaching or modelling lesson. She can spend between 90 – 100% in school each week.
Reading Gems – One Education’s structure for teaching reading. One Education have adapted the content domains for Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 and have made them child friendly to support children when answering questions. These question stems can then be used in reading sessions such as Guided Reading.
A simplified version has also been created for Early Years Foundation Stage by One Education.
Laura mentions the importance of providing children the skills to read. Children should retrieve information and make predictions, but it is essential that they have skills for these tasks.
Laura suggests when teaching children about inference it should be broken down into stages, for example what can be seen, heard, what they know? This can then be developed to what do they think?
Reading award is a set criterion. It looks at good reading teaching. It is split into 3 strands; reading for decoding, reading for understanding, reading for enjoyment.
Schools can work towards the award and use the criteria to inform their teaching. It promotes a holistic approach that covers the objectives from the National Curriculum.
Over 70 schools are working towards the Reading Award around the country.
Schools can work towards bronze, silver or gold for the award. Schools can choose the award they wish to work towards.
It is One Education’s 4th Annual Conference. The Literacy Conference is on the 9th October 2019. The theme for this year is Literacy Across the Curriculum.
A choice of workshops will be available on the day as well as the opportunity to listen to 3 keynote speakers. Every delegate will get to listen to the keynote speaker and attend 2 workshops of their choice. Details about the event are available on the website.
LIFEWorkBalance – funding. If we can make sure our schools are sufficiently funded it will giv