Engaging students, parents and teachers: tips from Bedrock school leaders

In order to transform schools into language-rich communities, we need to engage our key stakeholders: learners, parents and teachers. We selected panellists for our webinar that had brilliant strategies for engaging these three crucial groups. Here, we summarise the key discussion points.

Joining Bedrock Learning's Head of Engagement Alex Randle were:

• Joe Lane, Word Coordinator and Assistant Principal of Harris Academy Peckham - read our full case study
• Kelly Silverton, Head of KS3 English at Beacon Academy
• SJ Eastwood, Head of English at Cranbrook School

Joe: Staff didn’t immediately grasp the purpose of Bedrock – we had to help them understand how its importance as a literacy tool in order to get their buy-in. For learners, it initially seemed like just another homework task. Just as we did with staff, we had to help them understand the ‘so what?’ – its relevance and impact across all subjects.

Kelly: Some of our students perhaps lack parental support in ensuring their child has a dedicated time and space to do their homework. It’s been a challenge to help both learners and staff understand the wider impact of vocabulary and literacy across the curriculum.

Alex: Yes, GL Assessment found that there is a stronger correlation between reading age and GCSE outcomes in maths than in English Literature – and the reading age of an average GCSE paper is 15 years 7 months, whereas 25% of 15 year olds have a reading age of 12 or under. It’s a real challenge.

SJ: In terms of obstacles, most of our students’ parents work so they struggle to find time to support their children with Bedrock. It’s also a battle for Bedrock to compete with other things on learners’ phone that they find more interesting.

What’s really worked for us is buying into the motivation theory – if you tell someone explicitly your vision, purpose and outcomes and how they’re going to benefit, generally people will buy into it. Through using parents’ evenings as an opportunity to communicate in this way, those obstacles melted away.

Joe: I talk about literacy as an octopus – you’re trying to get your literacy octopus tentacles into everything you can. We bring Bedrock into our literacy development programme, staff briefings, class displays, lessons across the curriculum – all this helps develop a culture of “we all read”. We explicitly embed Bedrock words in assemblies and align our recommended book of the week to the same subject area.

For example, I gave an assembly on FGM. The Bedrock word I used was abhorrent and the associated book was Cut by Hibo Wardere.

We get the most impact when literacy improvement is embedded into our curriculum, so we explicitly teach Tier 2 vocabulary in all lessons. We have systems for sanction and reward – we send texts to parents if their child hasn’t done two Bedrock lessons, or to reward them if they have – and we run competitions.

In a staff team meeting, the opportunity to address literacy explicitly can be rare, even in a school like ours where literacy is particularly valued. But whenever there is a new initiative in our school, I’m thinking: “Can we bring literacy, reading, Bedrock, into this?”

I make sure literacy is raised, that there’s an awareness that learning words is the root of all knowledge, that words help you grasp new concepts which unlock the entire lesson; it becomes core to all of our teaching.

This image from Alex Quigley brings home the purpose of Bedrock for me; it shows how terms and ideas interweave through different subject areas. It shows how cross-curricular words are. It’s not just about geography – it’s about biology and history too.

In Religious Studies, which I teach, we map vocabulary in a notebook. In line with Rosenshine’s principles of instruction, we explain a concept in a word.

Another way we engage learners is to celebrate through our website or on screens around school when a learner has used ambitious vocabulary in their writing.

SJ: For engaging students, we focus on engaging staff first so that they can help enthuse learners. Teachers were shocked when we told them that in subjects like science and maths, if your verbal ability is low, you’ll underperform compared to students with a high verbal ability.

We asked teachers in all subjects to make suggestions for our ‘word of the day’. For example, a maths teacher suggested ‘depreciate’. This word goes into our daily notices along with its meaning, origin and an example sentence.

We also asked departments to come up with Tier 2 words – we put these words in electronic glossaries, available for learners to access at all times.

We’ve created literacy champions in each department to take ownership of literacy in their subject area, ensuring all staff are pumped up about the importance and relevance of literacy. Having such a range of people prioritising literacy and reporting on its impact has really helped buy-in.

"Our approach to literacy is inspired by the proverb, 'If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together'."

Some of the biggest literacy advocates in our school are now maths, science and PE teachers because they’ve bought into the importance of vocabulary and literacy.

Kelly: We expect Year 7 and Year 8 to do 30 minutes of Bedrock homework a week – about two to three lessons – and Y9 to do 45 minutes, or about four lessons.

As a school, we’ve put a lot of our curriculum into booklets. For example, all our English texts are already in booklet form – Year 8 are studying Animal Farm and have a booklet on it with vocabulary that we’ve either identified from the text itself or that’s useful when studying the text. The booklet includes a glossary with relevant words, definitions and etymologies from the Bedrock Vocabulary curriculum Blocks 7-12. We also help embed learning by asking learners for synonyms and antonyms for vocabulary, and we make links to other subjects as well.

Teachers from other departments come into English lessons to observe how we teach. We really want to ensure our department’s deliberate metacognitive approach happens in all subjects.

Joe: The first step was getting parents to log into their free Bedrock parent accounts. Over lockdown we gave this a real push, taking parents through the Bedrock login process step by step.

Sometimes, when there are access or language issues and the parent has given us permission, we simply sign them up ourselves. With physical parents’ evenings starting again soon, we plan to get any parents who haven’t yet used their Bedrock login to do so then.

Parents suggested that receiving a text message would be a useful nudge in terms of maintaining usage – this has been really effective. We send a reminder text to all parents every Monday, as well as another on Wednesday telling them how many lessons their child has done. Our message to students and their parents is to do Bedrock when they get home, and make it part of their home routine.

We also share impact data in letters, summarising the number of lessons the child has completed and the impact on their reading age. Parents find this really endorses our approach.

SJ: A lot of parents want to help their child but don’t know how, so giving them clear, practical information about the cross-curricular importance of literacy is really helpful. We’ve had Bedrock information evenings to push Bedrock’s purpose, and get them invested so they know to remind their child to do their Bedrock homework.

We’ve also invited parents in to be upskilled in the elements their children need to know. Through this, parents tell us they feel more effective at supporting their children.

Each year group gets a yearly handout of top tips that parents and children can do together, or that parents can oversee, in order to boost literacy skills. The English section includes varied activities, from handwriting to discussing newspaper articles. We are also working on having a literacy-based page on our website with top tips and advice.

The more parents know how to help their child, the more motivated they are to get involved.

Kelly: The parents we have difficulty engaging are those whose children often don’t complete their homework, so that’s our challenge – targeting that core group. We’re planning a parents’ evening where we create a webinar for them to watch at leisure, explaining Bedrock’s purpose. All parents receive an email on Friday if their child hasn’t completed homework due on Monday.

Joe: Make Bedrock a habit, embed it into every area of school culture, and use Bedrock (Tier 2) language.

SJ: Communicate your purpose clearly and concisely with learners, staff, parents; have in mind the long-term literacy vision for your school and the outcomes you’re working towards.

Kelly: It’s about the ‘why’ – the intrinsic motivation for learners, i.e. having high expectations and helping them to achieve the qualifications they want to achieve.