Part 3 is the section of my blog where I talk about schools and working with schools as a consultant. It is about school improvement, school development, teacher professional learning, leadership development and everything else I can think of.

Of course, I have always been focused on literacy, when working in schools. I believe that literacy is the door into success for schools.

A school in a pickle is often tempted to focus on the managerial aspects of school administration that are obvious and need attention. I have worked with head teachers who have embarked on ambitious building schemes, buried their heads in finance, or HR, or managing the behaviour of a few challenging children -anything else other than what happens in the classroom. They avoid the elephant in the room – the teaching.

Of course, being an excellent classroom practitioner does not mean you know how to develop the skills of teachers who needs to grow professionally. Teaching children and teaching teachers are very different activities and there are many, many headteachers in schools who are not sure how to improve teaching in the classroom – why should they know how to do this? There is no training needed to be a head teacher and much of the training offered to them is about the procedural and legal aspects of running a school. In many respects, headteachers of small schools (primary) are more like administrators than teachers. Yet, a school in a pickle needs to focus on the classroom. So leaders are tempted to bluster through using scripts and tick sheets, grabbing onto the next shiny new resource. They might fill the school with the latest gadgets, sign staff up to ridiculous schemes and fill everyone’s time with meetings to show the staff how to use them. Everyone is busy, all the time, but nothing is ever done. Little gets completed.

So, having a clear focus on one thing – reading, writing and language can be enormously helpful to any school improvement journey. The importance of this area of learning is obvious. A focus on literacy means that we don’t really need to buy schemes, or gadgets. Instead, we need to start with some assessments -we need to know where the children are. Then we look at where the gaps in learning are. Next we learn – we learn about how children learn to read and write. We explore pedagogies that have been proven to be really effective in the classroom and we try them. We come back, we discuss what happened, what we need to do next and off we go again. It is a simple cycle that puts the focus back where it should be – on the children.

This Part 3 of my blog journey is about this process – the process of developing teachers and teachers.