Two years ago I started my first senior leadership role in a school in London. The school had recently converted to an academy after many years of unstable leadership, and during the conversion process more than half the staff had left the school, while the number of pupils had increased by 200.
I was assigned reading as my remit, with a brief to introduce school-wide reading time, and raise the reading age of all pupils.
Many of the pupils were from Gujarat in India, and had little or no prior formal education. In a lot of cases, the pupils’ families were illiterate, and did not speak any English. The challenge I faced was therefore threefold. How do you deal with a substantial increase in the number of illiterate children, in a school with high staff turnover, which did not have an established and systematic model for teaching children to read?
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