A year has gone since we launched The FE Literacy Movement, and it has been monumental in securing interest and discussion surrounding literacy across our sector.
We have welcomed FE professionals from across the United Kingdom to join ‘the movement’.
We have been kept busy with not only our events, but with building on our existing relationships with The National Literacy Trust, The English Association, Lexonik and Citizen Literacy, to name a few.
We have been interviewed by The Post 16 Educator magazine and have featured on a number of podcasts.
So we are confident that we are raising the profile of literacy within our colleges and proud to share that we are moving at speed!
As co-convenors for the Learning and Skills Research Network, we are passionate about bringing research and practice from both FE and HE institutions across the UK. So we were delighted that teachers from England, Wales and Ireland were able to attend across our events.
In our Autumn term, we gave our ‘movers’ the space to discuss what they needed to know most about building literacy. The outcome was an oracy-focused training event in March, ‘Talk for Learning in Further Education’, hosted by us at Nottingham College and led by the National Literacy Trust. This was the first FE-specific oracy training of its kind.
The jewel in our crown was our end-of-academic-year inaugural conference ‘Literacy, English and the Subject Specialist Teacher’, held at the University of Derby in June. This main event was attended by over 80 practitioners from across the UK and from both FE and HE.
The conference blended evidence-based practice with our core mission: ‘to improve life chances for learners across the FE sector by harnessing literacy as a vehicle for social mobility’.
We are raising the profile of literacy and moving at speed
We were blown away by the powerful messages and research shared throughout the day, which was kicked by Get Further’s Dr Alice Eardley outlining the challenges and positives that the condition of funding requirements can bring for our disadvantaged 16-19 year old students.
With this, she explained, comes the need to draw upon cognitive science and make words come to life by modelling our own expert reading and writing skills.
We were humbled too by the calibre and expertise of our keynote speakers and presenters. We heard from English curriculum specialist Beth Kemp, University of Warwick and GCSE Resit Hub’s Dr Becky Morris, head of the University of Derby’s institute of education and dyslexia expert Sarah Charles, King’s College London literacy specialist Rose Veitch, adult literacy specialist Kerry Scattergood, Nottingham City of Literature director Hannah Trevarthen, Citizen Literacy’s Diane Gardner and John Casey, and national secondary assessment lead Helen Hewlett.
Each speaker shone a light on the potential we, as educators, have to shape better futures by equipping ourselves with what research shows us works to improve literacy across further education.
Finally, we were uplifted by a keynote from Dr Jo Bowser-Angermann, author and associate professor at Anglia Ruskin University, who has researched English resits extensively. She rightly pointed out that while post-16 resit policy is well-intentioned, we must pull away from teaching-to-the-test and embrace the freedom to innovate in our resit classrooms.
Further education colleges are more than just a mop-up for our students’ broken secondary education. We have the power to reignite creativity and must do so to truly re-engage students with improving their literacy skills, not forgetting that literacy crosses every vocation and discipline.
Our work continues across the next academic year, where we look forward to welcoming even more ‘movers’ to help us get closer to levelling the playing field for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Our events will be announced across the year, and they are not to be missed! This isn’t a top-down directive. This isn’t a commercial enterprise. What it is, is a grassroots movement that is putting FE literacy on the agenda
Every FE professional is welcome, so join us – and let’s shake things up.
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