Headteacher Yvonne Powell and her senior leadership team have created a strong literacy strategy at Little Ilford School in East Ham.
In a school where a third of pupils who arrive in Year 7 are at Level 3 or below in English, and where 90 per cent of children are learning English as an additional language, raising standards in reading, writing, talking and listening is never going to be easy.
Little Ilford School is in a deprived and culturally diverse area. Yvonne has made it her mission to improve the students' standards in literacy by combining cross-curricular activities and intervention programmes.
This programme also outlines the school's current focus on improving pupils' written work and the introduction of writing skeletons, a series of visual aids for planning different types of non-fiction writing. Leaders is the first of four programmes exploring literacy at Little Ilford School.
