NLS Framework for teaching

About the literacy hour

Rationale

The literacy hour is designed to provide a practical structure of time and class management which reflects the structure of teaching objectives in the NLS Framework. While the Framework provides details of what should be taught, the literacy hour is the means of teaching it. The Literacy Hour should be implemented throughout the school to provide a daily period of dedicated literacy teaching time for all pupils.

Why an hour? In the guidance on time allocations underlying the National Curriculum, the teaching of English is allocated about 5 hours per week. It suggests 180 hours at KS1 and 167 hours at KS2 in a 36-week year, plus additional time for teaching English through other subjects. Inspection evidence shows that, while time is used in different ways from school to school and even class to class within schools, almost all schools provide at least this amount of time for literacy teaching. This reflects the priority that primary teachers give to literacy. However, the literacy hour is also designed to bring about a number of important changes.

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A clearer focus on literacy instruction

the literacy hour is intended to promote 'literacy instruction' but this is not a recipe for returning to some crude or simple form of 'transmission' teaching. The most successful teaching is:

discursive - characterised by high quality oral work;
interactive - pupils' contributions are encouraged, expected, and extended;
well-paced - there is a sense of urgency, driven by the need to make progress and succeed;
confident - teachers have a clear understanding of the objectives;
ambitious - there is optimism about and high expectations of success.

The objectives in the Framework should give literacy teaching focus and direction, which should aim for high levels of motivation and active engagement for pupils. To achieve this, teachers will need to use a wide range of teaching strategies including:

direction eg to ensure pupils know what they should be doing, to draw attention to points, to develop key strategies in reading and writing;
demonstration eg to teach letter formation and join letters, how to read punctuation using a shared text, how to use a dictionary;
modelling eg discussing the features of written texts through shared reading of books, extracts;
scaffolding eg providing writing frames for shared composition of non-fiction texts;
explanation to clarify and discuss eg reasons in relation to the events in a story, the need for grammatical agreement when proofreading, the way that different kinds of writing are used to serve different purposes;
questioning: to probe pupils' understanding, to cause them to reflect on and refine their work, and to extend their ideas;
initiating and guiding exploration eg to develop phonological awareness in the early stages, to explore relationships between grammar, meaning and spelling with older pupils;
investigating ideas eg to understand, expand on or generalise about themes and structures in fiction and non-fiction;
discussing and arguing eg to put points of view, argue a case, justify a preference;
listening to and responding eg to stimulate and extend pupils' contributions, to discuss/evaluate their presentations.

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Improved classroom organisation and management

The literacy hour offers a structure of classroom management, designed to maximise the time teachers spend directly teaching their class. It is intended to shift the balance of teaching from individualised work, especially in the teaching of reading, towards more whole-class and group teaching. Where pupils are taught individually, the average time they spend being taught is around 5 or 6 minutes a week. This is frequently a cause of frustration for pupils and teachers. Often, because of interruptions and lack of continuity, the quality of this teaching is limited and, at Key Stage 2, the range of individual needs with which the teacher has to deal can become unmanageably wide. Less able pupils often receive fragmentary attention while the more able are left to 'cruise'.

The greater emphasis on whole-class work means that in a literacy hour, pupils will spend about three-quarters of their time being taught as members of a whole-class or a smaller ability group. About a quarter of their time will be spent on independent reading or writing work. Careful management of demands and responses in whole-class and group sessions offer high levels of involvement for all pupils, particularly the least able, many of whom quickly gain confidence. Primary teachers are often already skilled at teaching in these ways, for example in story reading, class discussion times and P.E.

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Effective management of literacy at school level

The literacy hour is designed to provide continuity of planning and teaching throughout the school. This has important consequences for pupils, teachers and headteachers:

for pupils, the literacy hour provides common practices and class routines that are clear and predictable and can be carried forward when they move to a new class. Experience with the National Literacy Project has shown this to be a significant advantage that contributes greatly to building confidence and high expectations;
for teachers, the common structure means that planning can be shared and that there is a common basis for in-service training. It also means that teachers from different schools can collaborate in planning and training more effectively because they come with common assumptions and a shared language about how literacy should be taught;
for headteachers, senior staff and governors, the teaching objectives establish clear expectations to enable the school to set literacy targets appropriate to different year groups. Alongside this, the time-tabled literacy hour determines when and how these expectations will be met in each class. These common structures should enable schools to monitor systematically the quality of teaching and its impact on pupils' achievements.

The literacy hour is structured to ensure that all the key aspects in the Framework are covered. Although the times are approximate and there is some scope to vary them to meet pupils' needs, the generic parts of the literacy hour should be treated as essential elements and covered on a daily basis. If there are compelling reasons for changing these times, schools should ensure that an equivalent balance of time and teaching elements are planned across the week. This balance should provide a substantial proportion of whole-class and group teaching (approximately three-quarters of the time), and independent working (approximately a quarter of the time).

Teachers should try to keep to an hour each day and avoid stretching out the time. This helps to keep a sense of urgency and pace in the work and helps to maintain a direct and lively atmosphere in the class.

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Links with the rest of the curriculum

Where appropriate, literacy teaching should be linked to work in other areas of the curriculum. For example, during the literacy hour, pupils might be searching and retrieving from information texts used in science, writing instructions linked to a technology topic, studying myths, autobiographies or stories linked to a study unit in history. Nevertheless, the focus of teaching must be on the literacy objectives from the Framework and pupils must be working on texts. In other words while links with the rest of the curriculum are fundamental to effective literacy teaching, other subjects should be treated as vehicles for literacy work and not displace it from its primary focus in the Literacy Hour. It would not be appropriate, therefore, for pupils to be spending time drawing or making models linked to reading during the Literacy Hour but it could certainly be appropriate for literacy work to provide a context for related activities in other curricular areas outside the designated time.

The literacy hour is intended to be a time for the explicit teaching of reading and writing. Teachers will need to provide opportunities for practising and applying new skills in independent work at other times. Most of this practice should be productively linked to other curricular areas. However, additional time may also be needed for:

continuing the practice of reading to the class;
pupils' own independent reading for interest and pleasure;
extended writing for older pupils.

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