Rationale

We know that amongst our Level 1 and 2 students there are often low levels of literacy and a range of barriers preventing engagement with reading and writing. We wanted to look at practical and creative ways of encouraging engagement, in concert with vocational departments. We also wanted to address the need for bespoke reading support for individuals, something which had been flagged for some time by Inclusive Learning Services within college, but at the start of the project was not being provided for. Finally, there was an awareness that the existing Learning Resource Centre was not necessarily meeting the needs of ‘hard to reach’ students, and therefore we wanted to explore the possibility of creating accessible ‘reading spaces’ in which to encourage and support engagement.

Other Contextual Information

Our action research was part of the Education and Training Foundation’s OTLA 8 Programme. We worked with three vocational tutor groups, each with 12-15 students, including one Painting and Decorating, one Plastering and one Carpentry and Joinery. These three groups took part in our ‘Drop Everything and Read’ (DEAR) initiative once a week during tutorials. Our bespoke reading mentoring provision worked on two levels. For our highest needs students, we formed a partnership with Read Easy, a charitable organisation who provide phonics-led reading tuition for adults with very limited reading skills. We also recruited and trained a team of 6 college staff to work as reading mentors for ‘moderate needs’ students – i.e. students who can read but would benefit from additional support. Finally, we created spaces, activities, and opportunities to promote and encourage reading within college, many of which were piloted on World Book Day, and then written into extra-curricular provision, with the support of LCB Student Union.

Approach

1. Engagement with tutor groups

Since the project lead joined LCB in 2019, the question of how to integrate literacy into vocational areas has been a constant topic of discussion. Both staff and students have lived through a decade of subject-specific vocabulary walls and other initiatives; we were keen to use the OTLA 8 opportunity to explore more creative approaches. Three groups were ultimately worked with, each given a Book Box and a weekly ‘Drop Everything and Read’ PowerPoint (Appendix 3.1), intended to structure discussion and provoke thought. Two of the groups went on to work with Leeds Arts University (LAU), taking part in three hour-long workshops in which they worked with undergraduates to design and create models of superheroes. One group responded really positively to this and will be taking part in a further 3 workshops in May/June 2022 and also plan to attend the LAU end of year Degree Show with their tutor. This tutor was invited to meet with the Vice Principal in February 2022 to discuss his group’s engagement with OTLA 8 and how their attitude to reading has changed as a result of their participation (Appendix 3.2 – staff feedback).

2. Reading Mentors

We know that a lack of basic literacy skills is a huge barrier for many of our students, who are sometimes unable to access vocational learning and/or make progress within their vocational areas as a result. I have previously developed ‘vocational literacy’ materials to aid accessibility but found that without intensive one-to-one support even this intervention was ineffective. OTLA 8 enabled us to explore an alternative route, in which reading for pleasure was the means by which we attempted to improve reading and literacy skills. For our high needs students, we developed a partnership with national charity Read Easy (Appendix 3.3). We identified 6 students who required ‘back to basics’, phonics-led mentoring. Read Easy assessed these students, 4 of whom have been receiving mentoring sessions twice weekly since January. For our moderate needs students, we recruited and trained a team of 6 Reading Mentors from LCB staff to deliver weekly reading sessions (Appendix 3.5). Yorkshire Mentoring trained these volunteers on the basic principles and concepts of mentoring, whilst the project lead designed and delivered training on the process of planning and delivering the reading sessions. Yorkshire Mentoring’s involvement was funded by LCB, and they will offer on-going supervision and evaluation until the end of the academic year (Appendix 3.7). We have been clear with our mentors that they too are ‘action researchers’: we set out on this from a position of not really knowing what approaches would be most effective with our cohort, so their observations and feedback will be invaluable moving forward (see Appendix 3.3).

3. Creating Reading Spaces

In some respects this has been the most difficult aspect of our research. The current LRC at the North Street campus of LCB is commonly regarded as not being particularly appealing for some of our hard-to-reach students. We wanted to look at ways of taking reading out into different parts of the college, creating comfortable, accessible, and creative areas for reading. It emerged in December that the LRC was likely to be completely re-designed in the new academic year, and thus would hopefully become more appealing and accessible, so we focused on ‘pop up’ activities and facilities which we hoped would have an impact in the interim. For example, our Carpentry and Joinery students built three ‘Little Libraries’, which were then decorated by our Painting and Decorating students. These have been placed around college as a facility for picking up a free book and/or dropping off books that others can take away. This facility is for staff and students and has stimulated a great deal of interest and discussion about reading. For World Book Day, both the college’s LRCs created Marvel superhero-themed displays and seating areas and tutors were encouraged to bring their students along to access these. We also ran a college-wide ‘Heroes and Villains’ poster activity for WBD, culminating in a massive display of students and staff contributions. Pop-up workshops were also offered that week – one creative sign painting (in North Street Reception – students designed and painted signs for the Little Libraries) and two ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ lunchtime drop-ins. The various workshops were very popular and had so much interest and support from staff that the LCB Student Union has agreed to fund these as an ongoing activity, diversifying their extra-curricular offer and promoting literacy along the way. This is a powerful unexpected outcome (see Appendix 3.5 for photographs of all above activities).