Members of our Northern Alliance Emerging Literacy Network are in the process of evaluating the implementation of Emerging Literacy across the Northern Alliance. We want to be able to understand what the barriers are to implementing the Emerging Literacy approach and also what supports us to take this approach forward.

We plan to capture the experiences of individual teachers, schools and clusters of schools by inviting colleagues to tell their stories through case studies. We are also consulting our Allied Health Professional colleagues to find out what their experiences are of partnership working. Part of the evaluation will also include analysis of Education Scotland inspections – looking carefully to see if there are links between high quality Emerging Literacy experiences and positive outcomes within the inspection quality indicators.

However, the most important part of Emerging Literacy is you! If you have had an experience of implementing Emerging Literacy in Primary One or across the school in the past four years, we would appreciate 10 minutes of your time! We have an Emerging Literacy consultation on Survey Monkey which we would really like you to complete via this link – Emerging Literacy – Class Teacher Survey

It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes and we really do want to hear what you have to say. The consultation is anonymous, and every completed consultation will build a clearer picture of what the barriers and ‘enablers’ are for you in your classroom. The survey will run from now until the end of June and we aim to share our evaluation findings by the end of July.

Some of you may be wondering why we are so keen to complete an Emerging Literacy evaluation at this time. Emerging Literacy can be a very useful took in your toolkit when school starts in August. It supports the delivery of a developmental approach to planning and assessing children’s learning – which will be particularly important for our children starting school this year. Another key component of the oral language strand within the Emerging Literacy is the ‘Words Up’ programme which has been developed by the Highland Speech and Language Therapy team to equip adults with the knowledge and skills to improve children’s early language development. The evaluation will help you to understand what needs to be in place in order to ensure impact.

If you have any queries about the Emerging Literacy evaluation, please contact your Local Authority Emerging Literacy representative, or Kathleen Johnston, QIM for the Northern Alliance – Kathleen.johnston@argyll-bute.gov.uk