How to improve literacy in Key Stage 2: embedding EEF guidance

Literacy impacts success in every subject, so developing a curriculum-wide approach to literacy has a proven impact. If you’re a primary school lead looking for support in drafting a literacy strategy, the Education Endowment Fund’s report into Improving Literacy in Key Stage 2 is a good place to start.

Here, we summarise its seven recommendations for improving literacy and tell you how each can be achieved in practice.

Every whole-school literacy strategy is unique. Yours will be informed by your school’s own distinct characteristics. However, there are some guiding principles to consider:

• Involve all teachers and support staff. Ensure they’re engaged in using language to promote learning in every subject
• Identify the particular needs of all students, across all three domains of literacy – oracy, reading, and writing
• Build strong links between school and home
• Plan for the longer term, emphasising the integral relationship between language and effective teaching in all subjects.

The EEF’s guidance isn’t meant to be comprehensive. Its recommendations are ‘lever points’, allowing evidence about literacy teaching to make a significant impact on students’ learning.

Tech can play a valuable role in any literacy strategy, complementing in-class teaching. So alongside each recommendation, we suggest how our online curriculum, Bedrock Vocabulary, can support your school.

The report also emphasises the importance of parental engagement, especially at primary level.

Overview of EEF recommendation: Speaking and listening activities develop language and provide foundations for thinking and communication. Pre-teaching key vocabulary, modelling key terms in action and giving students the opportunity to orally rehearse their ideas improves language capability and prepares students for reading and writing.

How Bedrock can help: Bedrock Vocabulary is human narrated. It exposes students to new words and structured activities, developing reading comprehension.

Overview of EEF recommendation: Fluent readers focus on comprehending the text rather than word recognition. Fluency can be developed by guided reading instruction. Prioritise reading and provide regular opportunities for learners to read, or be read, a wide range of texts.

How Bedrock can help: Bedrock’s human narration provides guided reading. Our algorithm ensures students’ learning matches their ability, maximising progress.

Overview of EEF recommendation: Learners apply strategies to aid comprehension, such as prediction, questioning, summarising, inference and activating prior knowledge.

How Bedrock can help: Every Bedrock Vocabulary lesson has at least three reading comprehension activities. Pre-writing activities give learners the opportunity to practise using the new vocabulary in different contexts.

Overview of EEF recommendation: Learners need a reason to write and someone to write for. Model the process an expert writer goes through, including planning, drafting and editing. ‘I do – we do – you do’ can be a useful strategy to use.

How Bedrock can help: Students apply their new vocabulary knowledge in independent free-writing activities that their teacher reviews.

Overview of EEF recommendation: Regularly encourage learners to focus on the big picture rather than getting caught up with a granular focus on spelling, handwriting and sentence construction. It will help with their writing fluency. Make time to focus on those other aspects explicitly.

How Bedrock can help: Independent writing tasks in each lesson enable learners to practise composition skills.

Overview of EEF recommendation: Use high-quality assessment and diagnosis to target and adapt teaching to students’ needs.

How Bedrock can help: Before starting Bedrock, learners take an assessment to put them at the right level. Our algorithm adapts to ensure they’re always at the right level to ensure maximum progress. Usage and progress data is visible to teachers at an individual and cohort level.

Overview of EEF recommendation: Focus initially should be on core strategies that benefit the whole class and so decrease the need for additional support. For learners still struggling, structured interventions should be put in place, with diagnosis matching them to these.

How Bedrock can help: Many schools use Bedrock as part of their intervention strategies, as well as at a whole-school level. Read our schools’ success stories.

Bedrock Learning's Senior English Specialist Ellie Ashton currently runs a webinar series deep-diving into the EEF recommendations one by one, highlighting the research and strategies you need to improve literacy in your classroom. Check out our webinar page to find our past recordings, and sign up to the next webinar.