Literacy Impact Educational Services

Before you plan the next literacy initiative or book more professional learning, do you know where the real gaps are?

Schools can invest significant time, energy and resources into literacy improvement without first stepping back to look at the wider system.

✔️What is already working?
✔️Where is impact being lost?
✔️And what actually needs attention next?

The Literacy Excellence Health Check™ is a short, strategic diagnostic designed to help school leaders look beyond individual programs, resources or professional learning and consider the broader conditions that influence schoolwide literacy improvement.

20 questions. 10 areas. Around 15 minutes.

You’ll receive a personalised report providing a starting point and suggested next steps for leading schoolwide change.

Before deciding what to add next, find out where to focus first.

👉 Start the Literacy Excellence Health Check™: https://www.literacyimpact.com.au/health-check/

Missed the last webinar? That's ok because we are running it again!

It's a live only event where you will find out why you are working so hard on lifting literacy across your school and yet it's not having the impact on your students' growth.

Date: Thursday, 24 Sep, 4pm - 6pm AWST / 6pm - 8pm AEST

Register now via Humanitix - https://events.humanitix.com/the-literacy-improvement-iceberg-tm-6qhn9gjc

A few weeks ago I received a very unexpected email informing me that I had been nominated for the AusMumpreneur Award in Education and Training.

Ausmumpreneur is about celebrating Australian mums doing great things in business. I would like to sincerely thank Olivia Jenkins for nominating me for this award. Olivia is supermum in business herself and also my extraordinary business coach 🫶🏻

When I started Literacy Impact I took a leap of faith in going out on my own with the goal to make a significant impact in improving the literacy outcomes for every child.

Far too many students do not reach proficient reading and writing skills and literacy is the gateway to living a life of choice and opportunity. Sometimes I took this vision on board a bit too much and have reached the point of burn out but that’s something that is still a work in progress.

Two children under 12 and four years later, life is full and hectic and one big juggling act but I feel privileged to have partnered with over 100 schools across our country and to look back and think there is a lot to celebrate.

Best wishes to all the other finalists and thank you again Olivia for making me take that moment to reflect and appreciate the journey!

Olivia Jenkins

Many school leaders know they need a more consistent literacy approach schoolwide… they just don’t know where to begin.

We expect school leaders to lead one of the most significant school improvement priorities they’ll ever face. Yet almost nobody has actually taught them how to lead literacy improvement.

They may understand curriculum and the ‘what’ of structured literacy. They may have strong pedagogical knowledge around effective teaching and mastery learning.

But implementation science, change management, building instructional consistency across dozens of classrooms, leading adults through sustained change from ideology to evidence - are completely different leadership skills.

Many school leaders end up doing what most of us would do- reading another book, attending a school improvement conference, listening to a podcast- hoping this will be the thing that finally brings everything together. The thing is, these are usually taught or explained in silos and not systems.

The problem isn’t commitment. The problem is that nobody has shown you how to build the capacity, conditions and systems for sustainable impact - for every student in your school.

That’s exactly why we created Building Literacy Excellence™ - to give school leaders a practical blueprint for leading sustainable literacy improvement with confidence.

Because great literacy outcomes don’t happen by chance. They happen by design.

Without an agreed understanding about what will be taught, in what dosage, frequency, complexity, and how to build the knowledge to mastery, even the best ‘program’ doesn’t guarantee the results you expect.

I love partnering with schools to bring this to life. Yesterday it was with a school in the Perth hills. If this is something you are wanting to work towards for your school, Building Literacy Excellence the one year partnership could be the next step. EOI here https://forms.cloud.microsoft/r/hk3K6dmW66

Why does finding time to lead literacy improvement feel harder than leading the school itself?

If this resonates with you- I see you and I have been there.

Student behaviour.
Teacher shortages.
No relief cover.
Union strikes disrupting school days.
One hour of staff meeting time each week.
Compliance reporting.
Parent follow-up.
Recruitment panels.

These are just a morsel of the daily urgent tasks I know all too well and are the actual world some of my school leaders are dealing with this week.

The reality is, most school leaders aren’t choosing to neglect literacy improvement.
They’re drowning in competing priorities.
The challenge isn’t that literacy isn’t important.
It’s that everything feels urgent.

When every day becomes reactive, the important work of building a coherent literacy system gets pushed to next week, then next term, then next year.

The schools that make the greatest gains don’t have fewer challenges.
They’ve built systems that protect improvement work from the daily noise.

That’s exactly why we created Building Literacy Excellence™. A one year staged partnership based on your context and Annual Improvement Plan, to support you to build the readiness, capacity for teachers, conditions, systems, low variance curriculum and MTSS framework that makes school improvement effective (and sustainable).

Because literacy improvement shouldn’t depend on whether you happened to have a quiet week (hello, when is that in schools?!) It should be built into the way your school operates, with a step by step proven pathway to improvement that you can rely on, with someone who understands your world.

Expressions of Interest for Building Literacy Excellence™ are now open.
Link in the comments.

We are investing heavily in improving educator ‘capability’ — but that is not a proxy for improving student learning.

Something I have noticed in education is the sheer volume of professional learning, conferences, undergraduate training, resource creation, and online development for teachers and leaders.

What there is less of, however, is a focus on the evidence of impact — of that training, study, resource development, or professional learning on student outcomes.

I understand that an information session or introductory workshop can be valuable- to build awareness, shared language, and initial understanding. But beyond that, we know from Joyce and Showers that professional learning only transfers into classroom practice — and student impact — when it includes demonstration, theory, practice, feedback and coaching.

Even when professional learning or resources are of the highest quality, if we are not a) aligning our training and resources with PL theory and b) tracking our direct impact on student learning, a disconnect will emerge that needs to be addressed.

I believe our moral purpose in education is to ensure that what we are doing or providing on a daily basis is improving student learning that can be measured and documented. If it is not, then our approach is either missing something, not yet effective, or in need of rethinking.

Because if around 30% of students in this country are not reading proficiently, the last thing we need is more resource creation or professional learning that does not shift that number.

Building capability of educators is only valuable when it changes student outcomes.

How do I fit it all in the literacy block?

If you've asked yourself that this week, you're not the only one. You may have read every “Science of Reading” book, inhaled every podcast, scrolled every Facebook group hoping the next post finally helps — and instead it's turned into noise.

The thing is it's not a "read more" problem. It's a "show me what this actually looks like" problem, because chances are, no one has.

Like the moment right after you finish the read-aloud — comprehension instruction is supposed to happen next, but nobody ever actually showed you how. If you're a graduate teacher, that gap can feel bigger than anyone admits.

That's exactly why I built the High Impact Reading Instruction and Intervention Masterclass — based on my book of the same name, and on 25+ years working at classroom, school and system level. It shows you what to prioritise, what to let go of, and how to teach it — including what comes after the read-aloud.

Right now, enrolment also includes bonus SRSD writing lectures for a limited time.

If you've been asking: — Am I actually on the right track? — How do I manage this many different student needs? — What do I keep, and what can go?

This masterclass was built to answer exactly that.

Link in the comments.

The Gist Statement- a highly effective routine for:

~checking for understanding of written texts
~formative assessment in reading written texts
~improving reading comprehension
~using a written response to reading
~linking sentence level writing to reading of complex texts
~applying in cross curricular learning areas
~primary and secondary contexts
~intervention of language and reading comprehension reading difficulty profiles

It is one of the many high impact routines we support our schools to embed with fidelity.

A link to the resource is in the comments. Please feel free to share with attribution.

https://www.loom.com/share/5dbad3ced687494e81641413fd0b466f

Teaching Students Gist Statements Effectively This Loom recommends using the gist statement routine to improve reading comprehension across the curriculum. It explains a three-step process: identify who or what the section is about, select the most important details, then combine them into a concise gist statement, leaving out less relevant inf...

The leaders of schools where almost every student reaches expected literacy standards aren’t luckier than the next leader.

They aren’t necessarily better resourced, either.

They have simply stopped treating literacy improvement as a collection of disconnected initiatives.

They understand that literacy excellence is not created by choosing the right program, booking an impressive speaker, purchasing another set of resources or sending a handful of teachers to coaching training.

These things may all have value but none of them, alone, creates a school in which every student is taught well, every day, in every classroom.

Exemplary school leaders view literacy improvement through a systems lens.

They recognise the difference between a school that is busy doing literacy things and a school that has built the conditions required for literacy excellence.

They also understand the cost of waiting. They don’t allow another term to pass while the leadership team circles the same questions:
Which program should we choose? Which professional learning should we book? Which resources should we purchase? Which initiative should we focus on next?

Every month spent in indecision is another month that struggling students remain exactly where they are and the longer it takes and the more resources it costs to catch those students up.

Some students begin to believe they are the problem.

But the majority of these students are instructional casualties of a fragmented system.

This is the uncomfortable distinction between schools that continually add more literacy activity and schools that build literacy excellence.

The difference is rarely effort or care. It is clarity, coherence and the leadership urgency to stop treating a system problem with isolated solutions.