Carl Pattison is an Independent Literacy Advisor. At the time of writing this guest post, Carl has various roles including Priority Literacy Lead for a Key Stage 2/3 literacy project across Derby and Nottingham Cities aimed at raising standards in reading and writing. He is also the Early Reading Lead advisor for the Flying High Trust. The Trust was founded in 2012 and has steadily grown to 33 schools in the primary phase across Nottingham City, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire.
Carl shares his findings of implementing the No Nonsense Phonics programme in multiple schools to date. He is very generous in his kind words about working with me – but I must add that I have benefited greatly from working with Carl and various school Reading Leaders in the Flying High Trust network – we are a team! Thank you so much to Carl and everyone involved – and well done to all the fabulous children who have worked so hard with their foundational literacy! Debbie Hepplewhite
Carl writes:
February 2024
Nearly four years ago, I reached out to Debbie via Twitter and it was one of the best decisions I could have made.
In 2019, I stepped out of Primary Headship to lead one of the 34 English Hubs (a literacy initiative by the Department for Education in England) and also I took on the role of the Early Reading Lead for a large, primary only, Academy Trust. It was a fascinating period in the first 18 months as I was able to visit many schools and extensively observe phonics provision – roughly a thousand lessons in that period! I was learning a great deal about my role through training and reading but some of the best learning came from working alongside colleagues in schools, with a particular focus on those children not making good progress with their reading.
From those first few months, however, it was clear that too many children were ‘slipping through the net’ (a phrase borrowed from Debbie) and in many cases, schools were unable to address this. This problem wasn’t about any lack of dedication and efforts of staff: Simply put, it was time to sharpen the tools and become more effective and rigorous in practical ways.
In those first 18 months, I became an advocate of paper-based learning for phonics lessons. I won’t go into the many reasons why, but it was clear that a rigorous approach to phonics that implemented paper-based activities had a huge effect on children’s learning. Luckily, I was able to implement this across a wide range of schools in my own Trust and beyond. We simply took the ‘Letters and Sounds’ model (DfES, 2007) and provided more rigour and high-quality, paper-based resources for children to use. The impact on England’s statutory Year 1 Phonics Screening Check (PSC) results was remarkable, even in a time when standards were dropping nationally due to the COVID pandemic. Although we had a positive impact on outcomes, I still felt we could achieve even more.
As a novice in this arena, I felt that there must have been others out there who had seen what I had in schools and shared similar thoughts. That’s where Debbie came in. I was fascinated by her Twitter posts for various reasons. Firstly, it was clear that she also believed in high-quality, paper-based activities. Secondly, her posts often tackled the status quo of the early reading world. At this time, there were very few ‘off the shelf’ phonics programmes implemented in schools. Most schools, from my experience, were relying on their version of ‘Letters and Sounds’. Amongst many topics, Debbie challenged practitioners to think deeply about high-quality instruction and resources along with good subject knowledge and incidental phonics teaching in addition to the systematic planned programme of work.
In 2020, Debbie kindly agreed to mentor me and over the next few weeks, months and years, I learned so much from her – and I still do! I learnt about her various phonics programmes and the thinking behind them. I also had someone to share my observations and findings in schools. Debbie’s programmes offered even more than the approach we had established across the Trust – therefore, I pitched to the senior leaders within our Trust that we should have ‘preferred’ phonics programmes for our Trust schools (this was before the concept of the DfE ‘validated’ list of ‘systematic synthetic phonics programmes’ was generated). The senior leaders understood the benefits of this and agreed that Debbie’s No Nonsense Phonics (Skills) would become one of our Trust’s preferred programmes and approaches. Schools would be free to select which phonics programmes they wanted to implement but No Nonsense Phonics would be where we focused our main efforts.
In January 2021, when schools were open for one day before going back into lockdown, we launched No Nonsense Phonics in one of the Trust schools. Since then, it is important to note that the school received an Ofsted ‘Good’ judgment in Autumn 2023. Prior to conversion, this school was in ‘Special Measures’. All schools across our Trust are now rated ‘Good’ or better and early reading is always a strength in reports. No Nonsense Phonics is implemented in 24 schools, with 7 further schools choosing to implement Read Write Inc (4 schools) or Little Wandle (3 schools). The last two schools to be inspected are both No Nonsense Phonics schools and they both achieved an ‘Outstanding’ Ofsted judgment. Read their reports here and here .
There are many other positives to implementing Debbie’s No Nonsense Phonics and I strongly recommend you read my other post about the ‘surprises’ that Reading Leads discovered when implementing No Nonsense Phonics. I want to finish this post, however, with good old-fashioned data. Here goes:
2019: 82% of our Year 1 children across the Trust passed the Phonics Screening Check. The national average was 82%.
2022: 85% of our Year 1 children across the Trust passed the Phonics Screening Check. The national average dropped to 75%.
2023: 89% of our Year 1 children across the Trust passed the Phonics Screening Check. The national average rose slightly to 79%.
It’s important to note that in this same period, more schools joined our Trust, with many having low outcomes for early reading before conversion. Even with this additional challenge, our average outcomes continue to improve. The standard of children’s spelling, handwriting and acquisition of (and curiosity for) rich vocabulary has also notably improved using No Nonsense Phonics Skills Pupil Books for teaching and learning.
In 2023, some of our Flying High Trust schools achieved national recognition by the Minister of State for Schools, Damian Hinds, who wrote to the schools congratulating them on ‘their 2023 Phonics Screening performance’ – within the top 1% to 5% of schools in England. Longwood Infant Academy (Headteacher, Anne Ingle) is in the top 1% of the country using the No Nonsense Phonics programme.
The wonderful effort and dedication of staff in our Flying High Trust schools is something that I am proud of. In uncertain times, faced with many challenges, they believe in hitting the reading challenge head-on so that every child succeeds on the reading journey. However, the difference, in recent years, is that they are facing the challenge with some of the best, high-quality materials available, written by a true expert.
Carl Pattison
The Literacy Advisor
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Subsequent post:
