A BARNSLEY teacher’s moment of inspiration when trying to teach a sport-obsessed teenager to read has turned into an £80,000 project which is transforming the way teachers help youngsters switched off from learning.
David Fallis was at Springwell Learning Community a few years ago working one-to-one with a 15-year-old lad who wasn’t interested in learning about anything that wasn’t sport.
He didn’t even want to be in the class room and was only happy in the sports hall.
“He’d been excluded from mainstream school, he had a very low reading age, and was totally disengaged with school,” said David.
“But he was happy in the sports hall.”
Springwell is a special school for pupils with social, emotional and behavioural mental health difficulties, and David was tasked with finding ‘interventions’ to help bring switched-off pupils back into the classroom.
Because he was so far behind in his reading, David wanted to encourage him to learn the basics of phonics, which is the process of learning to read and write by understanding the sounds made by letters and groups of letters.
“All he’d say is he wanted to go to the sports hall, so I was looking for a way to use his enthusiasm for sport to help him learn the basics of reading.”
David got some signs showing the various letters and sounds, stuck them up on the wall in the sports hall, and got the lad to throw a ball at a particular sound.
It was an instant hit, so after enlisting the help of PE teacher Kayleigh Dunwell, he soon built up a selection of games which became Active Phonics, now a successful community interest company which helps deliver phonics sessions in 20 schools, including 12 across Barnsley.
“It quickly proved useful at Springwell, helping get pupils interested in phonics,” said David. “They made progress with reading, it gave them more confidence, more self esteem, they learned to take turns and share with each other, and they became generally more resilient.
“If they got anything wrong, they were in an environment where they were in it together and they were more willing to have another go. If they were in a classroom and they got something wrong, they’d get frustrated, but because they were having fun, and they knew it was OK to try again, they were fine.”
The project was entered into the Shine (Let Teachers SHINE) awards, which supports a variety of educational programmes, and he was awarded £10,000 to develop the project further at Springwell. That was successful and he was awarded a further £20,000 to expand it, and now he has been awarded another £50,000 which is helping take the project into 50 schools.
David, who now works at Springwell’s pupil referral unit in Kendray four days a week, is dedicating the rest of his time to the project and hopes to recruit another 30 schools to take part in the project.
He is also working as a SHINE Ambassador to help encourage other teachers who have good ideas to apply to the programme to develop them like he did.
“I know there are teachers out there who have got ideas and ways of doing things that could help other teachers, other schools, other children.
“We want to encourage them to come forward and share what they do.”
See shinetrust.org.uk for more details on the work of the trust. David is offering some free training on Friday May 25 Friday June 15 at Springwell. See activephonics.co.uk or email david@activephonics.co.uk for details.
