Sheffield-based research shows how supporting family literacy boosts early reading.
Nancy Farrow, Executive Head of Sheffield’s Broomhall and Grace Owen Nursery Schools, says there’s nothing she enjoys more than spotting the early signs of children discovering the joy of reading and writing.
However, Nancy explains that this is not always the case.
We worked with one child who was very reluctant to come to nursery. He was shy, wouldn't do any mark making [basic use of a pen or pencil], wouldn't do any reading, wasn't at all interested in any of those things.
Nancy Farrow
Executive Head, Broomhall and Grace
Fortunately for Nancy and her staff, Sheffield-based research into early literacy (sharing books, early writing, and talk) has extended their knowledge and skills to help parents support their young children to become readers, writers and story tellers.
Nancy said colleagues visited the family home with story books and a whiteboard to model mark, but at first the child simply watched. The following week he proudly showed what he had created. “That transformed his mark making,” Nancy said. He soon began reading the books they had left for him, to his mum’s relief.
Learning at home has a profound impact on children’s early literacy development, and on their achievement later in school.
Nancy’s schools were part of a Sheffield-based research project, the UK’s largest preschool intervention study, the Raising Early Achievement in Literacy (REAL) project.
The project focused on creating and sharing an approach to help families support their young children’s early reading and writing before they go to school.
Today, engaging families to support early learning is the norm for many teachers, improving children’s foundations of learning across the UK.
For decades, research has suggested that families are powerful influences on children’s early literacy development.
In the late 1990s, Professor Peter Hannon of The University of Sheffield used his research findings to set out a new framework covering four main ways in which parents can help.
He worked with his colleague Professor Dame Cathy Nutbrown and others to further develop the framework with groups of parents, teachers and early years settings.
Cathy said: “At the time, visiting parents in their own homes to help with their child’s early literacy development was relatively novel. But today, many take this approach for granted.”
The ORIM (Opportunities, Recognition, Interactions and Model) framework was successfully used by early years teachers to engage and guide parents, leading to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funding a new project to expand its use further.
Twenty practitioners were directly involved in the project, sharing it with 300 other early years educators and 6,000 families.
In 2013 the ORIM framework was awarded the ESRC prize for outstanding impact on society.
We subsequently worked with more partners who used the framework in more education settings and charities nationally, including work with parents in prison.
Professor Dame Cathy Nutbrown
The University of Sheffied
The ORIM framework highlights four key aspects of family support for children’s literacy development:
Nancy Farrow still uses key findings from the Sheffield research today.
As well as using the ORIM framework in her own work, which she and her staff have absorbed into their practice, all of the family centres in Sheffield are now running a course based on REAL called Making it REAL.
She explained: “They’re doing more of that work with families and they’re training staff who might never have met REAL before. So, the research is still very current in Sheffield. It stands the test of time.”
For Nancy though, sometimes the small steps are as satisfying as the broader impact.
She says: “When families bring in little cards or little things their children have done with mark-making to show you their progress, that’s lovely. It’s very rewarding.”
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