On Friday 24th November the literacy leads from each cluster of schools across the Falkirk area met to discuss and shape our new Children’s Service literacy strategy. We spoke in detail about the work which had been done between this meeting and our last and agreed that:

1. The literacy strategy should be visual – Sketchnote format would be ideal.
2. It should link to related materials and be a genuine “One Stop Shop” which cuts down on workload and gives necessary information as succinctly as possible – we will hyperlink as much as is useful.
3. We need to make effective use of technology to make the strategy as engaging as possible – images, video and sound work best – we will gather video, examples of literacy practice, teachers and early years officers talking about what works for them

During the meeting we identified tasks such as creating a Falkirk literacy hashtag so everyone in our authority can find literacy work easily using Twitter. We settled on #FLIT, and have already started using this.

Each cluster literacy lead person will use this blog to post about developments in literacy within their own school and cluster – watch this space!

Our final priority task during the meeting was to structure our Literacy OneNote document to make it as useful as possible for practitioners across the authority. Yvonne Manning and Yvonne McBlain will work on this document using the criteria above to guide them.