Whether or not you agree with the term ‘more able’ or prefer to think of these pupils as ‘high potential’ (or whether you prefer not to label children at all – after all, don’t all children have high potential?), you will inevitably encounter many mixed ability classes in your time teaching Literacy at primary school. Last year, I had a number of pupils in my class who just seemed to be able to grasp concepts more readily and more fluently than their peers and I wanted to ensure that I was challenging them enough, that I was meeting their needs too. It was this that led me to attend Planning for the Needs of More Able Pupils in Years 5 & 6.

This course, run by the CLPE in partnership with the English and Media Centre, explored how to help pupils go above and beyond expected levels in literacy with strategies to stretch and challenge and how knowledge and skills can be developed in KS2, giving pupils the best possible preparation for the demands of KS3.

The emphasis was very much on practical ideas, exploratory activities and interesting texts, underpinned by recent research findings. We looked closely at Piers Torday’s The Last Wild and an accompanying teaching sequence. This training course definitely helped me to be able to:

• Identify what a more able reader and writer looks like and can do at the end of KS2 and develop ideas to help these children make further progress;
• Build higher order activities into a text-based sequence of work for Y5/6 which encourages critical thinking and develops the ability to write for a reader;
• Move pupils from being able to identify textual features to being able to talk and write about the impact these have on the reader;
• Establish strategies that help pupils go beyond inserting the features of different kinds of texts, to a more subtle understanding of the relationship between the writer and the reader.

Download the PDF version here: CPD MINI REVIEW – Meeting the Needs of More Able Pupils at KS2.

For more conference and professional development courses from the CLPE, click here.