Our School Partnership Agreement
Introduction
The aim of this page is to ensure that we all have the same aims and agree on how those aims can be achieved.
All Aboard Phonics is a relatively new system, but with ambitious aims for what you can achieve, as described below.
If you do not agree with what is suggested here, we need to discuss it. We can only achieve our mission if we are working with schools aligned to it.
100% Success
Our simple mission is to see every child reading confidently. This mission is inevitably an aspiration, but we expect to achieve it within most classes each year.
We hope you are also pushing for 100% success with literacy too.
From past experience you may have doubts at the moment about whether it is possible. That is okay! If that is the case, we will aim to surprise you. All we need from you right now is to be aligned with trying to make it happen.
The Whole School Impact
We know that the focus in a school is often naturally on the results seen at the end of the school journey. That is what the school is mainly being measured on.
But your end results are dependent on the achievements in literacy at the very beginning of the journey.
It can be statistically shown that if a child does not have good literacy at the age of 7, they are almost certain to fail most school assessments at the age of 11. So I hope that a relentless push to get higher literacy rates in the first 3 years of your school makes sense for everyone.
Is 100% Even Possible?
It is all very well having wonderful intentions, but is 100% success possible? What about the struggling readers and the dyslexics? What if you are in an special educational needs setting?
We have total confidence in 100% success being possible in most circumstances, because we have spent the last 14 years researching why children struggle to read and how to help them back on track. If someone can talk, we are confident they can read.
In fact, part of the fun is finding ways for the most challenged children to learn to read! Once all your colleagues have the tools needed to do that again and again, I think they will find it exciting and rewarding too.
Partnership Question 1
In order to achieve our mission, we need to work with school teams that also have that mission.
Partnership Question 1: “Are you committed to pushing towards 100% success in your literacy teaching.”
How We Can Achieve It Together
If we are agreed on the mission, how can we achieve it together?
We can succeed by building your school’s phonics results on these five pillars:
- Good resources that everyone can use consistently.
- A researched approach to interventions, with all the answers.
- The regular use of trainertext, to boost decoding skills.
- The use of the All Aboard home phonics app to boost practice time.
- Sufficient training for the whole team on all of the above.
We hope that all of those pillars seem sensible and essential for 100% success. If not, let’s discuss it!
Defining the Duties on Both Sides
As partners then, we both want the same outcome, based on the five pillars above, but clearly we have different roles to play. Let’s have a look at those.
Our Duties
Pillars 1-4 are completely our duty to deliver to you. I hope you are pleased with what you have had so far.
Our job is to keep improving what you get from us. So every bit of feedback you give to us will drive what you get from us.
That is what we mean by partnership. Neither of us can achieve the mission alone.
Your Duties
As an All Aboard School you have these three duties:
- Share feedback, so that we can keep improving the resources you get from us.
- Use all the resources, including the free home phonics practice app and the free online assessment tool.
- Attend and engage with the training needed, so that everyone is using All Aboard Phonics in line with current research-based best practice.
Partnership Questions 2 & 3
Partnership Question 2: “Are you happy to collaborate closely with us to achieve ever increasing success through communication and feedback?”
This means:
- Reading our emails/messages and responding as necessary.
- Reporting back on any frustrations.
- Sending over your ideas for resources that you think could be added.
Partnership Question 3: “Will the team be allocated sufficient time to attend the training needed?”
This means:
- Every member of the team doing the appropriate online training and self assessment (total of 1 hour of training).
- Every All Aboard teacher doing our 5-week CPD Personal Training course within their first year of All Aboard teaching (total of 7 hours of training) and every All Aboard teaching assistant doing our Intervention Mastery course (total of 3 hours of training).
- Every parent being encouraged to watch our parent training videos and being encouraged to get into a daily routine with the app.
Budget Management Help
We know that this is not just about allocating time. Budgets are fixed things and you may not have the necessary budget available right now for the training we are suggesting.
To help with that, we can accept delayed payment on the cost of the training, so that it drops into your next budget.
Are You In or Out?
We very much hope that the answer to our three questions will be an easy “Yes, of course!”
If not, then drop us a line or give us a ring.
The first step in this collaborative journey is for you to confirm your response below: