Head of Department: What should I be doing with Bedrock?

Bedrock is an exceptionally powerful tool. The cornerstone of its successful implementation is consistency. Whilst the delivery of Bedrock is typically carried out by class teachers, as a Head of Department, you will be the glue that keeps everyone driving literacy in the same direction with consistent implementation.

Whilst literacy progression is a notoriously difficult nut to crack in schools for a number of reasons, the platform gives faculty and literacy leaders a clear framework in which to understand learners’ tier 2 and grammar progress. Here are some useful ideas for guiding your department’s delivery of Bedrock:

Spread the word

Ensure colleagues responsible for delivering Bedrock clearly understand the mission Bedrock is supporting your school to achieve and its significance for learners.

Explain to colleagues that Bedrock’s vocabulary platform aligns closely with the EEF’s recommendations around explicit vocabulary instruction, and that a mastery framework also underpins our grammar curriculum: we start by breaking concepts down into manageable chunks before moving on to more complex concepts. The platform is entirely adaptive to thier learners and provides them with real-time data-driven insights into learners’ vocabulary gaps, empowering teachers with the knowledge to move their learners forward.

Set clear expectations

Ensure you have a clear benchmark for both learners and colleagues to aspire to each week. Without this, it’s very difficult to achieve consistency and engagement.

We recommend that between Monday and Sunday, learners achieve 20 points. More information about how learners earn points can be found here, whilst a detailed breakdown of the points system can also be found here.

We know that every setting is different: depending on how you’re using Bedrock, you could also use ‘time spent’ or ‘lesson completion’ as your measure of engagement. Find even more information on data and reporting here.

Especially for those using Bedrock during school lessons, a great way to reinforce and encourage usage in the lesson is to use the Weekly Engagement report. Encourage your department to use this to share the success of learners and show that every time they engage with the platform is valuable.

Ensure consistency

Colleagues who are delivering Bedrock must have a clear sense of what effective delivery looks like: in essence, how should they check when learners are engaging with the platform and when they aren’t?

The delivery of Bedrock can take many shapes. Every week, teachers receive an email informing them of their learners’ activity (they can change the day of this report by following the guide here). Checking in with learners and their usage is the best way to make sure your department follows a consistent, weekly pattern to facilitate accountability. At the very least, it’s important to ensure that learners are recognised for their engagement, and supported to continue their literacy journey.

As a lead teacher, the Class Engagement report in your ‘School reports’ dashboard is an exceptionally powerful tool to understand issues at class level, giving you a much quicker insight into where you can intervene and have the most impactful conversations with teachers and their classes. If you’d like a more granular insight into learner engagement the Student Engagement report gives you a very detailed week-by-week overview of how a learner has engaged with the platform.

Encourage teachers to also use the Block Placement report to clarify which block their learners are in, and then run Knowledge Trends reports to identify the areas where their learners need additional vocabulary support. You can also run these reports across year groups so that you can circulate the most impactful words across your curriculum into other subjects as well.

Get parents involved!

Ensure that parents know everything they need to! Involving parents with Bedrock is an incredibly useful way of helping them to enrich the language environment in the home. Our guide will help you get started.

Depending on how your school interacts with parents, communicative reminders and messages of praise are other means of empowering parents to be involved in their child’s literacy journey.