Could you tell us a little about your role at Ely College and what a typical day looks like for you?
As ‘Reading Lead’, my days always start brilliantly because I get to greet my form-time intervention group and then start reading aloud from our latest novel. This is a lovely calm start to the day for our students, but it’s also a lovely calm start for me too: for twenty minutes we close the classroom door, and the rest of the world just vanishes as we all lose ourselves in the story. This strategy is part of our evidence-informed secondary reading provision, discussed below, so it has a sound research foundation, but feels like a treat every day of the week.
Once lessons start, I teach a mixture of Reading Groups and English, including our Post-16 GCSE students, so I see quite a range of learners as well as my intervention students. The intervention includes a lot of dedicated parent contact time, so I often also spend part of my day chatting with families to find out how we can best support their children’s reading journeys.
Can you talk us through your career journey and what led you to where you are today?
My career journey began with a post-graduate gap year spent on the pastoral team of a large boarding school near London. I completed my teacher training the following year, then emigrated to America to get married and teach in a preschool. I returned briefly to the UK for my ECT year at secondary school in March, Cambridgeshire, before moving back to the US and taking a long career break to pursue other pathways, including raising my children and providing elder care for extended family as well as some volunteering and tutoring.
By 2018, we had settled back here in the UK, and my oldest was attending Ely College. Wondering if a return to teaching might be remotely possible after such a long time, I came in to help out a bit in our SEND and Alternative Provision depts. The following year, I was offered a teaching contract in the English department and things progressed from there.
I will always be very grateful to the college for creating such a seamless transition back to the profession for me.
You’ve been at Ely College for a number of years. How has your role developed and evolved during that time?
I’ve been really fortunate with this. My initial English teaching role led to Assistant Curriculum Lead in 2020 and then to Assistant SENCO in 2021. Following this, I returned to classroom teaching for a while and was then asked to put together a reading intervention in the summer of 2023 to support some of our struggling learners. Over time, this turned into the Ely College Reading Group Project, an innovative provision which we have been tracking for three years through iterative cycles of research reports. Impact data has been strong, and I recently presented the project’s evidence base and findings at the East Anglian ResearchED conference.
Throughout my time at Ely, I’ve also been given multiple opportunities to participate in the pedagogy of the college. I edit our staff teaching and learning journal, The Link, alongside our Vice Principal, Sam Rasmussen. Additionally, I am leading a new-model CPD project this year; it has involved all teaching colleagues in our setting designing and trialling research-based strategies in their classrooms, whilst creating artefacts to capture their process. The work which has come out of this is testament to the great strength of the teaching and learning culture at Ely.
Reading is clearly a big passion of yours. What is it about reading and reading interventions that motivates you so much?
I was a very late reader myself at school and have clear memories of how miserable and confusing this was at the time. There was no obvious reason for the delay – I just couldn’t do it.
This left me with a lifelong understanding of what it feels like to struggle academically, but also with a lifelong curiosity about the best way to teach people things and the adjustments we might make in the classroom to optimise learning.
Once I finally mastered reading, I passed through an educational bottleneck and made exponential progress, but without it, I was completely stuck. Reading really is the key foundational skill. I’m passionate about helping our secondary learners with it as much as we can, and about eradicating some of the shame they sometimes feel about struggling in this area too.
You’ve been involved in the college since just after it joined the trust 10 years ago. Looking back, how have you seen the school change and develop as part of the trust?
Though I didn’t join the college as a practitioner until 2018, I had watched its evolution with interest from 2016 when my eldest child started Year 7, just after it had been brought into the Trust. Like many parents at the time, we were navigating a period of significant transition as the school worked to establish a new vision and address areas of development. By the time I joined the staff myself, the college was already in a process of rapid change under Richard Spencer as Principal. Standards in all areas had significantly improved, leading to much better educational and social experiences for both families and staff, with all Trust values thoroughly embedded.
This positive trajectory has been carefully maintained under our current leadership team, headed by Simon Warburton. Ten years into the college’s Trust journey, my husband and I are now in the happy position of being able to send our youngest child to Ely College to start Year 7 this September with complete peace of mind, knowing that he will be nurtured and educated brilliantly, thanks to the dedication of colleagues at both a school and Trust level.
What do you love most about being a teacher?
The profound decency and resilience of our young people. I think it’s a really hard time to be a teenager, but through it all, our kids are buoyant and funny, resilient and hopeful.
This generation is inheriting climate change, a shrinking career market, a geopolitical landscape which feels increasingly unstable, and a tech environment which is moving faster every day. It’s our job as educators to try to equip them as best we can with all the skills and tools they are going to need to meet the coming challenges, but this job is made so much easier by how fundamentally pleasant and determined our students are. I love coming in every day and figuring it all out together – it feels like we are such a strong team.
Finally, when you’re not at work, how do you like to relax and switch off?
When I’m not at work, I enjoy reading, walking, baking and gardening, as well as spending time with my family. My kids are quite spread out in age, and I have a very busy husband, so life is full!
