Fetch Me a Pen

The Fetch Me a Pen (FMaP) Leadership Hub supports academic literacy and writing in London secondary schools. It seeks to extend and embed the work carried out by the original London Schools Excellence Fund FMaP project. The hub is led by Mulberry School for Girls and involves schools both within Tower Hamlets and across Greater London. It aims to build leadership capacity in schools to support teaching and learning related to academic writing. An investigative approach of creating, trialling and evaluating literacy-teaching methods was developed by the original FMaP project. Literacy leaders use this method to work with Science and Humanities teachers to better support and resource the writing needs of new curriculums. Ultimately, the hub provides a platform to develop the leadership skills of those with a responsibility for whole-school academic literacy. It brings together teachers in targeted subjects so that they can share and improve their own practice around the teaching of writing.

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At the heart of Fetch Me a Pen has been a commitment to equip teachers with the tools to develop the academic literacy of their students. Part of this is building their own confidence to experiment with language in their subject disciplines. Underpinning this work has been the creation of a safe and truly collaborative learning environment. This has given teachers the time and space to intellectually engage and to create a literacy approach, bespoke to the specific needs of their students. It’s been wonderful to see how Fetch me a Pen has continued to grow over the year, with even more teachers from a range of different schools and subjects gaining the confidence and knowledge to develop academic writers, regardless of their starting point.

As a result of the project, our own KS4 results have increased significantly. There is tangible evidence from lesson visits and the quality of the students’ writing, that our pupils can articulate their thinking in a sophisticated and fluent way. Despite the enormous socio-economic disadvantage our pupils face, I am very proud of the way our teachers expect the very best and believe that, with the right literacy tools, anyone can write in a highly academic way. This is regularly reinforced by the number of visitors who are astounded by the way our students think and write.

- Ruth Smith, Acting Headteacher, Mulberry School for Girls