Literacy Impact Educational Services

14/10/2026

🌐 A new chapter for Literacy Impact™.

I’m delighted to share our newly relaunched Literacy Impact™ website.

Since 2021, I’ve had the privilege of working alongside school leaders and teachers across Australia who are deeply committed to improving literacy outcomes for their students.

One thing has become increasingly clear through this work. Most schools aren’t short on effort, commitment or initiatives. What they often need is greater clarity about where to focus, what to prioritise and how to bring the different elements of schoolwide literacy improvement together.

This has shaped the evolution of Literacy Impact™ and the work we do today.

Our new website reflects this direction, with a clearer focus on helping schools identify the underlying issues limiting student progress, strengthen leadership capability and build the systems, structures and instructional practices needed for sustained improvement.

You’ll also find our school improvement approach, professional learning opportunities, practical resources and different ways we can work together.

A heartfelt thank you to the wonderful school leaders and teachers who continue to trust me to be part of their improvement journey. Your commitment to your students, and the work we do together, continues to shape everything I do 🫶🏻
Also a huge shout out to Yosh at YSL Marketing for bringing this to life.

The goal remains the same: ensuring every child has the opportunity to become a competent, confident and effective reader and writer.

I’d love you to take a look.

🌐 https://www.literacyimpact.com.au/

Julie
Founder, Literacy Impact™

12/10/2026

Many schools invest heavily in sentence and paragraph instruction. It's essential. But students in Years 3–6 also need to be taught how to build a cohesive, extended text.

Writing places demands on working memory through transcription, text generation and executive functions. When one of these isn't secure, the others suffer.

Three things teachers can do:
1. Teach handwriting and spelling to automaticity.
2. Build background knowledge and vocabulary before students write.
3. Teach planning and text structure explicitly using SRSD.

Three things to agree schoolwide:
1. One agreed approach to teaching text-level writing.
2. Text structures that are explicitly taught and revisited across year levels.
3. Sentence-level skills deliberately connected to extended writing.

A question for your leadership team: would a Year 3 and a Year 6 student describe how to plan a text in the same way?

Join me for Linking High Impact Reading and Text-Level Writing Practices, Tuesday 20 October, 3–6 pm AWST, with two 90-minute follow-up sessions. Register here - https://events.humanitix.com/linking-effective-reading-and-writing-instruction-in-the-literacy-block

10/10/2026

Effective connection of teaching and writing in the literacy block and across the curriculum:

For teachers:
→ Anchor the unit in one high-quality text.
→ Plan the writing outcome before the reading sequence.
→ Add short written responses to reading 2–3 times a week.

For schoolwide consistency:
→ Sequence core texts across year levels.
→ Plan reading and writing outcomes together.
→ Agree on model texts, worked examples and SRSD.

Slide 6 is for your next planning meeting. Save it.

Keen to go deeper? Webinar: Linking High Impact Reading and Text-Level Writing Practices. Tuesday 20 October, 3–6 pm AWST, plus two 90-minute follow-up sessions. Link in bio.

05/10/2026

Something I hear often from school leaders is: “We’ve invested in programs and professional learning, but we’re still not seeing the progress we expected.”

\Teachers are working hard. Leaders are concerned about the students who are still struggling, and they want to know what to do next.

Often, the conversation turns to whether they need a different phonics program, more intervention or another PL day.

Before making that decision, we need to understand what is getting in the way of student progress.

Is the teaching consistent between classrooms? Do teachers know how to use assessment results to decide what to teach or adjust next?

Is intervention addressing the gaps identified, and is student progress monitored centrally?

Do high expectations underpin daily teaching and learning in every classroom? Have staff had enough modelling, feedback and support to put the professional learning into practice?

Do middle leaders have the time, knowledge and support to lead the work outlined in the action plan?

Each of these questions points to a different possible issue, requiring a different response. This is the effort-to-impact gap I see in schools: evidence-based programs and committed staff, but gaps in the systems, support or implementation that affect how consistently and effectively the work happens schoolwide.

Finding the issue/s beneath the issue helps leaders decide what needs to change, in what order, and how to support staff to do it well—so more students benefit from the effort already going in.

24/09/2026

Now that our Year 1 students have completed the national Year 1 Phonics check, the important question is what are we doing with the data?

A few questions to unpack in a PLC or staff meeting with the timer on for 20 minutes max per question and record the responses.

1. What percentage of students met standard? What percentage didn't? What students are above standard? What specific gaps did they have?
2. What is the data telling us? Why do we think this? What further investigating do we need to do to identify why students didn't achieve the standard?
3. What are we going to do about it? What goals are we setting and what are we putting in place to catch those students up by the end of this year?

If we have less than 80% of students reaching proficiency, is it worth taking a look at our whole class phonics instruction, how it is being taught, to what fidelity and is being taught to mastery?

Some students with learning disorders will require 40+ to 200 repetitions before achieving mastery; along with effective systematic instruction linked to encoding with daily practice in decodable texts too. Whole class choral reading at the graphing, word and text level is highly recommended with the teacher moving around the room, paying attention to how students are going.

To support teachers to ensure we are getting enough review and retrieval practice in, I have created two free resources for schools to support decoding retrieval practice and review. You can access the resources here - https://linktr.ee/literacyimpact

We cannot hope that students will just 'catch up' as the longer we leave it to close learning gaps, the harder it becomes to close the gap. 10 weeks of teaching time before the end of the year, there is still plenty of time to make this happen.

22/09/2026

When literacy improvement stalls or declines, it’s frequently attributed to things we often don’t see. Schoolwide systems, structures, high expectations, agreed understandings, a shared moral purpose, a clear implementation plan, a distributed leadership team who feel confident about leading the work, teachers who feel supported and clear organizational, RTI and assessment structures.
Still time to register your place tonight to find out where the gaps may be contributing to holding your school and students back. Join me on Thursday live only 4pm WST ✨

Missed the last webinar? That's ok because we are running it again!

It's a live only event where you will find out why you are working so hard on lifting literacy across your school and yet it's not having the impact on your students' growth.

Date: Thursday, 24 Sep, 4pm - 6pm AWST / 6pm - 8pm AEST

Register now via Humanitix - https://events.humanitix.com/the-literacy-improvement-iceberg-tm-6qhn9gjc

22/09/2026

What is the cost of inaction for our students?

When a student begins to fall behind, time matters. The longer we wait to respond to a difficulty, the wider the gap can become — and the harder it is to close.

“They’ll catch up.”
“They’re not really a red flag yet.”
“Let’s give them a bit more time.”

These can sound like reasonable responses.

But sometimes, they are simply inaction dressed up as patience.

And while we wait, a student who was just beginning to slip can quickly become a student who is below expected standard and requires significantly more intensive support.

So what does action look like?

It doesn’t always mean a new intervention or program.

Sometimes it is a responsive pivot within the lesson: a reteach, another worked example, an additional scaffold, a small-group micro-lesson.

It is formative assessment built into teaching — frequent checks for understanding, cold calling, turn and talk, and immediate corrective feedback.

It is looking at standardised assessment data at the earliest opportunity and asking:

What is the data telling us?
Why might this be happening?
What are we going to do about it?
What change do we expect to see in the next five or ten weeks?

It is universal screening three times a year, so we can identify risk early rather than waiting until a student is already significantly behind.

It is a school-wide shift from:

“Did I get through everything I planned to teach?”

to:

“What was the impact of my teaching on students’ learning today?”

And it is a team overseeing the school’s RTI/MTSS approach — regularly reviewing progress-monitoring data, evaluating response to instruction and intervention, and making timely decisions about the level of support students need.

A preventative approach to literacy does not wait for a child to fail badly enough to qualify for help.

We notice early, we respond early and we monitor the impact regularly.
If it isn’t working, we change what we are doing.

The goal isn’t to become better at catching students after they fall through the cracks.

It is to build a school where far fewer students reach the cracks in the first place.

16/09/2026

When I get asked if I miss working in a school and being part of a school team my answer is no.
Reason is that instead of being part of one team I genuinely feel part of many.
Partnering with schools over a year is pretty special especially when the transformations for students happen like this example at Hastings Primary School, Victoria.
So many of the school leaders become long time edu-colleagues and lifelong friends. This is certainly the case with Hastings Primary School literacy leads and Assistant Principal- Rebecca Legge; and Melissa Thorne in the Mornington Peninsula.

15/09/2026

School improvement planning conversations frequently start with the wrong question.
They start with WHAT rather than WHERE.

These conversations are often:
What should we focus on in reading?
What writing focus for next year?
What should our next PL be?
All good questions but perhaps not the first ones.

Before WHAT we will do, we need to know:
WHERE are we now? And WHERE do we want to be? (And WHEN do we want to be there by?)

1. Where do we want our STUDENTS to be 6 months and 12 months from now? (As specific, measurable and quantifiable as possible: What measurable data shifts do we expect to see in value adding and achievement)

2. Where do we want our SCHOOL to be 12 months from now?(in terms of curriculum, systems and structures, assessment, intervention, MTSS)

3. Where do we want our STAFF to be in terms of classroom practice? (Consistency, rigour, fidelity, retention!) And are we creating the conditions that help great teachers stay?!

Without a clearly defined WHERE we are aiming
the WHAT can quickly become a collection of activities or shiny distractions.

So perhaps the first question in your next school improvement conversation isn’t:
What should we do next?
It’s:
Where exactly are we trying to get to?
Then build the WHAT backwards from there.