Extending the Englicious Platform for Primary English

The National Curriculum for Key Stages 1 and 2 at primary schools published in February 2013 requires teachers to teach spelling, punctuation and grammar, but most teachers find the formal teaching of these topics difficult in the absence of targeted support. As a result they need a set of well-designed resources, such as lesson plans, exercises and activities, based around consistent and clear explanations of the key concepts.

In this Follow-on Project, a team at the Survey of English Usage (SEU), University College London, will work with the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) and St Aidan's Primary School in north London to extend Englicious to a new audience, namely pupils at Key Stages 1 and 2 at primary schools. Englicious is an online English language teaching platform which was developed at UCL as part of an AHRC Knowledge Transfer Fellowship, and was originally created to support secondary school teachers to deliver the UK National Curriculum for English, and in particular to teach English grammar more effectively.

Our association with the National Association for the Teaching of English will ensure awareness of the platform among its members, and we will benefit from their knowledge of the primary education sector. Our association with St Aidan's Primary School will help us test and evaluate the resources that we will be developing in a classroom setting.

We believe that we can help primary schools meet the rapidly increasing National Curriculum demands in relation to English spelling, punctuation and grammar (SPAG), while at the same time making the teaching of these subjects interesting and fun for pupils and teachers alike.

The extended Englicious website will greatly enhance the impact of the original Knowledge Transfer Fellowship project beyond secondary schools into primary schools. As such the project is an activity "that build[s] upon knowledge exchange and pathways to impact already undertaken but which take[s] those activities in a new direction and to new audiences" (AHRC wording). There are currently just over 4 million pupils in UK maintained primary schools (source: DfE). These numbers are expected to rise by around 20% by 2020 (source: The Guardian). The project will thus deliver huge educational benefits to a large community of school children in whose lives Englicious will make a difference.

Our proposed project addresses clearly defined needs in the primary education sector at Key Stages 1 and 2, at a time when schools are expected to meet the requirements of a new National Curriculum, and when they are expected to prepare students for a new Year 6 SPAG test and to perform to a higher standard. Our extended Englicious site will support teachers by providing resources specifically designed to meet these requirements, within a sound framework which enables continuity into secondary schools.

We believe that the project represents excellent value for money since we will create resources with the potential to reach millions of primary school children for a low cost. It is very important to stress that the aim of this project is to make a long-lasting impact on UK schools in the domain of English language teaching. In the future we hope to find commercial partners who can help us bring the Englicious platform to market and to make it available internationally.