UKLA is delighted to announce that this year’s winner of the UKLA Literacy School of the Year Award, 2026, sponsored by Hays Education, is Lift Lea Forest Primary School, Birmingham.
The UKLA assessors who visited in March left the school with a very strong sense of the drive and ambition at Lift Lea Forest to enable each and every child to make rapid progress from their starting points and to achieve the highest standards in all of their endeavours. We were impressed by the meticulous planning and the use of professional learning, research, and tracking data to ensure that every child makes progress and to close the gaps in attainment.
The school’s rich curriculum is enhanced by additional activities offered to the children through after-school clubs, the Children’s University, and opportunities to see the world beyond Birmingham through the activities offered in the multimedia room. Pupils also benefit greatly from the opportunities to engage with technology through podcasts and broadcasts. We noticed that every moment of the children’s time – and every inch of school space – is used to good effect and that their school life is enriched with play, high-quality art and drama taught by specialists, gardening, and opportunities to care for their environment.
Children at Lift Lea Forest enjoy a wraparound reading environment, with carefully curated book choices in classrooms and lessons, enriched by a well-managed school library. The school has worked very hard to engage parents in supporting children’s reading at home. Children are clearly very proud of their writing, both in English lessons and across the whole curriculum, and they are well supported by scaffolding in their beautifully presented exercise books. Throughout the school, no space is wasted in enriching children’s learning and enticing them to pick up a book. We would also like to give special mention to the excellent and uplifting drama sessions delivered by the practitioner from the Birmingham Rep; these developed the children’s confidence superbly, and it was wonderful to walk into a room full of smiles. The pupils selected to speak with us did so articulately, confidently and with palpable pride in their school and in their own progress.
Congratulations go also to Steeton Primary School, Keighley, as the other school on this year’s Roll of Honour.
The children at Steeton Primary undoubtedly love reading and they are provided with a rich, beautifully curated, reading environment, led by passionate and well-informed staff who promote reading in every aspect of school life, as well as sharing the joy with a partner school and with the local nursery school. The children are amazing ambassadors for the school; they demonstrate both the school’s values and the focus on oracy, when they described their reading interests and talked about their writing. Even though children at Steeton don’t have access to a local public library, the judges admired the determination of staff to enable children to choose new books for their classroom collections at Waterstones, and to select the most precious books at transition points to carry into their new classrooms.
The judges were very impressed to see the impact on the children of meeting authors when they visited the school, and to note that the choice of authors was carefully matched to the children’s cultures. The curriculum for writing has been carefully and imaginatively designed to match children’s development, with the Drawing Club and the Curious Quest building into a more formal approach to writing at the top of the school. The judges were delighted to observe real opportunities to write with purpose and for an audience across the school and were privileged to see the exchange of letters (and precious books) between the Year 5 and 6 children at Steeton and their partner school. Phonics and spelling are taught with determination and consistency across the school, and it was lovely to see both the progress children were making in small intervention groups alongside the initiatives such as “draw the phrase” to help children get deeper into the text.
All the staff at Steeton are clearly working together to provide an enriched curriculum in an imaginatively managed setting. Although set across three different buildings, every opportunity has been taken to enrich children’s learning with displays and book corners, in classrooms and in the Forest School playground areas. The judges were amazed to see the beautifully crafted, hand-made and unique furniture to display books throughout the school.
It was clear that both schools placed a special importance on the teaching of literacy, and the need to embed it across the curriculum. The children of both schools made it clear that the efforts of the schools were paying off, demonstrating how exciting and empowering literacy education can be for young people.
We would like to thank our sponsor, Hays Education, for their generosity in continuing to support the UKLA Literacy School of the Year Award.