This is a chapter from the UKLA publication Literacy and Community: developing a primary curriculum through partnerships. It describes how a class teacher and a literacy consultant in a multilingual school in Birmingham developed a teaching sequence to explore identity and citizenship. The teacher, Katie Palmer, is now Deputy Head Teacher and Curriculum and Assessment Leader, and the school now has 356 children on roll. The book Literacy and Community invites readers to reflect on their own practice and the chapter ends with some prompt questions. If you find this article interesting, why not look in the UKLA bookshop for Literacy and Community for examples of partnerships with homes, parents and communities throughout the primary age range.

The following is the response of The United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA) to the consultation initiated by the Education Committee Primary Assessment Inquiry 2016.

Who’ll tell the story? Why teaching and researching narratives still matters. This presentation will re-visit some of Harold Rosen’s powerful arguments in The Dramatic Mode (1980) and Stories and Meanings (1985) about why it matters that young people both create their own narratives in the classroom and engage with other people’s narratives as well.