Testimonials

LP is now embedded into our ongoing CPD. New staff are trained in its principles, and existing staff regularly revisit the framework through refresher sessions, reflection and shared practice. It continually reminds us of the importance of not overlooking the essential building blocks of literacy, even as curriculum pressures mount.

LP has had a significant and ongoing impact on our team’s CP Development. We hold termly CPD sessions focused specifically on LP, and these have been essential in developing subject knowledge across the entire staff team—including both teachers & support staff. These sessions allow us to explore the Toolkit in greater depth and to build shared understanding & consistency in our approach.

Our team now has a good understanding of all the pre-literacy skills that can become barriers to children being able to access phonics.

We’ve used LP to support apprentices and teachers to plan more detailed interventions using LP’s incremental skill steps approach.

Through LP, we feel confident that we are equipping staff with the tools and understanding to give all children the best possible opportunity to catch up and succeed. It has strengthened our whole-team ethos and reaffirmed our shared commitment to building strong foundations for future learning.

All staff members have upskilled their knowledge and understanding through using the Launchpad Toolkit.

This year we have had a lot of new staff and ECTs. We found L.P most useful to support staff in ensuring their planning & teaching starting points meet the needs of individual children. The small incremental skill steps are particularly useful for our Red Pathway in school.

Launchpad is a tool in our SEND pack of resources, as such we have used it as a bespoke CPD offer for some staff.

LP has provided a framework to identify next steps which has been great CPD for staff.

The motor skills handbook has been extremely helpful and we are keen to look further into embedding other elements of the LP Toolkit into our practice. I’ve also implemented elements of the expressive language skills into our Literacy planning and CP, encouraging through adult interactions.

Launchpad has made us more aware of the small steps towards phonological awareness which are not always shown on other schemes – such as using compound words to support blending.

We have a great KS1 team and the staff who deliver LP are very proactive and always are willing to learn and create new resources using the Toolkit to support the children with their Speech, SAM and Visual Discrimination.

My personal knowledge has developed through taking part in the training and this has enabled me to train a TA in the use of LP as well as develop a bank of resources.

We have consulted the CPD videos and shared important messages/strategies from our training with Kirstie. We are intending to use these further, especially the skill strands focusing on high quality interactions and language development .

We have LP staff meeting time & informal LP discussions. It has certainly helped staff to structure and understand the building blocks- what skills must be embedded before building on these foundations.

I have shared LP materials with staff, as an example of the approach we want to take. i.e. looking in detail at what pupils can do, tracking back to find where they are and going from there – rather than delivering a set intervention or repeating the things they can’t do endlessly.