This year's London exchange was my first. I came back to the US all fired up from having learned so much. So now my big challenge is how to share what I've learned with all of you in Cornerstone schools. I had opportunity to visit five London schools, a Professional Development Center, and a Family Learning Center. The Cornerstone group was treated exceptionally by the wonderful Head Teachers, classroom teachers and staff, and especially by our new friend Craig Woollard and old friend Kevan Collins. The following week Edna Varner and I had the very good fortune to visit Wales as guests of the Basic Skills Agency, which works collaboratively with the schools to support literacy and numeracy development for children and parents who qualify. This agency actually has the responsibility to provide "cradle to grave" services for anyone in the United Kingdom with low levels of basic skills.

Everything we saw seemed purposeful, planned for, supported and valued by the entire school community. We saw examples of good practices, such as "Story Sacks," extremely well integrated throughout the learning community. Teachers of young children routinely introduced new children's books or curriculum themes, and incidentally encouraged lots of oral language, with a Story Sack. These sacks contained a story book (such as "Old MacDonald Had a Farm"), several non-fiction books related to the story (books about farm animals), toys (soft, cuddly farm animals), and paper and pencil activities related to the theme and were used by teachers, by educational assistants and by librarians to actively involve children in a variety of literacy activities. They were also used to connect home and school in inventive ways. One school held a parent workshop on making Story Sacks. Parents would make a story sack, test it out at home, and if it was successful, donate it to their child's teacher. Another school had a practice of teachers putting the story book they planned to use the following week outside their classroom door on top of a box, and teachers and parents were invited to drop in appropriate items that they might have at home or in the classroom for the teacher to use. A third school had a lending library of basic Story Sacks (one story book, one non-fiction book, one toy) and families were asked to add an appropriate item to it when they returned the Sack.

What makes the elements we saw in England and Wales work?

Culture of Planning
The culture of planning is a very real, prominent feature of the schools and agencies we visited. Plans are based on the review of assessment and other data. The school's strategic plans have a direct relationship to teacher planning. They are not done just for accountability purposes and are actually in evidence in the daily life of the classroom.

Clear, well defined targets are set that come from the school's data review: for the school, for students at particular grade-levels, for specific classrooms, for individual children, for targeted groups of children. Instruction is specifically designed with targets in mind. Resources are assigned and activities carried out. After a predetermined period of time, the results of activities are assessed and new targets are set. This is not just "paperwork," but planning taken seriously, and it achieves results.

Formal Policies
So many great ideas that we do here in the US on the basis of individual initiative are written into their formal policy. For example, instead of depending on an individual teacher to think of pairing a new immigrant child with a child in the class speaking the same language, there may be a formal policy which buddies up every child who comes into the school in the middle of the year with another student from their same cultural background. Policies are usually written, approved and then carried out by the school community. I brought home samples of several kinds of policies, which I am eager to share: "language" policies, "induction" policies, "Ethnic Minority Achievement" policies, "home reading program" policies.

An "induction" policy that very much impressed me included a parent/principal interview prior to the student being admitted to the school. Most students in this school are new immigrants or refugees, and the interview gives the principal and parent the opportunity to each share their expectations of school and of students, and to help orient a new immigrant to the British school culture. The interview gives parents a clear picture of how much they are valued.

In addition to local school policies, there are national policies that have a huge impact on the level of parent participation. Because the Basic Skills Agency collaborates with schools, many Family Literacy and other parent programs are offered as courses for accreditation. This accreditation policy enables parents who do not have the equivalent of our high school diploma to participate in courses at their child's primary school and then "graduate" to community college level study and often to employment opportunities.

Dedicated Resources
Once plans are in place and targets set, the UK schools have the budget flexibility to dedicate resources, including staff, to do whatever it takes to meet the targets. Many of these dedicated staff members operate on a "caseload" basis - meaning that they work to benefit students for whose literacy achievement they are responsible. Two examples of this type of staffing are "Learning Mentors" and the "Ethnic Minority Achievement teacher" or EMA. In each case, professional staff members are responsible for the achievement of certain children and work directly with the child, but are also free to develop program activities that could impact those children's achievement -- with the child's entire classroom or class teacher, with parents either at school or in the home, with a child's peer group of friends, and with the educational assistants.

Dedicated resources are offered specifically for parent engagement. For example, the Parental Outreach unit of the Professional Development Center provides services for specific ethnic minority communities, such as African Caribbean and Turkish. Outreach workers reach out to new immigrant communities to ease the transition to schools, conduct training for school staffs on understanding refugee community needs and provide training for bilingual classroom assistants. The Family Learning Center at South Haringay School is a model of an inviting literacy environment, stocked with bins of story books in many languages including Somali, Albanian, Turkish and Arabic, another set of bins filled with commercial and homemade games, walls decorated with colorful posterboards full of photographs from parent workshops captioned with labels such as "Working Together With Parents", "Meet Friends", "Learning From Each Other", "Sharing Ideas", "Making Games and Resources", "Helping Our Children".

Targeted Interventions
The Primary Education strategies include targeted interventions to support children who are not meeting standards at key stages in their progress (approximately ages 7and 11).

But it is not only the children for whom interventions are designed. Parent and community engagement activities are often designed to supplement and support the student needs being addressed.

The Basic Skills Agency Family Literacy courses are the most impressive. These are 16-24 week long courses designed for 8-12 parents of children in a particular grade level (say 5 year olds) who have their own difficulties with reading and writing. They meet with an adult educator 2-3 times each week using a syllabus about children's literacy development. Their children also meet with an early childhood educator for a related literacy activity. Once a week there is a joint session in which the adult educator and the early childhood educator coach the parent/child pairs through a well designed literacy session. The parents keep a portfolio of their lessons which they submit to the Basic Skills Agency for credit. In one such course, the final session assessment was that the adult students had to design the final joint Family Literacy session and include a read aloud, plus reading, writing, speaking and listening activities. Not surprisingly, the literacy achievement of these children improved markedly.

"Keeping Up With the Children" is a course that takes parents through their child's curriculum. I interviewed eight parents studying the equivalent of the 4th grade math curriculum. From them I learned successful outreach strategies and benefits that parents gained from their participation.

Parents with a record of successfully engagement in school activities who are interested in volunteering in classrooms are invited to attend a formal Parent Volunteer training program. Each volunteer completing this training is assigned two carefully selected students and signs an agreement to work with these students one-on-one for half an hour two days each week.