Shape Coding: The innovative use of a specialist approach in an inclusive primary school to help every child succeed in writing

HODO DIRIR AND MARYUM QURESHI, CYRIL JACKSON PRIMARY SCHOOL, UK

JULIAN GRENIER, EDUCATIONAL CONSULTANT, UNIVERSITY SCHOOLS TRUST, UK

In her foreword to the Education Endowment Foundation’s report Special Educational Needs in Mainstream Schools, Professor Becky Francis argues that teachers should ‘prioritise familiar but powerful strategies, like scaffoldingProgressively introducing students to new concepts to support their learning and explicit instruction, to support their pupils with SEND’ (Francis, quoted in Davies and Henderson, 2020, p. 2). In this case study, we consider something akin to a reverse approach: using a specialist approach for children with SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) to improve whole-class teaching and learning.

Shape coding

Cyril Jackson Primary School is an inclusive, inner-city school serving an under-resourced neighbourhood. The school has a language resource provision for up to four children with developmental language disorders (DLDs) in every year group. 

Research evidence suggests that children with DLDs do not learn to put words together into sentences through implicit approaches, such as hearing and using language in a range of contexts. Instead, they may require explicit instruction. As a result, the children in the resourced provision were previously taught separately during English lessons by specialist speech and language therapists (SLTs), using an approach called Shape Coding™ (Ebbels, 2007).

Shape Coding is a visual system that associates different grammatical forms with specific shapes and colours. It is designed to make abstract language concepts easier to understand:

• Shapes are drawn around phrases or groups of words, showing how they combine into sentences
• Colours are assigned to specific parts of speech (for example, nouns are red, verbs blue and adjectives green)
• Coloured lines are used under words (for example, single/double lines for singular/plural)
• Blue arrows are used on verbs (for example, to show verb tenses).

This coding helps children to plan and construct the sentences that they want to write.

Questions

While the specialist teaching by the SLTs was highly effective, teachers noticed that when children with DLDs were in their mainstream classes, they found it difficult to write. They did not always have a specialist SLT on hand, and teachers and teaching assistants were not trained in Shape Coding.

This raised two further questions for staff at Cyril Jackson. First, was the approach in line with the school’s commitment to inclusive practice? Second, might some of the children beyond the resourced provision benefit from explicit instruction to develop their skills in putting words together to form sentences?

Finding solutions

The team at Cyril Jackson decided to explore possible solutions to these dilemmas, drawing on A School’s Guide to Implementation (Sharples et al., 2024) from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF). The EEF guide suggests an initial sequence of action, beginning with exploration and followed by planning. In this case, the initial drive for change arose from a professional development session led by the specialist SLTs for teachers in Key Stage 2. The therapists wanted to ensure that class teachers understood Shape Coding well enough to support the children with DLDs in mainstream lessons when they were required to write. Some of the teachers followed up on this session in their joint planning time and decided that they would introduce Shape Coding to all the children. They found that putting Shape Coding into action helped them to understand it, whereas it had initially seemed very complex and technical. 

However, leaders also judged that it was important to ensure that significant changes to teaching developed in a coherent way. While teacher autonomy is important, children – especially those with SEND – benefit from a core of consistent approaches as they move through school. As Aubin (2022) suggests, mainstream teachers should develop a repertoire of consistent, evidence-informed practices ‘which they can use daily and flexibly in response to individual needs, using them as the starting point for their classroom teaching’.

Piloting

The school piloted the new approach for two terms in Year 3 and 4 classes. Structures to support the pilot implementation included time and support from senior leaders to review progress and solve unexpected problems as they arose, and regular drop-ins to see the new practices in action.

At the end of the pilot phase, teachers reported that many children, not just those with DLDs, benefited from the use of Shape Coding. For example, the school regularly has refugee children arriving mid-year, who have experienced education in two or more different countries and speak very little English. In the past, teachers had created bespoke plans for each child to help them to learn and write English. By printing out keywords with line drawings and using Shape Coding, teachers found that this group of children could start speaking and writing short sentences more quickly.

Scaling up

After the successful pilot phase, the new approach was scaled up to include classes from Year 1 to Year 6, with whole-staff professional development at the start of the autumn term and throughout the year. The implementation plan included a gradual reduction in the use of Shape Coding through Year 6, with only a small number of children in need of significant support continuing with the approach to the end of their primary education. This addressed the concern that children might become too dependent on Shape Coding, holding back their independence as writers. 

School leaders worked with the specialist SLTs to ensure that Shape Coding was implemented consistently across classes. The effect for some children was especially positive. For example, a child in Year 3 wrote the following sentences at the start of the autumn term:

I was at hom glum feel. Mummy sed ight it was time to tighM

Underneath, after discussions with the child, the teacher wrote: ‘take Victoria our pet dog for a walk. Then Victoria was playing in the park with a friendly dog. I wished I had friends.’

The same child wrote the following passage a few months later, at the start of the spring term, after a series of lessons about the mythical Greek hero Theseus (original spellings reproduced):

Many years ago a brave hero called Theseus lived in Athens with his father. Theseus felt crass because a sary creature was eating his people

The child first structured her thinking using Shape Coding and then wrote the opening sentences on her own.

At their annual reviews, several children with DLDs commented that they felt that they belonged more in their classrooms, now that they were included in English lessons and all the other children were using Shape Coding too. Two children with DLDs made so much progress that teacher assessment judged their writing to be at the level expected for their age.

Conclusions 

The implementation of Shape Coding at Cyril Jackson Primary School illustrates a thoughtful and pragmatic approach to changing practice. School leaders drew on the expertise of the SLTs to assure themselves that they had made a good choice of programme. They piloted change at a small scale, to minimise the risks to children’s best interests if the programme had turned out to have a negative effect. Drawing on the professional judgment of teachers, teaching assistants and SLTs, they scaled the approach up when there were strong indicators that it was successful. The scale-up was supported by sustained professional development, with ongoing assistance from leaders to solve problems as they arose.

For ethical reasons, the school chose not to have a ‘comparison group’ – for example, by implementing changes in one class in each year group and continuing ‘business as usual’ in the parallel classes. The school wanted to include all children in mainstream English lessons, and not just children in half the classes. Furthermore, the small sample size and natural variability between classes would have produced unreliable comparison data. Through reflective professional dialogue and by listening to children with DLDs at their annual reviews, the school assured itself that the new approach was working well. Teachers reported that children were more confident in their writing and that children with DLDs felt more included. The school’s outcomes for writing at the end of Key Stage 2 in 2024 were above the national average for children working at the expected standard and at greater depth.