About Ros

Ros has written over 20 publications on writing, talk, curriculum, and assessment. Ros has recently written an exciting and amusing biography which centres on her journeys and adventures through life.

The impact of ability to talk fluently and expressively on children’s learning became clear when, in the space of nine years, Ros assessed over 22,000 pieces of writing in the course of her work and in building The Criterion Scale for Assessment of Writing.

There was a clear correlation between those children who failed to score many ticks on aspects of writing like fluency, expression, ambitious vocabulary, range of connectives used, and so on – and the districts or socio-economic backgrounds of the community OR the fact that they were in the early stages of learning in English as an additional language.

Ros worked for many years in schools with children from challenging backgrounds and knew that their ability to express themselves in both talk and writing was more limited than that of most children from more privileged communities. Her findings would have been regarded as a research project in its own right, if the purposes had not been more specific – the accurate assessment of children’s writing abilities. This revelation, which was – at the end of the day – common sense and not surprising, did lead to more reading into research on the subject. It was when Ros met the work of Doctor Todd Risley, Professor Emeritus in the USA, that her eyes were opened. He gave Ros the ability to quote statistics on language and acquisition of vocabulary that she had not met before.

During the first decade of the 21st century, Ros found she was a lone voice talking about the importance and impact of planned and fluent talk, the acquisitions of an ever widening and challenging vocabulary and the importance of repeated composition of interesting sentence structures through talk. Despite the huge proportion of schools utilising her approach all over the United Kingdom with remarkable impact, it was often resisted by others in education.

The introduction of the first version of the National Curriculum (1989) brought great stress and confusion in primary education, where schools were generally used to teaching what they wanted when they wanted. In 1990 Ros developed her first curriculum model to make sense, accessibility and full coverage for a primary school in Kirklees. She then led the development of a full, commercial model of the primary National Curriculum for Kirklees Local Authority, named The Primary Curriculum Organiser (PCO) which became widely used across the country.

Ros’s most rewarding and challenging experience came when she managed the start-up of a large school in Qatar. Writing the systems, processes, and curriculum was a huge task and the success of the school was a very proud moment.

Curriculum development is an important topic at the moment with lots of schools putting time and effort into creating their own. Creating a curriculum that provides a broad, balanced, and challenging programme of learning through a cyclical spectrum of creative and original experiences, is a highly skilled task requiring in depth understanding and years of experience.
Ros advises on the processes of building a curriculum while providing exemplar materials and authentic ideas with sincerity and humour.

Ros was proud to be on the Global Advisory Panel for Harrow International Schools. Take a look at their great work here.