Let Teachers SHINE 2026 Winner: Sarah Featherstone – Ready To Thrive
An early years teacher is launching a targeted intervention to help nursery age children from disadvantaged backgrounds arrive at primary school with the skills they need to succeed.
Sarah Featherstone, experienced teacher and early years lead, has been awarded a £24,800 Let Teachers SHINE grant to develop Ready To Thrive – a project designed to help children aged three to four to build the basic skills needed for a strong start at school.
“Children are repeatedly arriving in school not ready for the challenges that they face when they start learning. Skills like eating independently, responding to instruction, listening to adults, asking for help, and going to the toilet – things that people don’t normally think of as school readiness. Children are increasingly arriving not ready for those challenges,” explained Sarah.
Ready To Thrive is designed to specifically support disadvantaged families, offering workshops to parents sharing strategies to teach these foundational skills at home.
“The idea is that by empowering parents and enabling children, this will free up teachers from the time they’re currently spending teaching the basic skills that children need to be arriving at school with.” explained Sarah.
The project tackles the growing gap in school readiness through targeted parent workshops designed to address the social, emotional, and physical skills that teachers have identified children are most lacking.
Ready To Thrive will also provide support for non-English speakers or parents who may struggle with reading, through ongoing support and resources delivered through social media channels.
“I hope we can demonstrate that early intervention with parents and getting them on board will benefit those children, close the gaps and help children to start school confident, independent, capable and ready for their education,” said Sarah.
She added: “If they start reception with a gap, that gap follows them through to secondary school and to GCSE level and it’s really hard to backfill it. So the idea is to plug that gap before they even start so it doesn’t impact on the whole of their school career.”
Training will be given to early years leads at participating schools in how to deliver the workshops with parents, ensuring the programme can be sustained long-term.
Sarah hopes that, eventually, Ready To Thrive will grow to reach even more disadvantaged children and families: “My ultimate goal is to have an impact on a wider number of disadvantaged children,” she said. “I’d love this to be rolled out nationally and for schools with large proportions of disadvantaged children to use it and notice a difference in their children.”
On receiving the Let Teachers SHINE award, Sarah said: “I’m absolutely delighted. I’ve been speaking about school readiness for about six years now, so I’m really, really pleased to be able to bring this to a wider audience”
Sarah joins a growing community of SHINE-funded educators dedicated to children’s development in the early years, helping them to be ‘ready to learn’ before they start formal school.
“To be given the support of SHINE, for them to say yes, this is a valid area that we want to focus on, is huge – I firmly believe that if we get this right, everybody will benefit, most of all the children,” said Sarah.