Let Teachers SHINE Winner 2026: Dr Deb Shorthouse – Family Literacy Project
A pioneering new project aims to give nursery children from disadvantaged backgrounds the best possible start to their education, before they reach the classroom.
Dr Deb Shorthouse has been awarded a £16,000 Let Teachers SHINE grant to develop the Family Literacy project, which works with parents to address low literacy attainment for disadvantaged children.
“The project is about supporting families with literacy, by working alongside them to support parents with developing their children’s emergent literacy skills and school readiness,” explained Deb.
The project builds on The Home Literacy Project – a previous three-year SHINE-funded project led by Deb that focused on intensive home visits. The project worked with parents in the home, dramatically improving their children’s early literacy skills.
Deb is now piloting the project to compare the home visits approach with school-led workshops, in order to discover if a lower-cost model could eventually be used to support families across the country by making the programme more affordable for school budgets.
To test the different approaches, two schools will receive home visits, while another two will host school-based workshops for parents. Deb plans to collect impact data using parent questionnaires, practitioner reflective journals and a special tool to measure children’s literacy skills.
As Deb explained: “The pilot project represents a crucial step in the work that I’m doing to build an evidence base for embedding a future family literacy model.”
“Ultimately, I’m driven to want to improve literacy outcomes for disadvantaged children. That’s what drives me, that’s what gets me up in the morning,” said Deb.
The project addresses a gap in family literacy support by testing a low cost, sustainable delivery model that could offer primary schools an affordable way to support children’s emerging literacy skills alongside other school readiness initiatives.
At the heart of the project are six essential strands of early years literacy: writing, drawing, early language, reading, engagement, and phonological awareness. Practitioners from local nurseries will be trained to deliver this framework, working with 32 part-time nursery children and their families.
The project focuses on children who may face barriers to learning, often identified through the pupil premium. By using nursery staff who already have a trusted relationship with the families, Deb hopes to overcome common hurdles in parental engagement.
Research shows a need for targeted, localised responses that strengthen early literacy through family support, parental engagement and community partnerships, in order to break cycles of disadvantage.
The project is part of SELLF (Supporting Early Literacy Learning in Families), a Community Interest Company that Deb has established.
“The most important thing about this project is what happens in between, what the parents do with the children, with the training they’ve had,” said Deb, emphasising that the real work would happen outside of scheduled sessions.
On receiving the award, Deb shared: ‘I was absolutely thrilled to receive news that I’d got the funding to run the pilot project. Long term, my hope is that something like this would become national policy where all families are supported to help their children succeed before they start formal schooling.”