An English teacher, senior leader and adviser, Helen has led English, literacy, and drama provision for over 20 years. Her work benefits from time spent as an Ofsted Inspector, acting head in an all-through setting, author, adviser to several academy chains and AQA examiner. Author of a national literacy audit toolkit, Helen has worked on several cross-phase, literacy projects for schools and charities. To date, Helen has worked with over three hundred school leadership teams across the UK to improve focus on vocabulary, literacy, and English.

Since the release of The Word Gap report in 2018, Helen has been determined to highlight effective, explicit teaching of vocabulary. This passion to address the word gap has focused her work in this area and, in the summer of 2020, she presented six vocabulary webinars for both Oxford University Press and ASCL, attended by over 5000 teachers. She was delighted to be a panellist for the launch of the 2020 report: Bridging the Word Gap at Transition.

You can access the recordings of these webinars on this link.

Helen hosts the weekly ‘Word-Up’ podcast series for Oxford Education, talking about vocabulary with a diverse range of inspiring educators, authors and actors.