Intent

Curriculum design, coverage and appropriateness 

The intent behind our approach to Reading is: 

• To promote a love of reading , through teacher knowledge of high-quality texts used across the curriculum. 
• For children to obtain a word reading knowledge alongside comprehension skills in order to navigate texts and deepen their understanding of the world.
• To ensure that every child learns to read to a high standard of fluency and understanding, regardless of their background, needs or prior attainment. 
• Close the ‘word gap’ by expanding pupils' vocabulary, deepening their understanding of the texts they are reading and widening their use of spoken language.   

Implementation 

Curriculum delivery 

Teaching (pedagogy) 

Assessment (formative and summative)  

Reading is implemented through a holistic approach, whereby children are reading across the curriculum.  Children read every day, with the opportunity to read individually, in pairs and in small groups as part of a whole class session. Children have a broad and balanced reading diet, and are exposed to a range of genres and authors.

Our Whole-class reading approach provides a clear structure and sequence, allowing our children to frequently access all reading domains.
Children are exposed to a broad range of genres and authors both ‘Old and Gold’, and 'New and Bold’, allowing our children to become ‘Rounded Readers’.

Impact 

Attainment and progress (including national tests and assessments) 

 The impact of our approach to Reading is that children are excited to read and frequently recommend and talk about their favourite authors and texts. 

Intent

Curriculum design, coverage and appropriateness 

The intent behind our phonics approach is to: 

• Deliver a high-quality systematic synthetic phonics programme of proven effectiveness, followed with rigour and fidelity so that children are taught consistently to use phonics as the route to reading unknown words. 
• Ensure pace of the phonics programme is maintained through high quality teaching and same day intervention, so that children become confident, fluent and independent readers. 
• Ensure children’s reading books show a cumulative progression in phonics knowledge that match the grapheme-phoneme correspondences they know to support decoding skills, building fluency. 

Implementation 

Curriculum delivery 

Teaching (pedagogy) 

Assessment (formative and summative)  

Phonics is implemented through the Little Wandle programme. 

Daily phonics lessons in Reception and Year 1

• We teach phonics from week 2 in Reception and use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, ensuring that children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school.
• We teach phonics for 30 minutes a day. In Reception, we build from 10-minute lessons, with additional daily oral blending games, to the full-length lesson as quickly as possible. 
• We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised expectations of progress. 
• Reception children have daily phonics with the teaching assistant, whilst the year 1 children are taught by the class teacher. 

Daily Keep-up lessons ensure every child learns to read

Phonics is taught in a whole class approach. Any gaps in knowledge are addressed through individual and group interventions (additional to whole class phonics sessions) from the start of the year in order for children to ‘keep up’ with their peers. Therefore, the children then move through the phase groups as one group together. Regular progress meetings are held with all reading teachers to monitor children making slowest progress and half- termly monitoring from the Hub Lead.  Children in danger of falling behind, or who are working behind the pace of the programme, are swiftly identified and enough additional support provided to enable them to keep up. 

• Any child who needs additional practice has daily 'Keep-up' support, taught by a fully trained adult. Keep-up lessons match the structure of class teaching, and use the same procedures, resources and mantras, but in smaller steps with more repetition, so that every child secures their learning.
• We use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments to identify the gaps in children's phonic knowledge and teach to these using the Keep-up resources – at pace.

SEND

For children with SEND issues that affects their ability to keep up with the pace of the programme, we use the Little Wandle SEND programme which makes use of the graduated approach. This allows us to approach the learning at a pace that is appropriate for the individual child. 

Teaching reading: Reading practice sessions three times a week

• We teach children to read through reading practice sessions three times a week. 
• Children read books matched to the children’s secure phonic knowledge using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments.
• This decodable reading practice book is taken home to ensure success is shared with the family.
• We engage our families and share information about phonics and how children learn to blend and other aspects of our provision, both online and through workshops.

Ensuring consistency and pace of progress

• Every teacher in our school has been trained to teach early reading by Little Wandle, so we have the same expectations of progress. We use the same language, routines and resources to teach children to read so that we lower children’s cognitive load.
• Lesson templates, Prompt cards and How to videos ensure teachers all have a consistent approach and structure for each lesson.
• The Reading Leader and Hub Lead regularly monitor and observe teaching and track progress rigorously.

Parental Involvement

• Parents are encouraged to attend phonics meetings where the class teacher models how to pronunciate the graphemes and are shown resources that they can access from home.

Impact 

Attainment and progress (including national tests and assessments) 

The impact of our consistent and systematic teaching of our phonics programme is that children become fluent and confident readers by the end of KS1.