Reading Intent, Implementation and Impact Statement
Intent
The National Curriculum for English (reading) aims to ensure that all pupils:
- Read easily, fluently and with good understanding.
- Develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information.
- Acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading.
- Appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage.
At Longney Church of England Primary Academy, we believe that all children should have the opportunity to be fluent, confident readers who are able to successfully comprehend and understand a wide range of texts. We want our children to develop a love of reading, a good knowledge of a range of authors, and be able to understand more about the world in which they live through the knowledge they gain from texts. By the end of their time at primary school, all our children should be able to read fluently, and with confidence, in any subject in their forthcoming secondary education. We believe all children can achieve and make progress in their reading. We understand the importance of parents and carers in supporting their children to develop both word reading and comprehension skills, and so we want to encourage a home-school partnership which enables parents and carers to understand how to enhance the skills being taught in school through good quality texts.
Implementation
Whole School Approach:
At Longney Church of England Primary Academy, we believe that all pupils should have the opportunity to be fluent, confident readers who are able to successfully comprehend and understand a wide range of texts. We want our pupils to develop a love of reading, a good knowledge of a range of authors, and be able to understand more about the world in which they live through the knowledge they gain from texts. By the end of their time at Primary school, all our pupils should be able to read fluently and with confidence in any subject in their forthcoming secondary education. We believe all pupils can achieve and make progress in their reading. We understand the importance of parents and carers in supporting their pupils to develop both word reading and comprehension skills, and so we want to encourage a home-school partnership which enables parents and carers to understand how to enhance the skills being taught in school through good quality texts. All staff have completed professional development on how to implement phonics and reading teaching across the school.
Our aims are that pupils:
- Enjoy reading across a range of genres;
- Be able to succeed in all reading lessons;
- Use a range of strategies for decoding words, not solely relying on phonics;
- Have a good knowledge of a range of authors;
- Be ready to read in any subject in their forthcoming secondary education.
- Parents and carers will have a good understanding of how they can support reading at home and contribute regularly to home-school records.
- The percentage of pupils working at ARE within each year group will be at least in line with national averages.
- The percentage of pupils working at Greater Depth within each year group will be at least in line with national averages.
- There will be no significant gaps in the progress of different groups of pupils.
Phonics: Early Years and Key Stage One:
Our school has chosen Little Wandle Letters and Sounds as our systematic synthetic phonics programme to teach early reading and spelling. All pupils in Reception and Year 1 participate in a 30-minute whole class daily session of focused phonics teaching and activities. Regular assessment using Little Wandle Phonics Tracker ensures pupils who are struggling to acquire sounds are allocated to appropriate support groups to close any gaps.
You can find out more information about how we do this on the link below.
There is also information on how we teach phonics and to support your child with reading.
https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/resources/for-parents/
From Reception, pupils are given a decodable book to read at home that will focus on the synthetic phonics that they have learned and that they are able to blend. Pupils will also bring a second, sharing book home to read and enjoy with their families.
Pupils who need extra support to learn the phonemes are given individual additional support from teachers and teaching assistants, either within the whole lesson or as part of planned interventions that take place in addition to the lesson.
During the Summer Term in Year One, pupils undertake the Phonics Screening Check which assesses their ability to apply the phonemes they have learnt to read real and alien words. Pupils who do not pass their Phonics Screening Check will have support in a form of intervention to enable each child to pass the check in Year Two.
We encourage parents and carers to read with their child every night. All pupils have a book bag and a Home Reading Record book. We invite parents to sign or make a comment to help support their child’s reading at home. Pupils have the opportunity to change their reading books regularly.
Year 2 onwards
Pupils who need further support with decoding are supported through Little Wandle Rapid Catch Up groups. These sessions build on the phonics programmes in Key Stage 1 so the resources and format are familiar to pupils.
At Longney we focus on fluency as well as comprehension. The teaching sequence begins with fluency, promoting pupils’ ability to decode written language at word and sentence level, while learning to search for meaning in the text. The comprehension reading domains are taught through the VIPERS approach.
In Key Stage 2, shared reading sessions focus on the reading domains and ensuring that pupils are comprehending what they are reading. A variety of stimuli, such as films, extracts and whole texts, are used to inspire pupils, capture their imagination and promote a lifelong love of reading. For the pupils who are yet to master the alphabetic code, catch up phonic sessions are provided to support the pupils in developing their knowledge of systematic synthetic phonics which will lead them to become independent readers. The VIPERS acronym is used to aid the recall of the 6 reading domains as part of the UK’s reading curriculum. They are the key areas which we feel pupils need to know and understand in order to improve their comprehension of texts.
The six domains focus on the comprehension aspect of reading and not the mechanics: decoding, fluency, prosody etc. As such, VIPERS is not a reading scheme but rather a method of ensuring that teachers ask, and students are familiar with, a range of questions. They allow the teacher to track the type of questions asked and the pupils’ responses to these which allows for targeted questioning afterwards.
For those pupils across the school who require further support with phonics and reading, books are banded according to the grapheme-phoneme correspondence. This ensures that the books are fully decodable by the pupils.
As pupils become more fluent readers, books are banded according to difficulty. Texts from different published reading schemes and picture books are included: fiction and non-fiction. Reading a variety of books develops good habits and independence. Pupils read different authors and types of text, such as poetry, stories, reports, explanations and recounts or diaries. They develop preferences and use the different styles in their own writing.
With challenging texts in school and taking home books at a comfort level, pupils gain fluency and mastery in both decoding and understanding their books. In the early years we develop decoding skills and then move to developing pupils’ inference and comprehension, whilst developing a rich and varied vocabulary.
Our aim is to nurture lifelong readers and hope pupils will curl up with a book and read their favourite stories over and over again. Just for the love of it! The pupils are encouraged to visit the local library which has a good range of books for pupils and helps to encourage a love for reading. Teachers read class books to pupils containing challenging and interesting novels exposing pupils to language and classic stories which they may find too challenging to read independently. If pupils are unable to read regularly at home, they are given extra opportunity to read regularly in school.
We also:
- Give pupils across the school the opportunity to join Book Club which takes place at lunchtime.
- Facilitate 'Drop Everything And Read' (DEAR).
- Give older pupils the opportunity to share a book with those in our younger classes.
- Have Regular Reader awards.
- Send home a Reading Newsletter once every half term.
- Invite parents in to share a story with a group of pupils.
- Visit Stroud Book Festival.
- Encourage pupils to engage with our Reading Passport.
- Hold book sales across the year.
- Encourage pupils to take part in the Library Summer Reading Challenge.
Impact
Formative assessments are made by teachers and support staff through group work and whole class reading sessions. Summative assessments are carried out termly using GL assessment standardised tests. The assessments are both used to identify gaps in learning, to allocate pupils appropriate small-group support and to identify pupils who need further challenge.
Longney consistently performs above the national average in reading. In 2018/19 88% of Key Stage 1 pupils achieved the expected standard and 50% achieved the greater depth standard. In KS2 80% of Key Stage 2 pupils achieved the expected standard and 40% achieved the greater depth standard. In 2022 79% of KS 2 pupils achieved expected standard with 28% at Greater Depth, this was above the national average.
