Intent

At Field Lane School, the teaching of reading is an invested priority and at the heart of our curriculum.

By the end of Key Stage One, our intent is that all children will have acquired the skills they need to decode with automaticity and fluency and to comprehend age appropriate texts. In Key Stage Two, our aim for all pupils is that they will have developed the necessary skills and attitude they require to become confident, efficient readers, enabling them to engage fully with the wider world in the future. From learning to read, to reading to learn, our aim is for all our children to read successfully with fluency and understanding, confidence and enjoyment.

At Field Lane we are passionate about instilling a genuine appreciation and lifelong love of reading, so that our children may reap the wider benefits of being a “reader”. Our wide reading curriculum introduces our children to diverse authors and poets, themes and genres, so that they will develop their literacy capital, as critics and thinkers and with a greater knowledge of the world around them.

We greatly acknowledge the role of parents and carers as our partners in learning. Our reading offer supports our parents in developing their children’s language and reading skills. It is our aim for all our families to be literacy rich.

Implementation

Initially children's listening skills are developed through the use of music, environmental sounds and rhyme. During their journey from Nursery, through the Early Years Stage and Key Stage 1, children are progressively taught the alphabetic code and key skills of blending sounds together for reading and segmenting words for spelling. Phonics is taught every day using the Floppy’s Phonics Teaching Programme and we ensure that our teaching of systematic phonics is rigorous, structured, multi-sensory and enjoyable quality first teaching. This programme includes the teaching of common exception words and also creates a platform for vocabulary extension and discussion based learning for the development of key language and comprehension skills. The Programme assesses the letter/s-sound correspondences of the alphabetic code explicitly and comprehensively for reading.  We use decodable books namely Floppy’s Phonics Fiction alongside aligned Oxford Reading Tree Word Sparks and Alien Adventures. These are structured in fine cumulative steps so that children can decode every word, running alongside or a little behind the GCPs that they have been taught in Phonics and ensuring that children practise, apply and consolidate their phonics skills in both fiction and non-fiction. 

In Year Two children continue to read levelled reading books from the Word Sparks and Project X reading schemes. In Key Stage Two, children needing a bridge to progress onto free choice, continue to practise their fluency, prosody and comprehension skills using levelled books on a daily basis and are taught and listened to in targeted intervention sessions. This intervention focuses on the teaching of fluency, prosody and comprehension and is done in close partnership with parents. 

Outside  the phonics programme, a wide variety of quality text types and reading material are used throughout school, to motivate and inspire children to read, enabling all groups of pupils to master a variety of decoding and comprehension strategies. Reading is taught discretely, as well as in conjunction with other subjects in the National Curriculum and Early Years Framework. Children are read to and listened to during English lessons and reading sessions on a regular basis as part of a broad and balanced curriculum and according to their individual needs. In guided or shared reading sessions we focus on the development of key language and reading comprehension skills and metacognition strategies. Sequences of teaching and learning in comprehension focus on activating prior learning, read and respond, breakdown and repair, delving at a deeper level, and  comprehension questions.  High quality teaching of comprehension also focuses  on the domains of reading comprehension: Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval and Summarising. Children are helped to relate the text to their own experiences, previous reading and the wider world. Teachers demonstrate how to refine answers to a high standard whilst modelling language.  Children continue to develop their reading fluency and prosody skills as they practise and perform reading aloud. Books are celebrated at other times in the school day such as story time and in assemblies. In Smart Time, children practise their reading for research skills independently as they delve into non- fiction books from our library and online sources to lead their own research down paths that interest them. Children continue to develop their reading fluency and prosody skills as they practise and perform reading aloud.

To ensure children read widely for pleasure, we have devised our Big Friendly Reading Challenge which ensures children are introduced to a different collection of age appropriate, quality books and authors each year. These collections include a diverse range of themes, authors, characters and genres, which we hope will inspire new interests and engender a love of reading in the home, and develop cultural capital by experiencing many new windows to the wider world. Daily story times are cherished here and throughout school they are structured, through our Recommended Authors list, to ensure that age appropriate, quality, new or well-loved favourites are enjoyed together.

At Field Lane School, we identify children who need support and provide effective intervention in the most efficient way that we can. At the end of KS1, children still identified as below national expectations for reading and / or who have not passed the Phonics Screening Check Resit will receive further individualised reading intervention. Teachers continue to reinforce the application of phonic knowledge and skills as the route to decoding words until this has become embedded and reading is automatic and fluent.  If pupils join our school at different stages in their development of phonic knowledge, we quickly identify the appropriate level for them to be working at and provide intervention accordingly. We support those children at risk of falling behind with targeted support through our interventions, these include lower 20 percent targeted parent groups, keep-up and catch-up phonics intervention in EY/KS1  and catch-up reading intervention in KS2.

Children are well supported with their reading at home. In Nursery, children select books to take home to share with their families. Throughout school, each child has a book bag and home/school reading record book. Children learning phonics are given decodable books to practise at home. Children also take home multi-skills activity sheets and phoneme tiles for recognition and blending in their Floppy’s Phonics folder. They have access to the Floppy’s Extra Practice Zone, all of which facilitates timely consolidation of what they have been taught at school. We encourage family members at home to read with their child daily and to communicate in their child’s reading record. Children are then encouraged to independently select books to read at home from our main school library. Our parents are keen to support their children at home and we provide a range of activities  to promote this. Staff deliver: 

• Floppy’s Phonics Workshops for EY and KS1 parents in order for them to fully support further revision and consolidation of skills. 
• Whole school Reading For Pleasure Workshop, where we share ways to create a positive reading culture at home 
• SATs information meetings for Year 2 and Year 6 parents, to  inform about age-related expectations and how to support with reading at home.
• Bespoke Loom videos in dual languages demonstrating how parents can access our digital resources and strategies for sharing a book even though they may not be confident in reading in the English language themselves. 

At Field Lane reading is promoted in our learning environment. Our library and classroom reading areas entice children to read their favourite books. The books available have been carefully selected and organised so that they are age appropriate and appealing to different tastes. We support children in selecting books and encourage them to expand their choices by trying out  different series and authors through our displays.

Throughout the school year our literacy and reading provision is enhanced through events such as class visits to Batley Library, Play in a Day, online Meet the Author Sessions, twice yearly class performances, Book week,  National Poetry day and  Kirklees Interschools World Book Day Quiz to name a few.

Impact

Reading is assessed in informal and formal contexts. Formative assessment of progress in decoding  is continuous: on a daily basis, teachers make judgments about decoding ability and word recognition skills in Phonics sessions and when listening to children read their decodable books. In guided reading, we assess children’s comprehension skills against our key year group expectations. Evidence of individual progress is kept in  guided reading folders.

Summative assessments of fluency and comprehension take place termly using PIXL assessments.  Teachers record and analyse the progress and attainment made and analyse gaps to inform future planning, ensuring children are supported and challenged appropriately.

The majority of children pass the phonics check at KS1. Our attainment and progress scores at KS1 and KS2 either meet or exceed the national average at both the Expected and Greater Depth standards.

We hope that as children move on to the next stage of their education, our children leave us as fluent, confident and able readers, who can access a range of texts for pleasure and enjoyment, and use their reading skills to unlock learning in all areas of the curriculum.