The Development of Reading at St Luke’s Primary

Vision / rationale / theory / practice / impact

It goes without saying that we aim for all of our pupils to develop reading fluency alongside strong comprehension and preferences for wide-ranging, challenging reading material  – children who can effectively read to learn as well as read willingly for its inherent pleasure. It also goes without saying that children need to read with fluency and strong comprehension to be successful throughout their education beyond our primary phase. Children whose parents/carers regularly read with their children and enjoy conversations about the books they have chosen are hugely advantaged and, unless a child has a specific reading difficulty, will make faster progress than those children whose parents/carers do not. We vision our school as a place where we take positive action to level the playing field and enable all children to leave our school equipped with reading skills to give them the best educational chances. The strategy with which we believe will best deliver this vision does not however go without saying! Research into reading theory is extensive. We embrace the 2009 Rose Review’s support for the Simple View of Reading (see below) and the need to build strong synthetic phonics’ foundations for reading development. Around and alongside this (see appendix 1), we aim to develop children’s vocabulary and comprehension skills, knowing that comprehension ‘bootstraps’ decoding (Oakhill; Cain) as well as being the end goal of reading processes – alongside supporting children’s reading preferences to become wide-ranging and challenging.  The environmental; pedagogical; interventionist and specialist strategies we employ to deliver this – and an analysis of our success are detailed below.

The Simple View of Reading  [Gough and Tunmer, 1986; Rose Report, 2009]

Skilled Staff and Evidence-Based Interventions / CPD

Staff

We employ staff who are skilled in assessing, planning and delivering interventions to children with reading difficulties and training staff supporting interventions.

The Junior Inclusion Leader has a Postgraduate Diploma in SpLD and can therefore diagnose children with dyslexia. We employ 2 specialist reading teachers (one infant; one junior) one of whom has a Postgraduate Certificate in SpLD.

Efficacy of Reading Interventions

·       Reciprocal Reading for reading comprehension: Brooks 2016 ‘What Works for Children and Young People with Literacy Difficulties?’

·       Carroll, JM., Bower-Crane, C., Duff, F., Hulme, C. & Snowling, M. (2011). Developing Language and Literacy: Effective Intervention in the Early Years. Wiley: Blackwell Chapter 5 The Phonology and Reading Programme (we call this P+R)

·       We call our reading interventions: Practice Makes Progress. Children agree to become involved and have a voice in the progress statement. Underpinning the Practice Makes Progress:  Phonology and Reading Intervention is Growth Mindset theory (Dweck, Mindset, 2006) and Visible Learning theory (Hattie, 2008)