English

Reading and Phonics

Ensuring every pupil can read accurately, fluently and with comprehensive understanding whilst nurturing a life-long love of literature and books.

Intent

Our readers will become lifelong readers. They read not only for necessity but for their own pleasure. They are both analytical and thoughtful with their reading choices and enjoy recommending authors, texts and genres to one another. Our pupils leave St Mark’s as competent, confident readers who have experienced a wealth of reading genres. As a result, they have developed their own preferences of text type, authors and authorial voice and are analytical when discussing their text choices.

We provide our pupils with a language and literacy-rich environment, high-quality, relatable texts and the inspiring teaching of phonics and reading, in order to promote the following:

Gain a life-long enjoyment of reading and books;
Read accurately, fluently and with secure understanding;
Apply the comprehensive knowledge of systematic synthetic phonics in order to decode unfamiliar words with increasing accuracy and speed;
Be able to read with expression, clarity and confidence;
Develop a broad linguistic knowledge of vocabulary and grammar;
Read and respond to a wide range of different types of texts;
Develop a deeper level of emotional intelligence and empathy.

Phonics

At St Mark’s Primary School, we believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. This is why we teach reading through FFT Success for All Phonics, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics in Nursery and follow the FFT Success for All Phonics progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school.

As a result, all our children are able to tackle any unfamiliar words as they read. At St Mark’s Primary School, we also model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum. We have a strong focus on language development for our children because we know that speaking and listening are crucial skills for reading and writing in all subjects.

Comprehension

At St Mark’s Primary School, we value reading as a crucial life skill. By the time children leave us, they read confidently for meaning and regularly enjoy reading for pleasure. Our readers are equipped with the tools to tackle unfamiliar vocabulary. We encourage our children to see themselves as readers for both pleasure and purpose.

Because we believe teaching every child to read is so important, we have a Reading Leader who drives the early reading programme in our school. This person is highly skilled at teaching phonics and reading, and they monitor and support our reading team, so everyone teaches with fidelity to the FFT Success for All Phonics programme.

Implementation

At St Mark’s Primary School, reading is at the heart of the curriculum; it is encompassed in all that we teach. Through carefully selected high-quality texts, meticulously planned teaching sequences and a priority placed on securing robust foundations in early reading, we provide an ambitious, comprehensive and balanced reading curriculum where no pupil is left behind.

Foundations for phonics in Nursery

We provide a balance of child-led and adult-led experiences for all children that meet the curriculum expectations for ‘Communication and language’ and ‘Literacy’. These include:

sharing high-quality stories and poems
learning a range of nursery rhymes and action rhymes
activities that develop focused listening and attention, including oral blending
attention to high-quality language.

We ensure Nursery children are well prepared to begin learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) and blending in Reception.

Daily phonics lessons in Reception and Year 1

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. Each Friday, we review the week’s teaching to help children become fluent readers.
Children make a strong start in Reception: teaching begins in Week 3 of the Autumn term.
Children in Reception are taught to read and spell words using Phase 2 and 3 GPCs, and words with adjacent consonants (Phase 4) with fluency and accuracy.
Children in Year 1 review Phase 3 and 4 and are taught to read and spell words using Phase 5 GPCs with fluency and accuracy.

Keep-up lessons ensure every child learns to read

Any child who needs additional practice has regular keep-up support, taught by a fully trained member of staff. 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 timetable additional phonics lessons for any child in Year 2 or 3 who is not fully fluent at reading or has not passed the Phonics screening check. These children urgently need to catch up, so the gap between themselves and their peers does not widen. We use comprehensive assessments to identify the gaps in their phonic knowledge and teach to these using the Keep-up resources – at pace.
If any child in Year 3 to 6 has gaps in their phonic knowledge when reading or writing, we plan phonics ‘catch-up’ lessons to address specific reading/writing gaps. These short, sharp lessons take place regularly throughout the week.

Teaching reading

We teach children to read through reading practice sessions every day. These:

Are always led by the main class teacher and supported by our support staff
use books matched to the children’s secure phonic knowledge
Always have a clear reading learning intention and enable every child to make progress within each lesson

Each reading practice session has a clear focus, so that the demands of the session do not overload the children’s working memory. The reading practice sessions have been designed to focus on three key reading skills:

decoding
prosody: teaching children to read with understanding and expression
comprehension: teaching children to understand the text.

In Reception these sessions start in Week 3. Children who are not yet decoding have daily additional blending practice in small groups, so that they quickly learn to blend and can begin to read books.
In Year 2 and 3, we continue to teach reading in this way for any children who still need to practise reading with decodable books.

Home reading

The decodable reading practice book is taken home to ensure success is shared with the family.

Reading for pleasure books also go home for parents to share and read to children.
We use the FFT Parent Portal to engage our families and share information about phonics, the benefits of sharing books, how children learn to blend and other aspects of our provision, both online and through workshops.

Additional reading support for vulnerable children

Children, in all year groups, who are receiving additional phonics Keep-up sessions read their reading practice book to an adult daily.

Ensuring consistency and pace of progress

Every teacher in our school has been trained to teach reading, so we have the same expectations of progress. We all use the same language, routines and resources to teach children to read so that we lower children’s cognitive load.
Weekly content grids map each element of new learning to each day, week and term for the duration of the programme.
Lesson templates, Prompt cards and How to videos ensure teachers all have a consistent approach and structure for each lesson.
The Reading Leader and SLT use the Audit and Prompt cards to regularly monitor and observe teaching; they use the summative data to identify children who need additional support and gaps in learning.

Ensuring reading for pleasure

‘Reading for pleasure is the single most important indicator of a child’s success.’ (OECD 2002)

‘The will influences the skill and vice versa.’ (OECD 2010)

We value reading for pleasure highly and work hard as a school to grow our Reading for Pleasure pedagogy.

We read to children every day. We choose these books carefully as we want children to experience a wide range of books, including books that reflect the children at St Mark’s Primary School and our local community as well as books that open windows into other worlds and cultures.
Pupils in all year groups benefit from discrete, daily reading for pleasure time within their timetable. During this time, they are exposed to a wealth of different reading material and it is often here that reading preferences are discovered.
Pupils engage with non-fiction texts across all topics within their curriculum and are encouraged to use these to research given topics further.
In Nursery/Reception, children have access to the reading corner every day in their free flow time and the books are continually refreshed.
Children from Nursery/Reception onwards have a home reading record. The parent/carer records comments to share with the adults in school and the adults will write in this on a regular basis to ensure communication between home and school.
Each class visits the local library every half term.
The school library is made available for classes to use at protected times.
Children across the school have regular opportunities to engage with a wide range of Reading for Pleasure events (book fairs, author visits and workshops, national events etc).

Impact

Assessment

Assessment is used to monitor progress and to identify any child needing additional support as soon as they need it.

Assessment for learning is used:

daily within class to identify children needing Keep-up support
weekly in the Review lesson to assess gaps, address these immediately and secure fluency of GPCs, words and spellings.

Summative assessment is used:

every six weeks to assess progress, to identify gaps in learning that need to be addressed, to identify any children needing additional support and to plan the Keep-up support that they need.
by SLT and scrutinised through the school’s assessment tracker, to narrow attainment gaps between different groups of children and so that any additional support for teachers can be put into place.

Statutory assessment

Children in Year 1 sit the Phonics screening check. Any child not passing the check re-sits it in Year 2.

Ongoing assessment for catch-up

Children in Year 2 to 6 are assessed through:

their teacher’s ongoing formative assessment
the FFT Reading Assessment Programme
the appropriate half-termly assessments.

FFT Success for All - Parent Portal

Phonics Support for Parents

English Curriculum Support for Parents