English

In Nursery, activities are designed to enable pupils to hear and join-in with spoken language in order to enhance the development of their oral language. Children are introduced to new vocabulary to help them better understand the world around them. In addition to this, opportunities are created that allow children to listen to, identify and join-in with rhymes, songs and stories with familiar patterns. Texts in the Nursery Reading Canon have been purposefully chosen to support the development of these skills.

In Reception and KS1, children practise reading the words on the page by reading texts that are fully aligned to our Sounds-Write phonics programme. This ensures they are practising previously taught phonic knowledge. In order for children to develop their code knowledge more fluently, they will practise reading from the same decodable home-reader for several days until they are completely fluent. As children move through KS1 and their phonic knowledge increases, they themselves begin to read aloud selected texts with support where it is needed. As well as their home-reader, children will also take home a text to share with a family member. Once children have sufficient code knowledge, they select their own home-reader; initially, this is supported by an adult and is usually from around Year 3.

Across the school, children listen to texts being read to them from our Reading Canon. These texts have been carefully chosen to ensure our pupils experience a range of texts that develop their vocabulary and background knowledge.

Whole class reading lessons aim to develop reading fluency and aid comprehension. To achieve this, reading aloud is a key part of our reading lessons and all children read aloud in a variety of ways. Children also read and follow the text as secondary readers while the primary reader is reading aloud. This is to maximise the amount of reading done by every child in every lesson. In addition to this, there are regular opportunities for ‘close reading’ where children are expected to answer questions and write specific sentences about the passage of text they have just read independently, before having a class discussion. We set high expectations in our lessons, which is reflected in the texts we have purposefully selected for our Reading Canon. We also read in other curriculum areas to further develop the children’s vocabulary and background knowledge.

At St. Andrew’s we use specific reading techniques are used to ensure children’s engagement in lessons. These include paired reading, repeated reading and carefully reading and discussing specific sections of text. As well as whole class reading aloud, teachers also carefully select vocabulary from the text to teach, and children are given opportunities to pronounce the word and use it orally. We give child-friendly definitions and do not promote guessing definitions.

Our reading lessons use high-quality literature to develop children’s reading fluency, as well as increase their vocabulary and background knowledge.

At St. Andrew’s, we focus on teaching six text types: recount, report, instructional, explanation, discussion, and persuasive texts. The text types are introduced and revisited in a specified sequence to reduce cognitive load. Additionally, the core grammar knowledge for each phase is specified and sequenced so that children have plentiful opportunities to learn the skills and practice them to automaticity. Once children are ready to apply these skills, they draft extended pieces. The writing outcomes are based on content from the text read and discussed in the whole class reading lessons, or from previously taught content in foundation subjects.

Again, this is to ensure the focus is on thinking about grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary choices, rather than making up content, which is something children do naturally when we use rich texts. In Early Years, the focus is on oral language development, however children will be exposed to writing through encoding the sounds they hear in their phonics lessons. There are opportunities for writing within continuous provision, but children will not be expected to write extended pieces until they are developmentally ready.

Teachers begin the planning process by identifying the purpose and audience for writing; the skills needed for each writing purpose are revisited, taught and practised. Children are given plenty of time to practice and consolidate this learning.

Children are taught explicitly how to plan their writing and time is spent editing work so that all children carefully consider the authorial choices they are making. This ensures that every child can become a competent and successful writer: we believe in improving the writer, not the writing. Lessons are sequenced to allow children opportunities to draft, respond to feedback and redraft, so children feel confident with their work. This also enables the taught grammar and punctuation to become embedded, so that children think carefully about their language choices and apply this in new pieces of writing across the curriculum. The true assessment of a child’s writing ability comes when teachers observe how they are applying the English learning in other curriculum areas, as well as future English writing. 

At St. Andrew’s school, we teach children to decode (read the words on the page) using the Sounds-Write phonics programme. This is a linguistic phonics programme that teaches children 175 sound-spelling correspondences over YR to Y2 and beyond. Rather than moving on to spelling rules, which have many exceptions and contradictions, children learn and apply more sound-spelling correspondences (the extended code) in their reading and writing throughout their time at St. Andrew’s.

The linguistic phonics approach looks at the relationship between the spoken language and the written word. Children will study three main skills to enable them to learn to read: blending, the skills of blending letters together; segmenting, separating sounds for spelling; and manipulating, swapping sounds to develop reading accuracy.

In KS2, children begin to study etymology (the origin of words) which enables them to discover the meaning of new words and apply their extensive code knowledge. Spelling lessons in KS2 replace phonic lessons.

All our teachers have received extensive Sounds Write training to support them to deliver the linguistic phonics lessons; they are also provided refresher training. The programme takes the children step-by-step through phonics, introducing them to the 44 different sounds in the English language and their different spellings gradually and systematically. The programme is highly specified, carefully sequenced and code knowledge is revisited so that it is taught to be remembered. 

Phonics is taught whole-class and any children who did not fully grasp the learning repeat the lesson / part of the lesson that same day to ensure gaps do not form. Children working below age-related expectations still join in with the whole-class phonics lesson and then receive additional phonics teaching focused on their stage of code knowledge. This approach ensures children catch up quickly and keep up.

Formative (at the point of teaching) assessment takes place in every lesson through regular quizzing of the children to check their understanding. This includes spelling tests from the statutory word lists and key vocabulary, as well as factual information of the context and knowledge of grammatical functions. Previous learning is revisited to embed the knowledge within the long-term memory.

The children have termly phonics assessments to check for decoding ability and fluency testing using DIBELS. The research evidence indicates that generic reading comprehension tests assess children’s vocabulary and background knowledge more than their reading ability. We therefore do not use generic reading comprehension tests to test their reading ability, but to further support teacher assessment, as well as expose children to exam-style questions and conditions. Reading fluency tests are a better indicator of children’s reading progress. The DIBELS assessments identify whether children are reading at an age-appropriate level and give detailed diagnostic information on key aspects of reading, so that teachers know exactly where and how to give additional support.

We assess pupils’ writing termly against our KLI (key learning indicators), and moderate within clusters across our trust. Additionally, every year group participates in a system called Assessing Primary Writing once a year, where children’s writing is judged anonymously and ranked with other pupils nationally. This supports our professional judgements and shows us how our children’s writing compares across the country.