Intake Primary School

Implementation

Early reading is supported through the Read Write Inc scheme (RWI) to teach daily phonics, reading and writing.

Regular training and development days ensure that staff are equipped to teach with the expertise and skills required to promote excellent progress, as well as a love of reading.

In KS2, when children have completed the RWI programme, they develop, widen and extend their reading skills through teachers reading a variety of age appropriate, culturally diverse texts to the class; adults frequently hearing individual children reading; using a range of suitable books as part of our learning and being able to choose their own texts allowing children to Read for Pleasure. We also work with parents to encourage home reading and offer children incentives to read at home at least three times a week.

Children who have not completed the RWI programme, not achieved the phonics check or are below age related levels in KS2 receive extra support. We will investigate where the barriers to learning are for these children and put suitable interventions and class support in place.

These are:-

• Intervention teacher to teach early literacy skills intervention for bottom 20% from Year 3 - 5 (intervention from Learning Support Teacher and Lead SENCo)
• Birmingham toolkit used to address gaps and monitor progress
• Intervention teacher is used to split Year 6 into 3 smaller groups - WTS to work with Deputy and SENCo 
• Intervention TA trained to use RWI to meet needs of children who did not achieve phonics screening - regular meetings and training from RWI Lead in school
• Children monitored by Learning Support Teacher to address difficulties, monitor progress and complete report 

These children will also receive additional time to develop reading skills such as fluency and comprehension with adults in school.

In addition to this, each year group has weekly access to the KS1 and KS2 libraries, which have a large selection of books to provide quality reading materials for all children to promote reading for enjoyment.

When planning literacy lessons, teachers make links to other areas of the curriculum to ensure that cross curricular links provide further contexts for learning. Teaching blocks focus on fiction, non-fiction or poetry, in line with the 2014 National Curriculum and comprehension, grammar and writing are embedded in lessons.

Lessons sequences build progressively towards an extended piece of writing which is edited improved and published enabling children to take pride in quality final written piece.

Handwriting is also taught within literacy lessons, and outcomes in KS2 are recorded in literacy books showing the learning journey and other work building towards the final written piece.

We ensure that lessons are accessible for children of abilities including those on the SEN register and those who may be unfamiliar with the concepts and situations on which lessons are based.

To enrich and enhance the literacy curriculum, the children take an active role in the Sheffield Book Awards, regular Book Fairs, World Book Day, the organisation and purchase of books for the library and the opportunity to recommend books they have enjoyed to the rest of the school.

Impact

Assessment for Learning is embedded in literacy lessons and children are active in reviewing the successes in their work and identifying, with support from their teacher, target areas for development to ensure a continuous and individualised approach to improving their work.

 Pupils are involved as much as possible in informative ongoing assessment.

• Reading and writing are monitored/assessed termly.
• Teachers’ ongoing assessment informs current progress.
• Formal testing through end of Key Stage tests.
• Regular monitoring of key words/phonic knowledge, eg weekly spelling tests.
• Termly work scrutiny and learning walks to monitor continuity and progression.

Termly assessments are used to track the progress of children and identify gaps and areas of support needed to close the gap.

The greatest gift our English Curriculum can give the children of Intake School is that they are able to read and so have access to the whole curriculum and acquire life skills which set them up for life beyond primary school. We hope that as the children move on from Intake School to their secondary education, that their creativity, passion for English and high aspirations stay with them and continue to grow and develop.