Reading: Intent, Implementation, Impact

Intent

Here at Kenwood, we value reading as a key life skill. We are dedicated to enabling all of our learners to become lifelong readers. Through providing a language-rich environment as well as high-quality, diverse texts, all young people will have the opportunity to acquire and develop essential reading skills.

For all our students, no matter what their prior attainment, complexity of need or previous exposure to reading, we are committed to swiftly establishing the essential foundations of reading skills and providing a diverse reading curriculum in line with national expectations. We are determined that no child’s opportunities in reading should be limited by their attendance at a non-mainstream school; rather, our smaller class numbers and the privilege this affords us of knowing our students especially well, should make it all the more possible to hold high standards of opportunity for them.

All students will read a wide range of high-quality, challenging literature. This will include drama, poetry, novels and non-fiction and literary non-fiction. The prestige reading is given and careful selection of material based on students' interests promotes a love of reading which will enrich our students' lives.

Implementation

Our students join us from diverse starting points and each young person's reading journey will be tailored to individual needs.

At Kenwood, we ensure that our provision is based on up-to-date, robust evidence. The Educational Endowment Foundation reading house indicates the key areas of provision needed for effective quality first teaching. Each of these has been considered and planned for.

This knowledge must be secured and the skills rehearsed continuously to strengthen a child’s reading ability. The Kenwood spiral curriculum approach mirrors the Scarborough reading rope (2011) to ensure fluent execution and deep comprehension of texts.

Vocabulary

During the Pre-Teach phase of each lesson, Tier 3 Vocabulary is identified and pre-taught to aid reading comprehension when it is encountered.

These words are taught using the following principles:

• Immediate Interaction – building opportunity for students to interact with word meanings straight away.
• Deep processing – enabling students to process the meanings of words in deep and thoughtful ways.
• Active interest – providing examples, situations and questions to create thought about the words.
• Repetition – providing many encounters with target words.

 

Phonology

Each student who is not yet a fluent reader will be assessed using Read Write Inc. Fresh Start. Following this, an individual programme of high-quality daily teaching, alongside regular reading of tightly matched books to close gaps in knowledge quickly.

Priority Readers

Young people with significant gaps in phonic knowledge or fluency are identified as Priority Readers.

These young people receive extra support daily to boost their reading. These may include phonics sessions, daily reading with a member of staff and targeted questions during reading practice sessions.

Progress of these young people is carefully tracked each half-term to ensure they do not get stuck and make continued progress.

Fluency

Fluent readers can read accurately, at an appropriate speed without great effort (automaticity), and with appropriate stress and intonation (prosody). Fluency is the bridge from word recognition to comprehension. Without fluency, it is very difficult to fully understand a text as the experience of reading becomes so disjointed.

 

All young people at Kenwood experiencing the Core and Secondary Ready curriculum have 2 hours' dedicated reading lessons, additional to the English curriculum. These ensure that the skills of fluency and prosody when reading aloud are explicitly taught so that young people are enabled to comprehend what they read at a deeper level.

 

Our lessons follow a structure rooted in the evidence from Bashir and Hook (2009); Vocabulary exposure, modelled fluent reading, text marking, echo reading, paired reading, reading for performance.  This approach suggests that children make accelerated progress when they continue to practice fluent reading of the same material within a guided setting while the teacher provides timely, specific feedback.

 

Comprehension

Students on the core and secondary ready curriculums are taught the skills of inference, prediction, explaining, retrieval, summarising and sequencing as part of their reading lessons.

Reading Novels

Students across the school enjoy English lessons which are based on high-quality texts, both short extracts and longer class novels. The skills taught include retrieval of key information, inference, vocabulary, sequencing, predicting, understanding the intent of the author and making links between texts. This develops the young people’s comprehension strategies and deepens understanding of a range of high-quality texts.

The curriculum has a spiral design based around the 11 identified essential pillars:

 

• Text type/ genre
• SPAG
• Structure
• Voice (tone, register)
• Purpose/ authorial intent
• Linguistic devices
• Perspective
• Context
• Audience
• Vocabulary
• Themes

Young people will return to these pillars through a wide variety of text types, embedding a deep understanding of how these shape our understanding and enjoyment of literature.

 

Read Aloud

 

“Reading aloud to young people is considered one of the most highly effective strategies for fostering a range of literacy skills, both at home and within contemporary classrooms. “

Margaret Kriston Merga and Susan Ledger - United Kingdom Literacy Association UKLA

 

Teachers of the Secondary Ready and Core curriculum across the school will read aloud daily, selecting books to engage the young people in their class. These texts will often be just above the reading ability of many of the students, exposing them to rich vocabulary and complex themes. Enjoying shared stories together fosters a love of reading and enhances shared

 

Libraries

 

Students have access to libraries where they can select and take books home. An online inventory of books is available on the Kenwood website. This enables students to access books from across the other sites. 

 

Impact

Through the teaching of reading, the aim of our provision will impact young people in the following ways:

• Learners will be able to read texts fluently and with good understanding across a range of genres.
• Learners will develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information.
• Learners will acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language.
• Learners will be able to talk confidently and critically about what they have read and consider the author’s intentions.
• Learners apply their reading confidently across a range of subjects within our curriculum.

Assessment

We monitor the impact of our reading provision through termly assessments, curriculum conversations and pupil voice. Attainment in reading is measured in the school using a range of formative and summative assessment methods, including;

• Kenwood Reading objectives progression
• The Read, Write Inc. Fresh Start tracker

• EHCP Outcomes
• Multidimensional Fluency Scale (Tim Rasinski)
• Bsquared small steps

Teachers and Teaching Assistants assess individual pupils' decoding and comprehension strategies through whole-class reading lessons, reading practice sessions as well as with one-to-one reading.