Our English Curriculum at Barford Primary School
This area of our website covers the subject of English and is supported by our Early Reading and Phonics Policy and our Reading and Writing policies.
Intent
Our intent at Barford Primary School is to provide children with a high-quality education in English that will teach our pupils to speak, read and write fluently so they can communicate their ideas effectively.
We value reading as a gateway skill and we are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers. Reading is the cornerstone of our curriculum. We believe that through supporting our children to learn to read, they will be able to ‘read to learn’ for the rest of their lives. Reading is key for academic success. We believe in developing reading fluency and all comprehension skills coupled with promoting a love of reading so all of our children can access the delights and rewards that reading provides.
We believe in supporting our children to love reading and writing. We recognise the importance of nurturing a culture where children take pride in their writing, can write clearly and accurately adapt their language and style for a range of contexts. We believe in setting high standards in the presentation of writing along with setting the important foundations in spelling and grammar. We aim to inspire children in their writing by providing opportunities to develop and apply their writing skills across the curriculum.
We believe that good writing is inspired by high quality texts and therefore aim to expose children to a range of high quality texts as vehicles for engaging their imagination and in turn inspire excellent writing across a wide range of genres.
We aim for our children to leave us as:
- Well-rounded citizens who use the English language to successfully access the world around them and to exploit its opportunities to widen their horizons, broaden their experiences and raise their aspirations.
- Accurate, fluent and well-read individuals with a genuine and intrinsic love and motivation for reading and literature of all types.
- Articulate, confident and technically precise writers who take pleasure in doing so.
- Masters of a broad, rich and varied vocabulary centred around the wide range of topics they have explored throughout their schooling.
- A solid command of the English language with which they can express themselves and communicate with others in spoken and written form.
- Curious and questioning learners who know how to ask questions that develop their understanding and allow them to further interrogate the world around them to maximise what they get out of it.
- Individuals that have good oracy skills and can articulate themselves and their opinions with clarity in order to make brilliant first impressions and allow them to pursue any leisure or professional interests of their choice in the future.
- Children that have experienced a wide range of extra-curricular experiences and opportunities linked to their studies in reading and writing.
- Learners that have been immersed in a cross curricular programme of study that has deepened their knowledge of and skills in English and that links to other subjects.
Implementation
Reading and Writing are timetabled daily across all year groups. Here is an overview of how English is taught across our school every day.
Early Reading and Phonics
Daily phonics in EYFS and KS1 are taught with fidelity to the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds revised programme including 3 reading practice sessions per week. Alongside the core programme Daily Keep Up and Rapid Catch Up are deployed to ensure no child is left behind. Children arriving in our school are placement assessed and if they require Phonics teaching they are integrated into our daily phonics provision from wherever they are in the school. Alongside our class teachers delivering daily phonics, our trained Teaching Assistants are timetabled to support across school to deliver the Reading Practice sessions. We also have a dedicated Teaching Assistant to teach targeted interventions for EAL pupils and children in Key Stage 2 who require Rapid Catch Up with phonics.
When children complete their phonics journey, they progress to the Little Wandle Spelling programme to supplement their phonic knowledge with taught spelling patterns. In reading,children work their way through Little Wandle Fluency programme where they are introduced to short chapter books
Vulnerable groups and those needing additional reading support, including the lowest 20% of pupils, are identified by class teachers and reading interventions are put in place to support the development of their reading. This may be small group comprehension work or additional daily reading to develop fluency and build confidence.
Reading beyond Little Wandle
Once children have completed the Little Wandle reading fluency programme, their reading development continues using Literacy Counts ‘Steps to Read’. This is a carefully crafted set of units that support teachers to teach a complete range of word reading and comprehension skills, linked to the Reading Domains, using a wide range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts. The coverage of these units ensures that they progressively develop their ability to understand, interpret, analyse, discuss and use a range of texts in a variety of ways.
Use of Accelerated Reader
The choice of Accelerated Reader, introduced in September 2023, is foundational for the development of our children as readers and supports our Reading for Pleasure pedagogy. We have chosen to use Accelerated Reader because we are able to deliberately, forensically and accurately ensure that children access and read books which are at the optimum difficulty to ensure development of reading skills. Within that approach the children have ownership of their reading choices which we believe supports and encourages children to make reading choices and develop a love of reading through self discovery. In addition Accelerated Reader:
- Provides data that helps us monitor and personalise reading practice.
- Encourages substantial amounts of practice, according to guidelines based on research findings.
- Makes practise fun for children by facilitating successful encounters with text.
The timetabled element of independent reading will enable children to read individually to the adults and give regular time to read, quiz, change books, discuss choices and for adults to carefully check book choice and patterns of reading over time. The time allocated for reading is then supplemented by our ‘home reading’ expectation.
Writing
There is clear progression set out through our curriculum planning for English. We recognise that learning is a change to long-term memory – the place where all knowledge is stored and we recognise that for increasing amounts of knowledge to find their way to the long-term memory basic transcription skills – handwriting, spelling and punctuation must be secure to enable the cognitively demanding composition skills fully develop.
To support our children in EYFS, we have a very clear progression of skills mapped out termly to provide clarity around the development of our youngest writers. Opportunities for children to learn and practise those skills are planned for weekly both with English lessons and within the continuous provision both indoors and outdoors.
Within Years 1-6 we use a ‘Read to Write’ from Literacy Counts to develop our writers. Each unit is based around a vehicle text, which is the starting point for inspiring children to write fiction and non-fiction pieces of writing. The ‘Read to Write’ planning is founded on the principle of ‘sentence accuracy’ to ensure children develop accurate sentence formation and punctuation from the beginning of their writing journey.
At Barford, we identify and track children who need support and provide intervention in the most effective and efficient way that we can to help each child maximise their potential by providing. Primarily this is done through adaptive teaching strategies so that teachers plan and teach English lessons, which take into account the particular needs of each child. The planning and resources from the scheme are adapted to meet the needs of our pupils including SEND, EAL, our lowest 20% and those children working at Greater Depth.
We have tailored the planning to meet the needs of our children through a clearly defined 5-phase approach as follows:
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Phase 1 |
Immerse – children are exposed to and explore the vehicle text through reading, drama and exploration of vocabulary. |
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Phase 2 |
Analyse – children unpick a WAGOLL of the genre to explore the structure and features. Then they learn how to use the grammar and punctuation concepts required to write a similar piece of writing. |
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Phase 3 |
Plan – children are taught how to use the WAGOLL and vehicle text to gather ideas and organise them into a well-thought out plan for writing. |
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Phase 4 |
Guided Write – children are taught over a series of lessons, how to write the particular genre, guided at each stage by clear success criteria. Children are taught how to proof read and edit their work progressively throughout this sequence of lessons. |
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Phase 5 |
Independent Application – Before completing the unit, children plan and write an independent piece of work drawing together all of the learning into this final piece of writing. |
Other opportunities for extended writing
Each half term children complete 2 pieces of ‘Time to Shine’ writing, which are creative pieces of writing that provide regular opportunities for children to practise writing in a genre they have learnt in the previous half term. This allows recall and application of skills and knowledge so that over time children are more confident when writing in different ways because they are learning and remembering more from their long-term memory.
In addition, through our creative curriculum topics, children have regular opportunities to use their skills and knowledge from English to write extended pieces to support and demonstrate their understanding.
Spellings
In Year 2, completion of the Little Wandle Phonic programme children complete the ‘Bridge to Spelling’ unit and then progress to the Little Wandle Spelling scheme. After that, in Years 3-6 children are taught spelling explicitly following the No-Nonsense spelling programme.
Handwriting
Handwriting is taught explicity throughout the school and we expect high standards of presentation supported by handwriting in accordance with the schools handwriting policy. In Key Stage 1, children are taught correct letter formation using the Sassoon Junior font (to maintain fidelity with Little Wandle) and in Key Stage 2 children develop cursive script using the Letter Join no-lead font.
Impact
We regularly assess children’s learning in English to measure impact. Through assessment we are checking that children develop transferable skills in English as they progress through the school such that our children are competent readers and writers by the time they are in upper Key Stage 2.
The complete range of Little Wandle assessments are used to carefully track the progress of all children with phonics and early reading. Star Reading assessments, linked to the Accelerated Reader, is used to track all children’s reading development and progress beyond Little Wandle.
Assessment for learning in English is continuous throughout the planning, teaching and learning cycle. The daily assessments teachers make through our feedback policy, help them to adjust their daily and weekly planning. The following strategies are used to support that:
- Observing children at work, individually, in pairs, in a group and in class during whole class teaching.
- Using adapted, open-ended questions that require children to explain and unpick their understanding.
- Providing effective feedback during lessons, opportunities for self-assessment, consolidation, depth and target setting.
- Use of success criteria as a frame for children to self-evaluate and peer-evaluate.
- Children are encouraged to correct their spellings, proof read and up level their writing independently.
We use Insight as our assessment tool termly to measure progress against the learning statements, which enables progress to be monitored and planning to be informed. This data is evaluated at termly pupil performance meetings and actions around interventions planned and acted upon immediately.
At the end of the school year teachers measure children’s progress against national expectations. They set targets for the next school year and summarise the progress of each child before reporting this to the child’s parents. The next teacher then uses these assessments and targets as the planning basis for the new school year.
Children take the national tests at the end of Year 2 and Year 6. The Phonics Screening Check is carried out in Year 1 and is repeated in Year 2 with any children who did not meet the expected level when in Year 1. We will administer national tests in line with the new recommendations.
Barford Primary School Phonics and Early Reading Policy