At Beechcliffe School Thackley, we believe reading is an essential life skill and entitlement for every pupil, irrespective of their starting points, backgrounds, and ability to read when they arrive at our school. Reading has the ability to shape minds and change futures, both in school and outside of it. At our school, we therefore believe that reading is everyone’s responsibility to teach, and we embody the belief that reading underpins our entire curriculum offer. Many of our students have experienced disruptive education journeys prior to arriving at Beechcliffe School, and consequently there may be gaps in their knowledge and foundational reading skills. However, regardless of ability or prior experiences, we are committed to creating an environment which values reading and where informed approaches to reading, fluency, and vocabulary enables our students to develop their reading abilities, access an ambitious curriculum, and give them an integral life skill.
The key aims for reading in our school are as follows:
– To provide quality first teaching in classrooms that place reading at the heart of the curriculum and the heart of learning. This includes explicit vocabulary instruction as a core component of our lessons, as well as the use of reading strategies that enable our students to make progress with their reading.
– To ensure teaching, resources, and reading materials are tailored to individual student need.
– To identify the needs of every student and use diagnostic assessments to make informed steps about how to best enable every student to make progress with their reading.
– To provide thorough, robust intervention programmes for students who need reading intervention. This includes phonics, spelling and grammar, handwriting, reading for meaning and comprehension, and fluency. As part of our intervention, we use the Lexonik Leap programme to support students with their phonetic knowledge and foundational reading skills.
– To celebrate and promote reading for pleasure throughout the academic year.
Alongside our English curriculum, all students access a reading curriculum where they explore a diverse range of texts that are rich in SMSC value, cultural capital, and personal development. The texts we choose for our reading curriculum are by a diverse range of writers, as we believe it is vital that our students read books that reflect our multi-cultural society. We believe our reading curriculum should enable students to feel represented in the stories they read, but equally that reading also broadens students understanding and empathy of other contexts, cultures, and people. Similarly, the books we read in our classes have also been selected because they explore life concepts that are worthy of discussion and reflection with our students – themes including but not limited to morality, kindness, resilience, relationships, power, and inequality. By exploring such themes and linking them to societal and cultural issues, we seek to develop our students’ empathy, understanding, and connection with the world we live in through the reading of these powerful stories. Finally, whilst the reading curriculum is an opportunity to further develop reading, comprehension, fluency, and discussion skills, it is also an opportunity to collectively enjoy a text and read for pleasure – something all students have a right to experience.
