World Aware – Through our reading curriculum, we give our pupils the opportunity to develop an understanding of the world they live in. We select quality texts from a range of authors, cultures and countries and seek to promote diversity and inclusion in our text choices.  

Belonging – We celebrate reading in our curriculum, our classrooms, our library and everyday school life. Our pupils enjoy regular visits to the school library and time with a reading partner, when they can share their love of reading with a partner from a different year group. School librarians and reading ambassadors encourage everyone to take pride in their class book corners and to care for the school books.  

Well-being – We nurture and build the self-esteem of our pupils by ensuring that our pupils become confident and enthusiastic readers. We are determined that every pupil will learn to read, regardless of their background, needs or abilities. We seek to ensure that all pupils will make sufficient progress to meet or exceed age-related expectations and use continuous assessment to identify any pupil who is falling behind.  

Spirituality – Our reading curriculum seeks to support our pupils’ spiritual, moral and emotional growth alongside their development of reading skills. We select texts that will stimulate discussion and support our pupils to explore big questions in the world along with aspects of awe and wonder.  

Possibilities – We set high expectations for all our pupils in reading, ensuring that as confident readers, our pupils can apply their skills and achieve across the curriculum.  

Reading is prioritised and taught every day in our schools. We provide and encourage frequent and varied reading opportunities, recognising that it is essential that pupils accumulate as many reading miles as possible; the more a child reads the better the progress they will make.  Learning builds on what was taught previously and encourages pupils to retrieve and make connections to create meaningful and deeper links for their understanding.

In EYFS, there are frequent opportunities to listen to stories, re-enact stories and sing rhymes to help to set a firm foundation in early reading skills and establish a love of reading.  We teach phonics through a highly progressive and integrated scheme in EYFS and KS1 to embed reading and writing skills. Our small cohort numbers allow the teacher to balance the level of support given to developing fluency with the need to model key reading skills at ARE. 

As pupils secure their decoding skills, our focus moves to developing comprehensions skills, initially through a structured, progressive reading scheme in Y2, then through quality texts in KS2.  Our English lessons are also structured around quality texts across the school, which may be linked to the term’s theme but will always be selected for their high-quality and potential to raise standards in reading and writing.  We want to ensure all children develop a love reading and, as part of cultural capital, all children have access to quality texts from a range of classic and contemporary fiction and non-fiction, and poetry. Teachers will model the skills of reading (including prosody) and give pupils the opportunity to listen to and enjoy a story whilst also improving pupils’ concentration skills through a shared experience.