Intent 

"Every child as a reader for life"

Relevant Reading Skills

We explicitly teach and develop children's confidence in spoken language and vocabulary, phonological awareness, phonics and decoding, comprehension and fluency.

Enjoyment
We have a culture which promotes a love of reading and reading for pleasure.

Achievement for all

We know that children who enjoy reading achieve more highly across the curriculum, raising their overall attainment. 

Diversity

We provide children with access to a diverse range of high-quality texts, which opens their minds to new ideas, experiences, people, places and times that they might never experience in real life.

Entitlement

We believe every child deserves to be a reader. We teach children the value of books and reading and how they contribute to a fulfilling life.

Responsibility

We understand that being able to read is essential for social, cultural and economic development. It is one of the most effective ways to effect social change and equalisation of opportunity. 

At Millbrook Primary School, every child becomes "a reader for life". We have designed a Reading Curriculum that ensures that pupils are instilled with a love of reading, gain the relevant reading skills, and acquire vocabulary and knowledge that enables access, equity, and achievement across the curriculum as well as in our rapidly changing society. 

Our aims for reading (taken from the National Curriculum) are to:

• Inspire pupils love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment.
• Ensure that pupils develop fluency to confidently read at speed.
• Provide pupils with good reading habits that enable them to understand what they have read and use that information for a given purpose.
• Support pupils to acquire rich and varied vocabulary by promoting high standards of language. 

We recognise that reading is the key which unlocks a child's ability to be autodidactic and learn truly independently, beyond our classroom. 

Implementation

We value evidence-informed practice and read widely to ensure that our Literature Spine, schemes for teaching and learning and pedagogical approaches used are highly effective for our school demographic.

The National Curriculum (for England) shapes our curriculum design and is supported by our selected programmes and/or schemes of learning - Read, Write Inc, Rapid Readers and Reading Gems. The curriculum design is sequenced with logical progression in vocabulary, knowledge and skills that build on prior teaching and learning so that our pupils 'know and remember more' with our domain coverage (Reading Gems) and end points identified for each year group. 

Our reading offer, and teaching and learning consists of:

• Read, Write Inc. - a validated systematic, synthetic phonics programme.
• Shared Reading - developing spoken language, confidence, expression and fluency through 'Readers Theatre'.
• Guided Reading - developing oral language and vocabulary skills through high-quality and supportive interaction, reading developmentally-appropriate texts, and practising and applying domain questions supported by Reading Gems.
• Reading Enjoyment - reading widely and often through access to the School Library, 50 recommended reads 'Reading Trees' and external partnerships (author visits, storytelling workshops, reading volunteers and reading buddies).
• Assessment - Read, Write Inc. half-termly assessments and benchmarking to assess decoding and reading level, HeadStart comprehension assessments and EARS to assess fluency. 
• Targeted Intervention - Read, Write Inc. tutoring to support decoding and Rapid Readers to support decoding and comprehension.

We place reading at the heart of our curriculum, and so our Literature Spine details the core texts for Reading and Writing, its cross-curricular conceptual links, genre, reading plague, and supporting texts to ensure background and conceptual knowledge is secured. Our 'Super Six' - the core texts for reading - are known well by pupils, over each half term in each year with Shared and Guided Reading based on the selected text.

Impact 

The impact of our Reading Curriculum is that:

• Pupils of all abilities succeed in reading because they read widely and often.
• Pupils are able to decode and blend words.
• Pupils become fluent and confident readers that access all curriculum areas.
• Pupils develop awareness, preferences and opinions of authors, genres and texts, and appreciate our rich and varied literacy heritage.
• Pupils are prepared to read around any subject in later stages of education or within society, recognising its value for both pleasure and information.
• Parents and carers are aware of how to support reading at home.

We know that reading is the passport to all learning, and so our Reading Curriculum ensures that pupils know more, remember more and do more through the reading skills, vocabulary and knowledge embedded to secure their understanding of not only our curriculum, but their access to reading in any context in any part of future education, or society.