- Developing reading skills helps student confidence, will secure their life chances and ensure they are happy, successful and life-long learners.
- Students who engage in reading and writing have an improved sense of well-being.
- Supporting students to be more fluent readers, especially the bottom 20%, will enable them better job prospects.
- Oracy is the number 1 employability skill.
- Speaking fosters confidence, emotional awareness and social skills.
- Oracy enables access to vocabulary across subjects.
- Students need to orally rehearse use of vocabulary and ideas prior to writing.
- Speaking and listening shows active engagement and allows teachers to meaningfully assess progress.
- Students need to be able to speak in order to read and write.
How we do what we do?
Literacy and Oracy Initiatives and Impact:
We currently run the following interventions, using New Group Reading and Spelling Test data, Accelerated reader data, baseline tests (EXACT, Lucid and LASS), and SATs results to identify the students in need of extra, specialised support.
- Reading for pleasure takes place for Years 7-9 through the tutor time initiative.
- Guided reading with Year 7 and Year 9 students, led by Year 11 prefects, helps to boost decoding, fluency and therefore inference and comprehension skills that allow students to access the whole curriculum.
- Sound training with Mr Vaughan (Inclusion Team)
- Students receive literacy intervention in the curriculum if they are part of the Evolve pathway.
- Rotary readers read with students on Monday mornings in KS3.
- ReadingWise intervention during two tutor sessions per week for Years 7-9 to improve vocabulary and comprehension.
- English intervention during tutor time with Mrs Davis (KS3 English Lead) to help with subject specific areas for development.
- Literacy input during timetabled lessons with Ms Chinery (Literacy TA).
- Ms Perou (SENDCo) and Ms Parker (TA) working with students on specialised speech and language targets.
- In the NGRT (New Group Reading Test), for the current Year 9, 85% of students have scored above average standardised scores. In Year 8, 82% of students have above average standardised scores and in Year 7, 85% of students are scoring above national averages.
- Students who received bespoke, specialised intervention were re-screened after an intensive period using ReadingWise.
In Year 8:
45% made expected progress
8% made higher progress
12% made much higher progress
In Year 7:
65% of students increased their reading age
- Targeted 1:1 intervention also takes place with our literacy learning assistant, for those students who score below their chronological age.
- Reading strategies (peer-to-peer reading, choral reading, modelling fluent reading, explicit, robust vocabulary instruction and repeated reading) are used within all lessons across the school to constantly support disciplinary literacy, with a weekly focus in briefing.
- KS3 students are supported with acquiring vocabulary and enhancing spelling accuracy using Bedrock independent study. Student engagement in Year 7 is 83-100%, and in Year 8, 84-100%, with upwards of 50% of students across all classes receiving praise and rewards for their positive efforts in learning, recalling, and applying new vocabulary and spellings.
- Over 100 Year 11 and 40 Year 9 and 10 students received literacy/GCSE English/English Literature support through specialist revision sessions/literacy sessions designed to close the gaps in their learning following school closures and prepare them for their revised GCSE exams.
- Key oracy strategies for all staff to make use of:
- Understanding the significance of, and implementing, exploratory talk.
- Modelling and scaffolding ‘good’ talk – e.g. encourage full sentences, developed explanations and reasons with connectives such as ‘however’ and provide examples. PEEEP etc.
- Re-thinking questioning – Socratic questioning, open, probing questions, ‘why & how’, thinking time, and no-hands-up.
- Consciously varying groupings.
- Getting conversation into the school culture.
Year 11 Outcomes:
- In English Language: 85.5% achieved a Level 4 or higher, 71% achieving Level 5+, 32% gained a Level 7 or higher.
- In English Literature: 86% achieved a Level 4 +, 69% Level 5+, 32% achieved a Level 7 or higher.
- This constitutes a significant improvement on the predictions made at the mid-year point and suggests that, despite the pandemic, our Year 11 students’ performance compared favourably with previous year groups.
