English - Phonics & Reading

Intent

At WHA, we believe that the ability to read fluently and with deep comprehension is not just an academic skill, but a fundamental human right and a catalyst for social mobility. Literacy, with reading at its core, unlocks every other area of learning and development. It provides children with the crucial tools they need to navigate an increasingly complex world, access a wealth of knowledge, and understand diverse perspectives. A secure reading foundation empowers children to become independent learners, critical thinkers, and empathetic citizens. It broadens their horizons, fueling imagination and allowing them to step into different worlds, histories, and cultures. It is for these reasons that we place reading at the very heart of our curriculum.

With reading, every opportunity shapes a life by:

Developing Our Values

Our school values are frequent themes explored in class reading texts. These values are investigated through the narratives, characters, and situations presented in the books.

Developing Knowledge

Children explore exciting, high-quality texts that are carefully linked to the wider curriculum, where appropriate, in order to deepen their knowledge across the entire curriculum. This ensures children encounter and secure a wide range of academic and subject-specific vocabulary, used repeatedly in a variety of meaningful contexts. The knowledge of phonics and early reading skills are taught explicitly, systematically, and rigorously. Children are provided with ample speaking and listening opportunities to develop fluency not only in reading but also in confidently using new vocabulary they have encountered through texts. Genres are revisited, with an early focus on traditional stories in the Early Years to secure knowledge of fundamental story structures. The National Curriculum and Early Years Foundation Stage are used to plan for the sequential knowledge taught.

Developing Equality

We ensure that our class reading texts represent the diverse pupils we have in our community, as well as those they may go on to meet in the wider world. Every year, children meet and explore characters with a wide spectrum of ages, abilities, family structures, cultures, and religions, alongside a balanced mix of gender representation. The themes covered are always age-appropriate but do tackle important, thought-provoking issues, helping to cultivate empathy, understanding, and respect for differences.

Developing Experience

We are committed to fostering a lifelong love of reading. All children across the school have regular access to the school library and dedicated quiet reading time to encourage reading for pleasure. During their journey at our school, children are provided with enriching opportunities such as visits linked to books, author visits, and connections to the local public library. We also have -come read with me’ opportunities for parents to come and join their child in class. In the classroom, techniques like role-play, hot seating, and conscience alleys are used to deeply explore character motivations, emotions, and choices found within the texts.

Implementation: From Phonics to Fluency

Foundational Skills

The reading journey begins with rigorous phonics teaching from the first days children join Reception. This consistent approach is used throughout EYFS and Year 1 for all pupils.

Systematic Phonics: We deliver a systematic, synthetic phonics program called Essential Letters and Sounds that explicitly teaches children the sounds and corresponding graphemes (letters) in a planned sequence.
Decodable Reading: To ensure early success, children in EYFS and Year 1 are provided with decodable reading books. These books are precisely matched to the sounds they have learned that week, allowing them to apply their phonics skills immediately and build confidence.
Shared Reading: We couple phonics instruction with Whole-Class Shared Reading using big books and high-quality texts. This develops a love of stories while explicitly teaching concepts of print, such as word-to-word correspondence. We place an early focus on exploring and securing knowledge of traditional story structures, building a firm foundation for comprehension and future writing.

Reading Fluency and Comprehension

From Key Stage 1 upwards, our teaching focuses on developing depth of understanding and analytical skills.

Whole Class Reading: texts are chosen strategically to support and deepen knowledge within the wider curriculum. This ensures children encounter and secure a wide range of academic vocabulary used in meaningful and varied contexts.
Fluency:
VIPERS:

Vocabulary
Inference
Prediction
Explain
Retrieval
Summarise

We use the VIPERS acronym as the backbone of our comprehension teaching to ensure children develop the necessary knowledge and skills to analyse and understand texts.

Vocabulary and Retrieval skills are foundational and visited in every lesson to ensure automaticity and security. The more complex analytical skills (Inference, Prediction, Summarising, and Explanation) are taught explicitly in focused lessons. This rigorous approach helps children cultivate a 'reader’s voice'—the ability to internalise and articulate their own ideas, views, and feelings about characters and events.

Fluency: A dedicated focus on reading fluency is paramount in Key Stage 2. Once children have secured their decoding skills, instruction shifts to developing speed, accuracy, and expressive prosody (reading with appropriate tone and rhythm), which are crucial components for reading for meaning. To facilitate this, we explicitly teach and model the use of fluency codes (e.g., symbols for pausing, emphasis, and tone change) within our whole-class reading sessions.

Independent Reading: Children in Years 2 to 6 participate in the Accelerated Reader Programme to develop independent reading stamina and comprehension. At the beginning of each term, pupils complete a Star Reading Assessment to accurately determine their ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development). This ensures they select books that are appropriately challenging to maximize reading progress.

Every time a child finishes an AR book, they take a short quiz to assess their understanding before moving on. Children can also access MYON (an online library linked to AR) at home and in school for further independent reading opportunities.

We prioritise reading through our Daily Dedicated Reading Practice session, starting at 8:30 AM each morning. This guarantees every child has consistent, high-quality reading time and access to in-school support. Furthermore, we strongly encourage parents to read with their child at home, recording their progress in their Reading Diary.

Impact

Reading is the key to all learning; without this essential skill, children inevitably struggle to access the depth and breadth of the wider curriculum. Our systematic approach to the teaching of phonics and reading ensures early identification and prompt, targeted intervention when required, guaranteeing that all children make progress. Children consistently engage with high-quality texts, allowing them to read both for meaning and pleasure. Furthermore, they develop the necessary disciplinary literacy to read effectively in other subject areas, deepening their knowledge and understanding of the world. Our expectation is that a high number of children achieve the expected standard or above in reading.

Ultimately, we want every child to leave WHA as a confident, expressive, and knowledgeable reader who is fully equipped to participate and succeed in society.