A number of strategies, detailed below, are in place to ensure that reading is prioritised at Kingsmeadow in terms of both wellbeing and academic progress, and students are rewarded for their reading resilience.

Our Tutor Read Aloud Programme enables every tutor group to read together at least once a week as part of Thrive.  Each tutor group is allocated a set text, and tutors, or other adults, read this text aloud while students follow in their own book.  Readers model how we navigate texts, and the group is able to invest in the stories as part of a shared experience.  The books have been carefully selected to be age appropriate, challenging and enjoyable, and include fiction and nonfiction titles such as  ‘The Hobbit’, ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’, ‘The Penguin Lessons’, ‘1984’ and ‘Noughts and Crosses’.

Tutor groups complete a Word of the Week activity in which students explore the etymology of a word before collaborating on a sentence and entering it into the Word of the Week competition.  This initiative allows students to explore and expand the vocabulary they use across the curriculum, enabling them to access more sophisticated texts in all subjects, as well as developing their written and spoken precision.

Students in Years 7 and 8 have a reading lesson built into their timetable, in addition to their English curriculum time, to enable them to take part in the Accelerated Reader programme.  This again supports students to read widely, while tracking and supporting their progress via STAR tests and in-class interventions.  This is complemented by the Lexia online literacy programme for students who require additional reading support.

All staff take part in literacy training as part of the whole school CPD programme.  Often rooted in research from the Education Endowment Fund (EEF), these sessions focus on strategies to support reading fluency, decoding, comprehension skills, word consciousness and embedding effective classroom dialogue in the classroom. Furthermore, department leads ensure that reading texts adequately challenge students in order to prepare them for the rigour of external examinations. 

 All staff have access to reading age data and can, therefore, provide in class support where needed, and can direct students appropriately where they require additional challenge.

Our bi-weekly creative writing and book clubs offer students the opportunity to develop their creative literacy skills in a welcoming environment at the end of the normal school day. 

All Key Stage 3 students are assessed using the New Group Reading Test (NGRT) and, in conjunction with data from KS2 SATS and Accelerated Reader, those identified as not reading at their chronological age are assigned a reading mentor who meets with them weekly, in small groups, to develop their reading fluency and comprehension skills.  Students who are significantly below their chronological reading age are phonics tested and, where applicable, they will begin to follow the ‘Reading Quest’ phonics programme three times a week.  We also use the NGRT to help us identify students who may find it difficult to access GCSE content.