Intent 

Children at Priory will have a strong foundation of English skills which will enable them to progress across the curriculum and prepare them for tasks in their futures. It is the responsibility of all staff to help to develop children’s confidence and competence when speaking and listening, reading and writing in order for them to access the curriculum effectively and achieve their full potential.  

Reading  

At Priory Primary we strongly believe that reading is fun and purposeful and that children learn best when they can explore texts deeply. We strive to provide all our pupils with high quality opportunities to both ‘learn to read’ and ‘read to learn.’ During reciprocal reading lessons, our pupils access a wide range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts through novels, magazines, library books, and online texts. They are given opportunity to engage in high quality debate and share their opinions on characters and plot points. Pupils can use strategies to make predictions, question ideas and summarise what they have read. Vocabulary is a key focus in our teaching of reading and we consistently expose our pupils to a language rich curriculum right from the very beginning of their school journey. 

Writing  

It is our intent to create inspiring and brave writers who will dare to showcase their own talents, using a range of different strategies. By writing for a variety of purposes and audiences, children will apply progressively harder skills in order to communicate effectively. Positive and negative intent is embedded and discussed at every given opportunity – we use demonstration writing to highlight a writer’s voice and showcase how to incorporate skills. Writing at Priory challenges children to meet their ‘Goldilocks’ spot – it includes a variety of different sentence structures and punctuation to add description to settings and characters whilst creating an atmosphere. Children at Priory will be given time to edit their work throughout the writing process in order to develop their thoughts and refine basic skills.  

Impact  

At Priory Primary, we strive to ensure that our pupil’s reading attainment is in line with or exceeds their potential when we consider the varied starting points of all our children.  

We measure this using our assessment cycle, including the current STA assessment guidelines, whilst always considering the age-related expectations for each year group.  

We provide a bespoke curriculum that will ensure our pupils become ‘readers’ and that they are prepared for life beyond our school, throughout their educational journey and on into adulthood. In addition to this, our high expectations regarding clarifying and using new vocabulary transfers into writing, where children are expected to be brave in their word choices and apply purposeful vocabulary when correctly applying grammatical skills or new punctuation.  

By the time children leave Priory Primary School they will be able to: 

• read easily, fluently and with good understanding 

• develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information 

• understand what it means to predict, clarify, question and summarise and draw on these when faced with a new or unfamiliar text 

• acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language 

• appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage 

• write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences 

• use discussion in order to learn; they should be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas 

• are competent in the arts of speaking and listening, making formal presentations, demonstrating to others and participating in debate