Author: sictadmin

English at Overdale CP School

In the Teaching of Phonics and Reading at Overdale CP School, children starting in Early Years Foundation Stage, follow the ‘Letters and Sounds’ phonics programme. This programme continues throughout KS1 and into KS2 where applicable. All Literacy is founded on the ability to read well. We operate a book banding reading system using a variety of different schemes and genres. We firmly believe that reading should be an enjoyable experience. In Early Years we develop our first partnerships with parents and other adults – we want children to see that reading isn’t just something that happens at school, but is part of everyday life. In school, we provide a rich collection of books and reading resources. Children read in a variety of ways, exclusively as individuals, as part of a guided group and then as confidence increases as independent readers. At all stages we ensure children bring their books home. We also access public libraries as a great place for children to widen their reading experience. Visits are made to Scarborough Library and we provide a computerised library of our own.

Overdale’s English curriculum is driven by imagination. Activities and thematic units of work are designed to let students explore and escape from the ordinary and to project themselves into invented, unfamiliar or fictional experiences. Learning is led by the chance to be creative.

Strengths of the curriculum:

• Leaders and governors focus on consistently improving English, this means that at the end of KS2, outcomes showed significant improvement in both attainment and progress
  · In KS1 Phonics percentages for children attaining the expected standard in Y1 have dratiscally improved since 2014 Ofsted outcomes – moving from 28% (2014) to 83% (2017) meeting the national standard for the last three years.
  · Rapid progress throughout Early Years has been a direct result of targeted daily focus phonics teaching and talk for writing activities, thus ensuring early writing outcomes have improved.
  · Pupils are helped to understand where their strengths and areas for development in English lie as a result of assessment for learning and next steps, this ensures that gaps are closed for all groups of pupils
  · In line with the school development plan, we are assessing, tracking and working with those children identified with a language need therefore enabling them to become effective communicators.
  · Pupils are helped to develop a fluid cursive handwriting style, because of the importance placed on presentation and formation of cursive letters from Nursery to year 6.

 Areas for development:
· Progress for reading at the end of Key Stage Two is not yet 0 or above, this means that some groups of pupils (boys and SEND) are not making expected or above progress
· Inconsistencies in SPAG teaching and expectations are resulting in children achieving lower than National % at the end of Key Stage Two.
· Spelling of the national curriculum word list and high frequency words needs to be a priority across the whole of the school, so that results improve at the end of Key Stage Two.
· We still need to monitor progress and attainment in Phonics to ensure all children make expected or above progress from Nursery to the end of Key Stage One.

 Intended actions:

• To place reading and books at the centre of the curriculum and monitor the impact this has on improving outcomes for all pupils and closing the gap between them.
  · In order to ensure that standards in attainment are closer to or meet national at KS2 we will rigorously monitor the quality of learning, pupils’ progress and attainment across English.
  · All teachers will engage parents in their child’s learning around SPAG and reading to support improved outcomes for all groups of children.
  · In order to ensure spelling is a priority throughout school we will use dictation passages regularly to check children’s progress with high frequency and national curriculum word list spellings. This will be monitored through book scrutiny and learning walks.
  · Working alongside the assessment subject leader to analyse trends in the data for groups of children and implementing relevant actions to address barriers to learning.

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