Literacy
Policy

Version |  September 2023

Our Literacy Intent

The development of an effective literacy skillset - speaking, listening, reading and writing - is fundamental to the achievement of a rich and fulfilling life. These skills are used daily to communicate with the world around us. The more successful we are at these skills, the more we can succeed in life.

Literacy skills must be constantly practised to improve student’s understanding, self-esteem and motivation, as well as increased attainment. It is our aim at Co-op Academy Swinton that all our students can access the full curriculum offer by developing their accuracy and automaticity of reading, subject specific and conversational vocabulary and confidence and precision when speaking.  At the heart of our whole school approaches to reading and literacy are the whole-school curriculum principles and a desire to remove barriers for our disadvantaged cohort

Rationale

Co-op Academy Swinton’s literacy policy has been informed by recent research led by The Education Endowment Foundation’s ‘Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools’, research endorsed by The National Literacy Trust. It is also informed by the work of Alex Quigley’s The Vocabulary Gap, Doug Lemov’s Reading Reconsidered and Daniel Willingham’s The Reading Mind.

Priorities for this year:

•        Provide high quality literacy interventions for struggling students

•        Prioritise ‘disciplinary literacy’ across the curriculum

•        Provide targeted vocabulary instruction in every subject

•        Exploration through literacy

Provide high quality literacy interventions for struggling students

This area focuses on the use of appropriate, meaningful and measurable intervention to improve literacy skills, vocabulary, comprehension and decoding skills. In order for all students to achieve their potential, intervention strategies must be used to improve literacy skills and ensure that all students can make significant progress, regardless of their entry point to the secondary phase.

It is our mission for all students to leave the Academy with a reading age in line with their chronological age. All students entering in year 7 at below expected reading age get immediate intervention in small group settings.

All students complete an Access Reading Test (ART) which gives us a Normed Referenced Standardised Score (NRSS). This is an age-standardised score that converts a student's “raw score” to a standardised score which takes into account the student's age in years and months and gives an indication of how the student is performing relative to a national sample of students of the same age.

The NRSS is used to assign a reading intervention wave:

Those students who are identified as struggling readers will receive will receive an individualised programme based upon their Normed Referenced Standardised Score (NRSS). Students with a score of below 85 will receive intensive reading intervention in a small group format alongside the use of the IDL Literacy Intervention which is a speaking-computer based multi-sensory system which supports struggling readers. Students with a score of 85-97 will receive intervention using the Reading Plus program that will take place during STRIVE time twice a week. Reading Plus features an assessment placement test which gives granular data to help understand pupil literacy needs and the most suitable strand of the intervention package. Students are measured on engagement with reading, vocabulary and comprehension to give an overall reading proficiency score. Students select extracts or texts to read based on their own interests and work their way through the course. The choice of reading material makes the programme appealing as students have more ownership over the order in which they complete the course. Reading Plus includes texts of varying difficulty levels up to the academic reading ability of a KS5 student.

Students are regularly tested to see progress and all students will complete a second ART test towards the end of the academic year. Classroom teachers will have access to the NRSS on the critical data spreadsheets that are used across the Academy. They will receive regular CPD on how to support and promote reading in their subject area.

 Prioritise ‘disciplinary literacy’ across the curriculum

Literacy is not a bolt-on. Instead we think hard about what it means to be literate in each discipline/subject and build the necessary skills into our curriculum. Disciplinary literacy covers the academic reading, writing, spoken and multi-modal skills used within each subject area. Understanding disciplinary literacy essentially means mapping, understanding and supporting the individual needs for literacy within each curriculum area. Unlike primary study, secondary education is delivered by a range of teachers with different subject specialisms, many of whom are not experts in reading or literacy. Disciplinary literacy seeks to help classroom teachers understand the needs within each subject area, the crossover between subject areas and how literacy can best be supported across the curriculum.

Expectations:

•Heads of department will work with departments to consider:

             -What are the unique reading skills in my subject?

             -What are we reading?

             -When do we read it?

             -How do we read it?

•        ‘Read like a ……’ posters produced by every subject area e.g. read like a Geographer

•        High quality texts weaved through the curriculum and added to medium term plans

•        Consistent approach to reading in classrooms- activating prior knowledge, identifying challenging vocabulary to teach, modelling fluent reading and summarising

•        Modelling of fluency using the ‘I, We, You’ model

Provide targeted vocabulary instruction in every subject

Research suggests that students need to understand 95% or more of the words on a page to have a strong comprehension of a text. Even students with comprehension as high as 90% can struggle to decipher or ascertain the meaning of the unknown 10% of words on a page.

Why is vocabulary important?

• Becker (1977) identified poor vocabulary knowledge as the primary cause of academic failure of disadvantaged students.
• Children from a low socioeconomic background typically have a smaller vocabulary than children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, and that gap widens as children get older, Beals (1997), (Sutton Trust Report 2010)
• Disadvantaged students show declining reading comprehension as their limited vocabulary constrains what they can understand from texts, Chall et al. (1990)

While the teaching of subject specific vocabulary is important, it is of equal importance to develop students’ spoken or written vocabulary to include more complex but still common words. This ensures that students will have a proficient understanding of most exam questions, ‘articles, documents and other types of media. Vocabulary is a broad topic that can be broken down into the following categories:

• Tier 1 vocabulary

The most basic every day words, most notably simple nouns, connectives, sight words, adjectives and early reading words such as ‘girl’, ‘dog’, ‘and’, ‘it’ and ‘good’. Where students struggle with tier 1 vocabulary, they will need wave 1 intervention

• Tier 2 vocabulary

Vocabulary used by more mature and proficient readers/writers. These words are commonly known and understood by native speakers of a language but are complex enough to require explicit instruction e.g. Required, beneficial, maintain and approximate.

• Tier 3 vocabulary

 The subject specific vocabulary taught within a specific discipline. These words are complex and, outside of an academic environment, rarely utilised, therefore these words need to be explicitly taught within subjects. Tier 3 vocabulary can include words such as ‘trigonometry’, ‘iambic pentameter’, ‘osmosis’ and ‘omniscient’.

Expectations:

• KS3 form tutors deliver tier 2 vocabulary instruction once a week in STRIVE time. Students are regularly quizzed on word definitions and have opportunities to use the words in context
• Tier 3 vocabulary is listed on medium term plans and is on knowledge organisers with definitions for each topic
• Tier 3 vocabulary is explicitly taught and practised in lessons
• Departments to develop a consistent approach to tier 3 vocabulary instruction

Exploration through literacy

Exploration through literacy is the opportunity to see the world through literature. It is a focus not just on the number of books in our libraries or classrooms, but the variety, how appropriate these choices are, how engaging they are and how much they open the eyes of our students to the world around them. Co-op Academy Swinton serves a diverse community in terms of local culture and heritage. We believe that all students should have the opportunity to see their culture represented in the books they read.

Reading for pleasure has been associated not only with increases in reading attainment but also with writing ability, text comprehension, grammar, breadth of vocabulary, attitudes, self-confidence as a reader, pleasure in reading in later life, general knowledge, a better understanding of other cultures, community participation, a greater insight into human nature and decision-making (Clark & Rumbold, 2006; Howard, 2011; Wigfield & Guthrie, 1997). A recent government report highlights this, noting that once decoding has been mastered, mature reading skills are ‘b are ‘best developed by instilling in children a love of literature’ (Reading: The Next Steps; DfE, 2015, p. 4).

KS3 pupils follow a ‘read aloud’ curriculum once a week where their form tutors read aloud to them and thereby model fluency and improve their reading comprehension skills:

‘The act of reading aloud to the class from a challenging text can support the development of the children’s spoken language comprehension and therefore contribute to their reading comprehension skills’ EEF 2020

Books are chosen to be age appropriate but challenging. The books we choose also compliment the English curriculum. Links can be made to the knowledge we want them to know and remember. We aim to build on the cultural capital of our students, discussing, describing and showing them places they may never have visited or even heard of.

Alongside the reading aloud teachers use reciprocal reading strategies of predict, clarify, question and summarise to check student’s understanding and engagement with the text.

Expectations:

• Read aloud curriculum once a week in STRIVE time

                     -Teacher to read aloud with enthusiasm and passion

                     -Students to follow the text being read using a ruler

                     -Teacher uses recommended reciprocal reading strategies

                     - Students complete a 5-10 minute written task

• KS3 and KS4 extracurricular book club offered
• New and challenging texts available from the library
• Shared reading list of challenging texts for all year groups available and advertised on social media
• Fortnightly library lesson for KS3 in which reading is supported by guided tasks that allow students to predict, wonder and reflect on their chosen fiction texts