Intent, Implementation, and Impact 

English – Reading Curriculum Statement 

Our curriculum is joined and sequenced properly to ensure that our children avoid gaps in their learning. A globally relevant curriculum helps to facilitate children with a strong world view. 

Intent 

At St. John’s RC Primary School, our curriculum is designed with reading as a priority. We want our children to develop a love for reading. We strive to ensure pupils at St. John’s Primary School can: 

• Confidently and fluently read with understanding  

• Develop an enjoyment or reading with a love of books 

• Develop a wide and varied vocabulary  

• Read a wide range of texts and genres  
   

Implementation 

The teaching of reading begins when children start in Early Years at St. John’s with phonics. We follow a synthetic phonics programme: Little Wandle. Children are taught phonics daily and, in this lesson, they participate in speaking, listening, and spelling activities linked to the sound they are learning. If there are children who are not secure in their decoding skills by the end of Key Stage 1, children will continue to access the phonics programme into Year 3 with 1:1 Sessions to address any gaps.  

Once decoding has been successful, children are then able to develop their comprehension skills so that they can read age-appropriate texts with fluency and understanding. At St. John’s, we use age-appropriate texts for 1 hour comprehension sessions on a weekly basis from Literacy Shed Plus. This offers children to read a wide variety of text types and engage with wider issues. We focus on the main VIPERS skills (Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval and Summarise or Sequence) to ensure pupils are exposed and are familiar with a broad range of comprehension style questions. 

In addition to this, at St. John’s we recognise and value the importance of reading aloud to our pupils. Instilling a love of reading, teaching staff ensure that a high-quality text is read aloud to pupils for 20 minutes, daily. This can expand children’s vocabulary, build self-confidence, and helps children to make sense not only of the world around them, but also people. Year 6 children create Reading buddies’ with our younger children to allow them to share texts with one another.  

Our children are continually developing and showcasing their love for reading at St. John’s. Children from Years 1 to 6 can take part in the St. John’s ‘Reading Raffle’. We expect our children’s love of reading to expand across home learning, therefore, if their reading diary is signed by an adult at home daily, the child can receive 1 raffle ticket each day. These will be put into a post-box and drawn at the end of each half term for the chance to win a prize! 

We have a library rich in engaging texts which dive our school’s passion for embedding a love of reading. We not only want our pupils to ‘read’ but enjoy reading so they have the chance to explore and ‘escape’.  

Intended Impact  

At St. John’s RC Primary School, we will see success in reading through the enjoyment and love of reading. Our pupils will be confident in discussing the books they have read and love with both staff, and their peers. We will monitor the impact through discussion with colleagues, children, and parents, learning walks, book looks and data.