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At Cardinal Heenan, we ensure that every pupil becomes a confident reader, no matter their starting point with us. We teach every pupil the skills they need to become fluent readers, and we make sure that this is a positive, confidence-building experience.

Intervention (Additional, short burst teaching sessions)

Our Reading Provision Pathway ensures that every pupil progresses on their reading journey. Our robust procedures for identifying readers who are behind allows for immediate access to a bespoke, time limited and successful intervention.

When accessing the Reading Provision Pathway, no student will leave our school unable to read fluently and accurately. The Reading Provision Pathway can be started at any point depending on where a pupil is on their reading journey.

Read Write Inc. Fresh Start is a proven phonics intervention for students in KS3 and KS4 who have slipped through the reading net. Our pupils make as much as two years’ progress in just two months.

The Amber Reading Development Course is a highly successful programme developed by School Improvement Liverpool and is designed to improve the automaticity, vocabulary, pronunciation, reading speed and confidence of readers not yet at expected reading age.

Our Reading Hour

At KS3, all pupils participate in one reading lesson each week developed to explicitly teach the skills of reading. The scheme of work is comprised of an anthology which celebrates high quality texts chosen for their literary value; broad range of voices; range of forms and genres; appropriate level of challenge for the year group; and how they complement and enhance our wider curriculum.

Each term the texts are explored through one of our lenses, Respect, Believe, Achieve. We use Our Reading Hour to explicitly teach effective reading strategies to students using the Reciprocal Reading Model which is then mirrored across the curriculum:

Reading Across the Curriculum

At Cardinal Heenan, every teacher is a teacher of Reading. We are all committed to equipping every pupil with the skills, knowledge and confidence they need to become confident readers who read to learn.

An energised verbal environment is the basis of every students’ literacy experience within all lessons. This is established through deliberate whole school habits for explicit vocabulary and spelling teaching; I say you say, morphology & etymology, clarifying, in a sentence, RAG word walls, Speed Sound Charts, Freya Models. Our pupils value time to practice before reading aloud, which we do through teacher reads, choral reading, echo reading, reading in partners. Notably, when our students read aloud, they do so with confidence, expression and flair.

In addition to the Shakespeare, Poetry and other highly esteemed texts studied as part of our KS3 English Curriculum, our pupils enjoy two Novel Studies in full each year. The scheme has been curated with incremental challenge in mind so that each novel is well pitched to the year group studying it. As is evident in the dialogue below, these novels are sparking widespread enthusiastic conversations about books between teachers and pupils.

“Ghost boys opened my eyes to discrimination in different places across the world. It’s actually good, you know, read it.” Bobby McKeown, Year 9.

“Studying the class novels has reignited a love of reading for both pupils and staff! Pupils have enjoyed the opportunity to read stories rich in language, enhancing their own knowledge and skills as both readers and writers.” Miss Griffiths, KS3 English Lead.

Sparx Reader

We strive to eliminate barriers to getting started with reading. All of our pupils have 24/7 access to a bespoke and diverse online library via Sparx Reader. There is an obligation that this is accessed weekly as part of KS3 homework, and daily access is encouraged. Through Sparx Reader, the ‘heavy lifting’ is done for the pupils - through choice architecture for example - so that they can get straight into appropriate books and practise reading attentively and with care.

Sparx personalises each pupil’s home learning, offering four e-books for them to read independently matched to their level. Pupils are encouraged to read carefully and are rewarded for accuracy in their reading, not speed. After they read a section of their e-book, pupils will be told to stop and answer a series of multiple-choice questions to check their understanding. They earn Sparx Reader Points (SRP) based on their reading accuracy.

Sparx Reader is a way to: develop pupils’ intrinsic motivation and heighten their self-efficacy; reduce the cognitive effort involved in developing a solid reading habit; and build our pupils’ confidence as they learn to attend and concentrate for sustained periods of time on their reading.

For more information on how to support your child with Sparx Reader, please visit https://sparxreader.com/parents/ or contact their English Teacher who will be happy to help.