We prioritise reading because it is an essential, enabling competence.
Being taught and supported to read well is part of our pupil entitlement. We believe, that aside from keeping our pupils safe, it’s the most important thing that we do.
Being able to read unlocks access to the wider school curriculum. Being able to read well mean that a young person has more choice and agency. Teaching pupils to read well is part of an education that prioritises fairness and social equity.
- Our school has a reading lead
- Our teachers and support staff are trained in teaching reading
- We assess pupils’ reading ages so we know when pupils might need more support
- We have embedded a strong culture of reading, including reading for pleasure
How can parents support reading?
- Encourage your child to read. We’d suggest at least 20 minutes a day.
- Both fiction and non-fiction texts are appropriate. This might be books, including graphic novels, magazines, newspapers or digital texts.
- Talk to your child about what they’re reading.
- Encourage your child to borrow books from the school library.
- Get your child had a library card so they can borrow books easily from your local library. This is normally free.
Reading in CAM schools
Our trust, The CAM Academy Trust has set an ambitious five-year strategy: CAM30. One of our goal areas is the ‘gift of reading’.
Our aim is for 90% of our young people to be able to read well by 2030.
As a trust we are driving this by:
- Having common reading assessments across all our schools
- Training all pupil-facing staff to be teachers of reading
- Having an expert reading lead in all our schools
- Providing high quality support for pupils that need it
- Embedding strong cultures of reading
- Offering a professional network for reading leads across our schools
Supporting Reading Development
These pages contain a guide to the eight stages of reading development and how to support your child. Each step has a description of that stage of reading as well as tips on how to support child’s reading development. It is important to remember that reading is a highly complicated skill, using multiple strands that come together to create a skilled reader, and each child will progress differently. This scale is simply a guide, and a child may progress in different areas at different rates.
The basics are – to make time for reading, model reading, and talk to your child about their reading. If you are unsure of which questions to ask please see the suggestions below.
The scales have been taken from The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education along with additional suggestions from the librarians, Mrs V Fielding White and Mrs D Payne.
| Area | Example Questions |
| Information Retrieval (checking they are understanding what’s on the page) | Where did …. go on this page?
Who are the characters we’ve met so far? What did this character do? What does this character say? |
| Inference (checking they are picking up on clues and reading beyond the text) | Why do you think the character did this?
How do you think the character is feeling at this point? Why do you think the character said this? How does this compare to how they were feeling earlier? |
| Predicting (trying to guess what’s going to happen in the future of the book) | What do you think will happen next?
How do you think this will make the character feel? How do you think it’s going to end? |
| Summarising (briefly saying what’s going on) | What’s happened so far?
What’s happened on this page? |
| Application (applying what’s going on in the story to themselves) | Can you relate to how this character is feeling?
Would you have made the same decision? Why/why not? Do you know anyone like that? |
| Synthesis (how well can they explain how the book fits in the wider categories) | What genre(s) does this book fit into?
How do you feel about the ending of the book? Would you change anything? Why? |
| Evaluation (allows them to work out what they like/don’t like each time) | How effective do you think the writing is? How would you compare this to….?
Could this happen in reality? |