Our Intent, Implementation and Impact Statement 

Intent 

At Morven Park Primary School, we are passionate about ensuring all children become confident and enthusiastic readers and writers. We believe that phonics provides the foundations of learning to make the development into fluent reading and writing easier. Through daily, systematic, and consistent high quality phonics teaching, children learn to segment words to support their spelling ability and blend sounds to read words. To allow our children to develop a strong phonic awareness and effective blending and decoding skills, we have elected to use a synthetic phonics programme called Rocket Phonics. This story-based scheme supports our children in learning to read fluently so that they can put all their energy into comprehending what they read. We passionately believe in teaching children to read and write independently, enabling them to access a broad and exciting curriculum and ensuring they flourish as learners throughout their time at our school. These fundamental skills not only hold the keys to the rest of the curriculum but also have a huge impact on children’s self-esteem and future life chances.

Our intent is to enable children to read easily, fluently and with good understanding, develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information, and appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage.

Reading is at the heart of Morven Park's curriculum with reading skills developed across a range of subjects. Our curriculum has been developed to recognise the importance of reading in every aspect of daily life and to develop children’s love of reading. We recognise the importance of nurturing a culture where children love to read.

Implementation

This starts from the very beginning as children enter our EYFS, with nursery children supported to develop their early reading skills by learning about sounds and rhymes.  Phonics is taught daily in Reception and Key Stage 1, through the ‘Rocket Phonics’ scheme. Children are first taught to hear sounds and blend them together in sequence to make a word. We start with blending oral sounds, then progress to reading the letters and blending them together to read the word. As children build up their knowledge of sounds, they can apply their decoding skills to any unfamiliar word.

We ensure that pupils read books that are well matched to their increasing knowledge of phonics and ability to read ‘tricky words’ so, they experience early reading success and gain confidence that they are readers, as well as consolidating the learning that takes place in school. In EYFS and Key Stage 1, children take home a Rocket Phonics scheme reading book that is matched to their phonic ability.

As our pupils transition from 'learning to read', through the Rocket Phonics programme, to 'reading to learn', children participate in daily guided reading lessons. During guided reading, the focus is on children developing their reading skills and developing a deep understanding of the text that they are reading.

At Morven we ensure that our English teaching and learning provides many purposeful opportunities for reading, writing and discussion. We use a wide variety of experiences, quality, diverse texts to motivate and inspire our children.

We work hard to foster a love of reading within our pupils. We have reading for pleasure timetabled daily, teachers read out loud regularly to their class, and we ensure there are many opportunities for children to listen to and share a variety of stories and texts. Teaching a range of genres across the school, both in English and other curriculum areas; results in pupils being exposed to, and knowledgeable about, literary styles, authors, and genres. They can express preferences and give opinions, supported by evidence, about different texts. Reading events, throughout the year encourage and promote enjoyment and opportunities to develop lifelong learning.

Impact

Through the consistent, systematic, and daily teaching of the Rocket Phonics programme, our aim is for children to become fluent, confident readers by the end of Key Stage One.  Children are assessed at the end of Year 1 using a Government Statutory Assessment Tool known as the Phonics Screening Check. This screening check confirms whether the child has learnt phonic decoding to an appropriate standard and will identify sounds needing further support in Year 2. Those who do not pass the screening will have further support in Year 2, allowing for them to consolidate and develop their confidence, ready to retake the screening at the end of Year 2.

Through the Rocket Phonics programme, children will be equipped with the skills to decode unfamiliar words using strategies that they have been taught in their daily lessons.  This way, children can focus on developing their fluency and comprehension as they move through the school.

This leads to children taking pleasure in exploring the rich literary world around them with a firm phonic basis to support them, being able to read fluently both for pleasure and to further their learning.