Reading
Reading at Ladybridge Primary School
The needs and backgrounds of our children, and the school’s core values underpin all areas of our curriculum.
INTENT
At Ladybridge, our shared reading curriculum is built around a sequence of high-quality, age-appropriate texts, utilising Literacy Counts’ Ready Steady Read Together units of learning. The core intent is that all pupils, from Year 2 to Year 6, regardless of their decoding ability, needs, or background, have equity of access to ambitious, diverse literature from exceptional authors. Through this inclusive, dynamic resource, we provide lessons that integrate metacognitive strategies, inspiring children and families to develop a lifelong love of reading for pleasure, knowledge, and information. We aim for all pupils to become fluent, confident readers who can successfully comprehend and analyse a wide range of texts across any subject, understanding more about the world in which they live through the knowledge they gain.
Through expert teacher modelling of expression, pace, and intonation, children learn how skilled readers bring meaning to a text, directly supporting their independent comprehension skills. This shared approach creates a language-rich environment for deep discussion, questioning, drama, and vocabulary exploration, which enhances essential oracy skills alongside textual understanding. We firmly recognise the vital role of parents and carers in this journey; by fostering a strong home-school partnership, we enable families to enhance the reading skills taught in the classroom using high-quality texts at home. We offer Phonics workshops and Early reading workshops to help parents understand how they can help their children to become confident and fluent readers. By the end of their time at primary school, our children read widely, often, and with total confidence, ensuring they meet—and where possible, exceed—National Curriculum expectations, leaving them exceptionally well-prepared for secondary education.
IMPLEMENTATION
The implementation of our early reading curriculum is grounded in high-quality, systematic synthetic phonics following the principles of the Read Write Inc. programme. In EYFS and Year 1, as well as for targeted children throughout Key Stage 2, pupils participate in daily phonics lessons tailored to their exact stage of development. To target teaching precisely, children are assessed regularly and placed into streamed groups that follow an agreed, sequential progression of new sounds. During the Summer Term of Year 1, all pupils undertake the statutory Phonics Screening Check to assess their ability to apply their decoding skills to both real and pseudo words. Any pupil who does not meet the expected standard receives immediate, targeted phonic interventions that continue across subsequent year groups to ensure they successfully acquire these critical literacy skills.
As pupils progress from Year 2 to Year 6, the shared reading curriculum transitions into a structured sequence of learning episodes using Literacy Counts’ Ready Steady Read Together units. This framework bridges the gap between mechanical decoding and deep comprehension by building lessons around engaging, vocabulary-rich, and ambitious texts. Vocabulary development is systematically supported in context, ensuring that every child, regardless of their decoding ability, can access high-quality literature. Each unit follows a consistent and explicit instructional cycle where teachers model reading fluency, appropriate pace, expression, intonation, and prosody to show children how skilled readers bring meaning to a text.
This shared approach creates a language-rich environment where comprehension is deepened through structured opportunities for retrieval practice, metacognitive strategy modelling, deep discussion, questioning, and drama. To ensure rigorous academic progression, the curriculum embeds interactive gamification elements and low-stakes quizzes linked directly to the Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 reading content. This builds comprehension skills, word reading, and grammatical terminology step-by-step. By maintaining this structured approach, the school ensures absolute consistency, clarity, and progression across all year groups, enabling all pupils to meet or exceed National Curriculum expectations.
IMPACT
The ultimate impact of our reading curriculum is the development of fluent, confident, and lifelong readers who possess a love for reading and have excellent communication skills. Through our structured approach, pupils of all abilities succeed across every reading lesson, demonstrating an ability to express clear personal preferences for authors, genres, and text types. In EYFS and KS1, the rigorous application of Read Write Inc. ensures that children build excellent word recognition skills and can deploy a range of strategies for decoding unfamiliar words without solely relying on phonics. As they progress through the school and engage with Ready Steady Read Together units, pupils accumulate a vast, advanced vocabulary and a deep knowledge of authors. By the time they complete their primary education, our pupils are highly proficient in reading widely and critically, leaving them well-prepared to read for meaning.
This reading framework has a rapid development of pupil oracy, which sits at the heart of our shared reading curriculum. Through regular opportunities for drama, questioning, and exploration, pupils develop into articulate communicators who can confidently verbalise their thinking and justify their ideas. This emphasis on oracy enhances their reading comprehension, allowing them to debate text meanings, talk collaboratively, and use sophisticated vocabulary in both spoken and written contexts.
Beyond the classroom, the impact of our curriculum is clearly visible in our strong home-school partnerships. Parents and carers gain an understanding of how to actively support both word reading and comprehension at home, resulting in high-quality, regular contributions to home-school reading records.
The percentage of pupils working at age-related expectations, as well as those working at Greater Depth within each year group, is consistently at least in line with national averages. Furthermore, our highly inclusive framework ensures that there are no significant gaps in the attainment or progress of different groups of pupils, ensuring that disadvantaged children, those with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), and pupils speaking English as an Additional Language (EAL) make rapid, sustained progress from their personal starting points.
For information on how to help you child read at home, click here.
Why not have a look at the recommended reading books for your child's year group in the links below?