‘Reading is power and the key to unlocking our curriculum and preparing students for life-long success and happiness’

At Ark Alexandra we love reading. Our staff and students are readers, and the libraries are at the heart of our school community. We prioritise reading in every classroom and share the joy of reading together in our form time. We recognize that the skill of reading is hard and so support all students to purposefully develop their readings skills to read fluently. Nurturing fluent readers who can independently comprehend a wide range of texts is crucial for students to appreciate the central role of reading to acquiring knowledge and setting them up for excellence in future learning. Equally important, reading different texts develops students’ skills in self-reflection and understanding different opinions and interpretations. In this way reading enhances and expands students’ empathy and self-awareness, encouraging them to be kinder people and develop faith in their own opinions and abilities.

Policy

Please view our Reading Policy at https://arkalexandra.org/our-policies

Principles

The following principles underpin our beliefs about reading and influence our approach to reading at Ark Alexandra and across all areas of our work:

1. Reading is celebrated, enjoyed and discussed by all staff and students;
2. Reading is embedded across the curriculum and prioritised to allow all students to access the full curriculum offer;
3. Children are taught to be metacognitive readers so that they can unlock challenging texts and independently read for meaning;
4. A rigorous and sequential approach to the intervention reading curriculum develops student fluency, confidence and enjoyment in reading (for the lowest 20% of readers)
5. All children read at their chronological age level by the end of year 9.
6. All teachers are teachers of reading, regardless of the subject they teach and high quality training is in place for staff to ensure teachers are experts in the teaching of reading.