Reading at TLA

Why is reading important?

All staff at Temple Learning Academy believe that reading profoundly affects our students’ lives, offering them a vehicle to store and share the essential knowledge of their cultures. We believe that beyond powerful personal experiences, reading is the master skill of school, unlocking the academic curriculum for all pupils at our academy so we all need to nurture our students’ reading will and skill.

We know that for many school children in England, their reading ability is steadily improving, however, there is a reading gap that needs to be closed urgently. We know that children of all backgrounds (including multilingual students), who are read to regularly at home at the age of 5 perform better in maths, vocabulary, and spelling at age 16, as compared to those who do not read to at home. We know that the reading gap emerges early, before students attend school and it is worsening over time without targeted intervention. We believe that the act of daily reading matters. Students who are read to daily can hear up to a million more words than those who have not been read to. We have the understanding that the reading that our students undertake in school (as they progress through all key stages) is typically more complex and requires substantial background knowledge and reading skill.

How do we prioritise reading?

Throughout our academy, we promote and celebrate reading. Whether it is reading for pleasure, or reading for purpose, we model strong habits of reading to our students. Staff promote their own favourite reads to students and you will see this around the site. ​

We also work hard to ensure that reading is foregrounded within our curriculum. In Primary, we carefully map our key texts to ensure that they link to the curriculum learning and excite and inspire all learners. Treasure boxes for each class also provide a wide variety of texts which include the elements of the literary cannon, books that reflect our culture and diversity and texts from prior learning. In secondary, this is done first and foremost through the English curriculum with a carefully considered offer of modern and heritage reading experiences including poetry, drama, prose, speeches and non-fiction writers. 

• We promote the culture which respects and values reading
• We assess students’ reading skills regularly, using age appropriate assessment tools
• We know our student’s reading ability and adapt our teaching instruction appropriately.
• We use consistent approaches and provide our students with necessary lifelong skills
• We foster the love of reading through modelling reading in every lesson as appropriate
• We support our struggling readers by targeted intervention
• Staff have access to high quality reading CPD to deepen the understanding of reading development and how to teach reading in their classroom
• We support our KS3 and KS4 students by developing the disciplinary reading