Our school is in a little village of just under 400 residents in Cornwall. It’s a rural area, surrounded by farms and hamlets, with a dispersed population and low birth rates. Like many other village schools with less than one-form entry, it is normal for us to have mixed-age classes.
This can be problematic when children must follow a hierarchical learning programme. However, at our school, where we have 72 pupils across seven year groups, we have revolutionised our reading curriculum to address this.
We now split children into stage-based, rather than age-based, teaching groups, to work through our internally designed reading progression programme. We have been running this programme for just over a year, first focusing on implementing a new systematic synthetic phonics programme in 2023, then developing our approach to cover reading fluency across all year groups.
Within our trust, we have developed a “Phonics to Fluency” programme, ensuring that children still develop their phoneme-grapheme correspondence for reading accuracy, whilst practising the skills of reading automaticity and prosody. This programme has now been running for six months, incorporating children from Year 2 to Year 4.
We prioritise reading fluency, aiming for all pupils to achieve above-expected reading levels by the end of primary school. Our approach emphasises building on systematic synthetic phonics from the start of Reception and takes pupils on a journey through to fluency in Year 6.
A ‘stage not age’ approach to reading
We pledge that our youngest pupils will hear and participate in a thousand stories, rhymes, poems or songs every year. To deliver this, all of our staff are trained in phonics and reading instruction, with coaching at least once a fortnight.
And we really mean it when we say that everyone is trained in reading instruction: a secretary in one of our schools stepped in recently and delivered a phonics lesson after the teacher was called away.
More on literacy:
The first 45 minutes of each day are dedicated to reading instruction. We teach small cohorts of between five and 10 children still developing fluency, based on their stage, as this uses staff time most effectively. But we also make time to practise with individuals as needed. This allows us to have groups that are focused on particular sounds working together every morning.
For stage-based teaching to work, you need to know your pupils extremely well. Thankfully, having small classes enables us to have the time to truly understand our pupils’ needs. Every three to four weeks we assess pupils’ reading capability and what sounds they can accurately record. We then adjust based on this: whether they need more support, fast-track tutoring or exposure to a higher level of texts.
We use the Talk Through Stories programme as a core part of our English curriculum, identifying the tier 2 vocabulary that we want children to learn and using books with those words in for teaching opportunities.
Across three of our schools, we have selected a core reading spine of high-quality texts, which are rotated between them (it would be difficult for any one of these small schools to invest in all of those texts themselves).
A few years ago a child joined us in Year 5 as a non-reader. We started teaching them phonics-based reading instruction from their first day with us. When they left us for secondary school, they were reading.
Our approach to stage-based reading instruction is comprehensive, research-based and pupil-centred, with a strong emphasis on encouraging a love of reading. And it’s clearly working: the majority of our Year 2 readers graduate from the phonics programme before the end of key stage 1.
In addition, over the past two years we’ve had 100 per cent of the children at Egloskerry Primary School passing their Year 1 phonics assessments. Our goal now is for 100 per cent of pupils to gain the expected standard in reading at the end of key stage 2 and, more importantly, 100 per cent of our children to have a passion for reading.
Lynsey Slater is principal at Egloskerry Primary School and primary director at Athena Learning Trust
