Literacy is truly at the heart of learning. It is extremely important that all our students maintain a love of reading and writing throughout their time with us at West Hill School. Reading especially helps to improve concentration, reduce stress, increase vocabulary and develop clarity of thinking. The habits we want to instil in our students are lifelong and enriching.

Reading for Pleasure

Encouraging children to read for pleasure is evidence-based to aid progress across the entire school curriculum and continues to benefit children into adulthood. 

To support our students to read for pleasure, we have a well-stocked school library with over 4000 books. Our school library is a great place for our students to develop their love of reading and is open before school, breaktime, lunchtime and after school. We celebrate important movements during the year, such as Black History month and Pride month. We want reading to be something to educate, to nurture and, most importantly, to enjoy.

To promote reading across our school, all form groups have a fiction book they read aloud as a class during form time. We have scheduled library sessions throughout the year for every form group and a weekly Recommended Reads promotion. Each student also has access to our online library where they can browse available stock, reserve books for loaning, complete and read book reviews and search our stock for subject-specific titles.

To provide extra guidance for all our students, we have produced Reading Canons for each year group as well as recommended reading lists for each key stage, which are age-appropriate books that will be informative and stimulating.

Please see below our recommended reading lists for each key stage and our Reading Canons for each year group.

 

 

Assessments

To make sure we know the reading ability of all our students, we conduct regular testing on vocabulary, inference, speed, comprehension and phonics. All of this data is collected and analysed, so that we can find any students who need the extra support of our intervention programmes.

Intervention

We use Rapid Plus to help our Year 7 and Year 8 students, whilst Years 9 and 10 use a similar programme we have designed ourselves. We also offer Lexonik intervention, a phonics-based intervention to support those students who require fundamental skills development. Our success rate from intervention is extremely good and those students feel the benefits in all of their subjects.

Parent support

All parents/carers want to know how they can help at home. We are going to be launching a series of parent workshops aimed at supporting those parents/carers of students receiving intervention. Please see the supporting material from the EEF for additional guidance for all parents/carers.