At Horton St Michael’s CE Academy, it is our vision to create a community where children can express themselves and communicate confidently with others, developing their character and enabling them to flourish together. We aim to develop a lifelong love and passion for reading and writing by exposing children to a wide range of quality authors and genres.
English and Literacy contribute to the whole school curriculum by developing the abilities of our children to speak, listen, read and write for a wide range of purposes and audiences, using language to learn and communicate ideas, viewpoints and feelings confidently.
The children in our school are taught in safe, secure and stimulating environments, enabling them all to achieve their fullest potential. Every child will be revered and respected as part of our school family and loved and valued as one of God’s children.
Children who read regularly, or are read to regularly, have the opportunity to open the doors to so many different worlds! More importantly, reading will give children the tools to become independent life-long learners. We believe that reading is a key skill and are dedicated to ensuring that by the time our children leave us, they are competent and confident readers, ready for the next stage of their life.
All members of our teaching team are exceedingly qualified to deliver: high-quality phonics sessions, guided reading sessions, one-to-one reading sessions, shared reading and interventions where necessary. All staff respond and adapt their teaching to ensure our children are stretched and challenged and to identify those children who may require additional support. Our school is well resourced with high-quality texts in a wide range of genres to ensure children have opportunities to apply and develop their reading skills. We regularly review and update our resources to ensure that they are appropriate for our current cohorts. Staff training is updated regularly.
The teaching of reading in our school is coherently planned through the use of a DfE approved systematic, synthetic phonics programme. Through a continuous cycle of planning, teaching and assessment we support the individual learning journeys of all children.
Through the teaching of systematic, synthetic phonics, our aim is for our children to become fluent readers by the end of Key Stage One. This is evidenced through our phonics screening results in which our children always achieve highly. From this, we can focus on developing their fluency and comprehension as they move through the school. However, we firmly believe that reading is the key to all learning and so the impact of our reading curriculum goes beyond the results of the statutory assessments. We promote reading for pleasure as part of our reading curriculum. Children speak extremely positively about reading and enjoy reading as part of their daily lives. They relish the idea of exploring a new book together or independently and understanding the importance of reading as a lifelong skill.
We develop a love for reading in a range of ways. These include:
Our reading scheme is fully book banded in line with age-related expectations (EYFS, KS1 and KS2) with explicit links to reading ages and phonics stages. We use the Collins ‘Big Cat’ Phonics for Little Wandle as the main reading scheme to teach, assess and engage our children as readers. However, this is supplemented with a range of other high-quality schemes that feed directly into our book banding system outlined above.
We hold regular family reading sessions. As a school, we believe support from home plays a vital part in ensuring that your child is a happy and confident reader and writer. Reading with your child and as a family is a special time, where you can foster a love for reading and books that can last a lifetime! These will provide you with the opportunity to read with your child(ren) and their friends. We will provide a wide range of books for you to choose from. Remember you can also bring your own favourite book(s) from home to share with your child(ren). The children are also welcome to bring in their favourite books from home to share and read .
We welcomed local poet Andy Tooze to school. He inspired the children by sharing some of his poems then supporting them to write and perform their own poetry.
Children earn wristbands by reading to, or in the presence of, an adult.
One read should last at least ten minutes and you can only get one read a day signed off.
We enjoyed a visit from Leek library. We were excited to find out that the library was free to join and also the huge range of books that they have. Lots of us already belong to the library and more of us are joining soon.
For World Book Day 2025 we were asked to come to school wearing costumes that used recycled materials.
Our theme was Paddington Bear. We had a picnic with marmalade sandwiches and we completed activities linked to the Paddington story.
Where appropriate, before children complete a written task, they are immersed in a practical activity. For example, children in Sycamore were looking at features of instruction writing.
They made their own jam sandwiches, then wrote instructions for someone else to follow. They loved eating their sandwiches!
SUAT supports and leads in the set-up of new academies joining the partnership. The services provided by the central support function cover both educational and non-educational support. In terms of educational support, SUAT is linked to the School of Education of Staffordshire University, which is an outstanding ITT provider.
