Intent, Implementation, and Impact 

English – Reading Curriculum Statement 

 

Intent

At St. John’s Primary School, our curriculum is designed with reading as a priority. We want our children to develop a love for reading. We strive to ensure pupils at St. John’s Primary School can:

• Confidently and fluently read with understanding
• Develop an enjoyment or reading with a love of books
• Develop a wide and varied vocabulary
• Read a wide range of texts and genres 

Implementation

The teaching of reading begins when children start in Early Years at St. John’s with Phonics. We follow a synthetic phonics programme: Little Wandle. Children are taught phonics daily and, in this lesson, they participate in speaking, listening, and spelling activities linked to the sound they are learning. If there are children who are not secure in their decoding skills by the end of Key Stage 1, children will continue to access the phonics programme into Year 3 and beyond with 1:1 Sessions to address any gaps.

 

Once decoding has been successful, children are then able to develop their comprehension skills so that they can read age-appropriate texts with fluency and understanding. At St. John’s, we use age-appropriate texts for 1 hour comprehension sessions on a weekly basis. This offers children to read a wide variety of text types and engage with wider issues. We focus on the main VIPERS skills (Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval and Summarise or Sequence) to ensure pupils are exposed and are familiar with a broad range of comprehension style questions.

In addition to this, at St. John’s we recognise and value the importance of reading aloud to our pupils. Instilling a love of reading, teaching staff ensure that a high-quality text is read aloud to pupils for 20 minutes, daily. This can expand children’s vocabulary, build self-confidence, and helps children to make sense not only of the world around them, but also people. Year 6 children create Reading buddies’ with our younger children to allow them to share texts with one another.

We have a library rich in engaging texts which dive our school’s passion for embedding a love of reading. We not only want our pupils to ‘read’ but enjoy reading so they have the chance to explore and ‘escape’.

Intended Impact

At St. John’s Primary School, we will see success in reading through the enjoyment and love of reading. Our pupils will be confident in discussing the books they have read and love with both staff, and their peers. We will monitor the impact through discussion with colleagues, children, and parents, learning walks, book looks and data.

St. John's Library 

Our school library is a vibrant and welcoming space, rich in a diverse range of texts to inspire a love of reading in all our pupils. From classic literature and modern fiction to non-fiction, poetry, and multicultural stories, the library offers something for every interest and reading level. It supports not only reading for pleasure but also research and independent learning, helping children to broaden their vocabulary, deepen their understanding, and develop a lifelong love of books.