Phonics

At Bishop Barrington, some of our students don’t have the basic skills of being able to read, which hinders their progress in all of their subject areas. It is therefore vital that we teach students the skills needed to access the curriculum but also access life after Bishop Barrington.

The Education Endowment Foundation found: “Phonics has a positive impact overall (+5 months) with very extensive evidence and is an important component of early reading skills, particularly for the children from disadvantaged backgrounds.”

“Fresh Start is a systematic synthetic phonics programme for struggling readers aged 9 – 13+. Pupils are taught at their challenge point, so they learn to read accurately and fluently in just 25 minutes a day.”

Fresh Start is for students who:

• are not yet reading age appropriately
• have missed schooling or are late arrivals into school
• are new to the UK education system
• are learning English as an additional language.”

The Department for Education, advised that students who need support with their reading at an older age, “schools might want to avoid SSP programmes specifically designed for younger pupils and consider age-appropriate lessons”. The Read, Write, Inc Fresh Start programme is specifically designed for secondary school students, with age appropriate texts to support this to allow students to read.

How Phonics: Read, Write, Inc Works at Bishop Barrington

Students complete a STAR reader test as a baseline assessment at the beginning of the academic year. Students who are identified as needing “urgent intervention” or “intervention” due to their reading age being significantly below their actual age, will be identified to take part in a phonics’ screening test.

If students require phonics’ intervention, students will then receive phonics’ lessons, which will be built into the curriculum. This will be a small group of students with one of our lead phonics’ teachers.

Students start at their level and work their way through the programme. There are 33 levels.

During phonics’ lessons, students will practise the sounds, complete a range of activities which allow students to practise the sounds and there are anthologies linked to each level to allow students to practise reading, but reading a text at their level.