English

Reading

At Monkspath School, reading is at the heart of our curriculum. We believe that reading unlocks learning across all subjects and opens doors to lifelong opportunities. From the earliest stages, we nurture a love of reading and develop strong comprehension and literacy skills.

We teach reading through a range of strategies, including VIPERS, which help children develop key skills in Vocabulary, Inference, Prediction, Explanation, Retrieval, and Sequencing/Summarising. Our Book Spine forms the foundation of our curriculum, guiding the texts we use to teach comprehension, grammar, writing, and to inspire a love of reading.

Children have access to a wide variety of texts, including our non-fiction library, which supports reading for information and builds knowledge across the curriculum. We also use Bug Club to structure early reading and comprehension, ensuring a consistent and engaging approach.

Regular class story time and opportunities for children to explore their own reading interests are built into the school day. In Key Stage 2, we set reading challenges to inspire and motivate children to read widely and often.

Phonics

We use Bug Club Phonics as our systematic synthetic phonics programme, starting in Early Years and continuing through to the end of Key Stage 1. This scheme provides a clear, structured approach to teaching phonics, supporting children to decode words, build fluency, and develop confidence in reading.

Bug Club also supports reading practice at home, with online access for families to engage in their child’s learning. As children progress, the Bug Club reading scheme continues to support their development, reinforcing phonics and comprehension skills.

We place a strong emphasis on reading for pleasure, recognising its role in building life skills, cultural capital, and the ability to access the whole curriculum. Reading empowers children to become independent learners and thoughtful members of society.

Grammar

Grammar is taught in context through the high-quality texts we read and through visual literacy approaches. This ensures that children understand how grammar works in real writing and can apply it effectively in their own work. Our teaching follows the National Curriculum expectations for each year group, ensuring progression and clarity.

Writing

Writing at Monkspath School is taught through a wide range of fiction and non-fiction texts, as well as through other areas of the curriculum such as science, history, and geography. Children learn to write for different purposes and audiences, covering a variety of genres including narrative, explanation, persuasion, and report writing.

We focus on developing children’s skills in planning, drafting, editing, and publishing, helping them to become confident and capable writers. Writing is closely linked to reading, with texts used as models to inspire and guide children’s own work.

Outcomes and Expectations

Our approach to English ensures that children leave Monkspath School with strong literacy skills, ready for the next stage of their education. We are proud of our outcomes, which reflect the high standards we set and the support we provide for every child to succeed.

Our curriculum meets all statutory requirements set out in the National Curriculum for England, and is tailored to meet the needs of our diverse and vibrant school community.

Supporting Every Learner

We believe that a positive attitude towards speaking, reading and writing is key to success. Our classrooms are inclusive, supportive, and engaging, where mistakes are seen as opportunities to learn and every child is encouraged to persevere and take pride in their progress.

We recognise that every child learns differently. Our teachers use a range of strategies and resources to support all learners, including those who need extra help and those who are ready for greater challenge. We also work closely with parents to support learning at home and celebrate progress.

Strong Outcomes

We are proud of our consistently strong outcomes in mathematics:

• Our pupils make excellent progress in mathematics as they move through school.
• Our pupils perform exceptionally well in the Year 1 Phonics Screen.
• At the end of Key Stage 2, our outcomes in reading and writing are above national averages, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach and the hard work of our pupils and staff.

Curriculum

Please click on the links below for curriculum information.

Early Years (Little Chimps - Reception) Book Spine

Years 1- 6 Book Spine