At Hurst Green Church of England Primary School, we recognise the importance of equipping our children with literacy skills to prepare them for the future and we aspire for them to achieve excellence in reading and writing. We encourage our children to become active listeners who are confident, and have the skills, to speak aloud in a variety of contexts. As a school, we are passionate about books and together we promote a lifelong love of reading. This supports our children to become confident writers and ‘allows them to access the full curriculum on offer’ (Ofsted, 2019). We offer a language-rich learning environment and use carefully selected texts across a range of genres, immersing our children in quality literature at every opportunity: ‘The most important gift a school can give a child is the power to read.’ (Ofsted, Reading by six. How the best schools do it, 2009).

Please see below for further information about English at Hurst Green.

How do children learn phonics at Hurst Green?

Children in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 have structured phonics lessons each day.  We follow the validated ‘Twinkl’ phonics programme for teaching synthetic phonics, which has 6 different levels.
Generally:

• Nursery and Reception children cover Level 1-3 of the programme;
• Year 1 children cover 3-5; and
• In Year 2 and beyond, children finish Level 6 and move on to ‘Support for Spelling’ in KS2.

However, all children are different and we assess children regularly to see which phase they should be taught.  This may mean that they are taught by different teachers with a different group of children on some days to ensure their needs are being met and are being suitably challenged.

We use a variety of reading schemes including Project X that are carefully matched to the children’s phonics knowledge.