Literacy is an essential life skill for maximising our students’ academic achievement, employability, and life experiences. At Leigh Academy Minster, every teacher is a teacher of Literacy. The Literacy curriculum aims to equip students with the knowledge, skills and experiences which will enable them to participate actively in the world around them. We strive to develop the whole person and broaden students’ horizons through building confidence and skill in manipulating the English language and its grammar in a variety of contexts.
Our Strategies for Supporting Literacy
Our approach to supporting literacy development covers whole academy strategies, large scale interventions, and small scale interventions. Our goal is to ensure that students are able to develop the core literacy skills required to successfully engage with the curriculum as a whole.
Pillars of Literacy
To address the literacy needs of our students, we focus on six key strategies across the curriculum. These six pillars encompass strategies that are deemed the most essential to the supporting literacy in every subject:
- Know the Students – resources will be provided to staff to more easily identify their students and their literacy needs;
- Modelling Language – teachers modelling language in lessons, opportunities to talk with peers;
- Dual Coding/Visual Cues – the use of graphic organisers and images to support learning;
- Key Vocabulary – access to glossaries, identification of key words, word walls;
- Scaffolding Writing – sentence starters, substitution tables, whole text guides or proformas;
- Peer/Self Assessment – students need the tools to be able to find and correct errors in their own and others’ work.
Literacy Marking Codes
All staff and students in the academy use universal marking codes when proofreading for literacy across all subjects. These codes were chosen in consultation with all faculties.
Sparx Reader
All students have access to Sparx Reader, with this diagnostic tool made possible via the provision of a 1:1 Chromebook device for each student. Sparx Reader provides students with a range of personalised texts to meet their interests and reading levels. To gauge a student’s understanding of the text, Sparx Reader, requires the student to answer a series of questions as they progress through the text, giving staff the ability to monitor student engagement and reading development, with Sparx Reader providing an initial screening for students current reading levels prior to additional diagnostic testing.
New Group Reading Testing (NGRT)
Selected students in Year 7-11 will test their reading ages three times across a year to monitor and assess progress. Individual and small group literacy interventions will then be established to support the student(s) development of their literacy skills.
Knowledge Organisers and Disciplinary Literacy
Students use Knowledge Organisers in all of their subjects. Using these, pupils prepare for lessons by learning specialist vocabulary, spellings and definitions of new words in advance. In all subjects, pupils are tested sometimes daily, often weekly and always termly on their retention.
Our Academy’s spiral curriculum is explicitly planned to provide students with opportunities to learn disciplinary literacy across all subjects, with this regularly assessed through formative and summative assessment opportunities. .
Reading and Cultural Festivals
All tutor groups will participate in a weekly reading session, with specific texts for each year group. Texts will be selected as part of our student voice programme and will be focussed on developing a students enjoyment of reading.
Every year the academy takes part in festivals and events that celebrate the importance of literacy and cultural diversity.
The Academy Library
Our library is the heart of the academy, as a centre for both developing literacy and improving research skills. Every student in Year 7-9 receives a lesson in the library once a week, and the library is open to all students during break, lunch, and after school. The space is a brand new addition for Leigh Academy Minster, and has been purpose built to provide our students with a high quality space that develops their love of reading, literacy and a range of co-curricular activities.
The library collection is over 4000 books and continuing to grow, with a range of both fiction and non-fiction texts. At the academy we place a large importance on the development of students’ first language, along with English, so we have a Foreign Language section with a number of titles.
In addition to this, research by the National Literacy Trust has stated that one third of school age children do not see themselves in the books they read. This has led to a targeted expansion of books in our collection by a range of authors from different backgrounds and cultures.