Literacy Across the Curriculum

At Accord Multi Academy Trust, we believe that good literacy skills are essential for all pupils. Without good literacy skills, pupils are held back at every stage of their life from health and wellbeing to employment and finance. We believe that every pupil, regardless of their ability or context should be supported to develop the very best literacy skills possible including becoming confident speakers, attentive listeners, fluent readers and skilled writers. We understand these skills are key not only to the academic success of our pupils across their curriculum, but more importantly to their future successes beyond education.

We strive to achieve the following:

Ensuring all pupils are supported to develop as critical thinkers, articulate speakers, fluent readers and skilled writers through our ‘Think It, Say It, Read It, Write It’ approach
Ensuring our approach is targeted as and when required and focuses on supporting pupils with lower literacy levels to ‘catch up’ with their peers
Ensuring that all teachers and support colleagues understand their role in supporting the development in literacy of all pupils
Ensuring that our policy and practice is evidence-based and that all teachers have access to high quality professional development opportunities to support them in their role.

Our literacy strategy is used in all lessons to support our pupils’ understanding, expression and articulation in both written and oral forms. It covers four main areas: ‘Think It’, ‘Say It’, ‘Read It’ and ‘Write It’.

Accord Literacy Strategy

Think It

The ‘Think It’ aspect of our strategy gives pupils time to think about what they are learning in an intelligent and informed way. Pupils are actively encouraged to carefully consider their thoughts and frame their answers before responding to questions. This approach helps pupils to organise and structure thoughts and ideas in a way which will support their quality of speech and writing. Pupils should be able to use the language of their curricula both precisely and coherently in order to respond to and build on their ideas constructively. 

Say It

The ‘Say It’ component of our approach encourages all curriculum areas to consider the vocabulary of each subject as a key component for underpinning high quality academic talk. A strong emphasis is placed on pupils using tier three vocabulary in their spoken language alongside a drive to ensure that pupils are supported to engage in high quality structured talk. This can involve strategies such as: 

Exploring tier three vocabulary by breaking down the etymology and phonetics of words by exploring suffixes and prefixes and making links to pupils’ prior knowledge of these
Offering sentence starters that insist on formal spoken responses
Offering Think It and Say it tasks whereby tier three vocabulary is used to support recall prior knowledge and secure learning.

Read It

‘Read It’ is split into two areas –reading for learning and reading for pleasure. Reading for learning is where lessons are differentiated according to pupils’ reading age, to support development and understanding. Pupils will practice inference, summarising, synthesising, metalinguistic exercises, prediction and relatability tasks and modelling. Reading for pleasure is the encouragement of reading for enjoyment. This is measured through pupils’ sense of pride and personal achievement.

Write It

‘Write It’ is the independent application of skills in written form. Pupils will show this through the level of formality and articulation with which they present ideas.

Reading Interventions

The Trust proactively plans to support pupils with the weakest levels of literacy, particularly in Year 7. Tiered support is in place through literacy programmes and specialist interventions. Reading assessments are regularly used to match pupils who are struggling with literacy to appropriate types of intervention and to further monitor the impact of those interventions. Pupils are well supported to ‘catch up’ with their peers at an early stage in their secondary education. Our interventions include:

Fresh Start – a synthetic phonics-based package for use in secondary schools.
Reading Buddies – for work with confidence and fluency
Bedrock Learning – an online literacy intervention which focuses on spelling, grammar and comprehension.

Through our approach, pupils are exposed to a range of complex academic texts. They are supported across disciplines to actively engage with what they are reading and use their existing subject knowledge to support their comprehension. Pupils are supported to engage in a range of different active reading strategies such as:

Activating their prior knowledge
Making predictions
Questioning what is being read
Clarifying areas of uncertainty
Summarising the meaning of sections of text to consolidate their understanding.

Beyond the Classroom

Pupils are actively encouraged to read for pleasure and fulfilment. The academy promotes a positive image of reading and seeks to actively promote the merits of reading amongst pupils and staff members. Each department has in place a ‘Beyond the Classroom’ strategy to encourage reading for pleasure. Our LRC has purchased more than 60 subject-specific books for pupils to borrow. Below is an outline of the books identified by each subject at each Key Stage.

Books to Support our Curriculum

Reading Routes

In 2024 we introduced a planned programme of reading for pleasure via form learning. Texts were carefully chosen to reflect key PSHE themes and to extend pupils’ understanding of a range of social, cultural and historical contexts. Texts are ambitious but engaging, to ensure that we are pushing the reading skills of pupils beyond those books they may ordinarily choose.

Every week, form groups engage in two reading sessions lasting 15 minutes each, totalling 30 minutes across the week. These sessions take the form of guided reading, where form tutors will read aloud to pupils in their classes. Pupils will all receive a copy of the text and will be expected to read along but not read aloud. Visualisers, book marks and rulers will be provided to aid the process of reading.

Reading Routes Roadmap