English

At Downlands Community school, we aim to inspire the imagination of children through a love of creative writing and reading for pleasure. We encourage children to develop their own natural voice through writing in different styles and developing their understanding of the real and imaginary world through reading. Children are encouraged to explore language and develop their understanding of vocabulary through the exploration of a range of texts. We strongly believe that if you can say it – you can write it. Therefore we encourage children to verbally share ideas and use discussion to develop sentence structure and help plan their writing. We prompt both a love of writing and reading and hope to inspire literary passion in all children.

Downlands Community School is a maintained school within Dorset Local Authority, therefore we will follow the Primary National Curriculum. The following English policy describes the vision and pedagogical principles for teaching and learning in this subject, which has been agreed by staff and governors.

Early Reading

Downlands Community School has chosen Sounds Write as its systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) reading programme which is validated by the Department for Education. Since identifyng this SSP provider in 2021 and following consultation with local schools, Downlands has embarked on extensive training for all teachers and TAs.

Sounds Write was chosen for this school because of its clarity and ‘non-nonsense’ approach, the clear links made between early reading and early writing and having seen the effective appraoches working in local schools. Parents can find out more about the Sounds Write approach to teaching early reading here.