Hampstead Hill School’s ambitious curriculum intends to develop lifelong, curious learners who personify our school values. We deliver a high-quality education that provides a foundation for understanding the world, conservation, the ability to reason, and a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about learning. Through strong cross-curricular and knowledge-rich links, our children develop critical and reflective thinking skills to fulfil a broad academic foundation.
Hampstead Hill School aims to create a well-managed reading environment that places importance on reading for pleasure and developing lifelong independent readers with interest and agency promoting our school values. Reading is a complex skill needed to succeed throughout the pupil’s educational life, so children are introduced to a variety of strategies and methods which help the words on the page conjure feelings, generate critical and thoughtful thinking, and form a connection to the wider world around them.
Children who read often and routinely will become competent and confident readers over time, so we recommend progressively challenging and demanding texts to achieve higher reading attainment and equip them with proficiencies and schemes to draw meaning from the text. We use a sequential approach to develop the children’s reading skills to build their confidence and become well-rounded readers who are able to comprehend and fully analyse multimodal texts when tackling the wider curriculum.
Reading should be a valuable and rewarding aspect of learning to help develop literacy tastes and preferences. Children need to experience and encounter a broad breadth of text types from a wide range of authors, poets, and illustrators whose works are representative of varied voices, perspectives, writing styles, literacy traditions, contexts, theme, cultures, heritage, diversity, race, and eras. We have a growing library of rich and varied breadth and range of quality children’s literature displayed and accessible to children to browse, and choose from to promote a positive ethos around reading. This also serves as a resource bank for broader reading around all areas of the curriculum and important themes and topics.
We place a huge emphasis on reading with the children on one-to-one or in a small, guided reading group. While pupils are given daily feedback in the reading records to encourage home/school dialogue, guided reading offers differentiated reading using a variety of reading descriptors with books or texts carefully chosen to engage in shared reading experiences. Frequently reading out loud to children in the classrooms is instrumental in supporting a child’s reading journey while slowing down the written language to imagine and navigate the distinctive patterns, scenes and reflect on thoughts of a text.
Each child is monitored regularly and assessed termly using the reading criteria in the Reading Assessment Scale. The level of provision and support is determined on the factors of individual progression and understanding by providing contingent and adaptive scaffolding.
Our dedicated Targeted Support Team, led by Kitty Stuart, a qualified teacher, provide support for all children. With direction from our Heads of Years, the Targeted Support Team use our assessment data to identify and support children requiring support or extension sessions. Typically, the sessions run weekly across a half-term – all children will complete pre and post-assessments to measure the impact of the targeted support.
The aims of Targeted Support are: