Reading at St Andrew's
At St Andrew's, we believe that reading is a gateway to lifelong learning and personal growth. Our goal is to foster a genuine love of reading by providing meaningful opportunities for all pupils to develop their reading skills and grow into confident, fluent readers.
We offer a rich and varied selection of texts that reflect the diversity of our world and promote inclusion, helping children see themselves and others in the stories they read.
Through a combination of structured phonics, shared reading, independent reading, and storytelling, we nurture curiosity, empathy, and imagination—ensuring every child has the tools and inspiration to thrive as a reader.
Early Reading
To teach early reading, we follow the Essential Letters and Sounds Synthetic Systematic Phonic programme and our reading is initially based on phonetically decodable books that support the ELS scheme. This is followed by the use of a range of texts from Oxford Reading Tree, Big Cat and ordinary fiction and non-fiction books.
