At Haydn, our intent is to provide a curriculum that inspires a love of reading. Leaders in our school prioritise the teaching of reading: word reading and reading comprehension. We work to achieve this through experience of and engagement with, a range of high quality and enjoyable texts. We value reading as a key life skill, and are dedicated to enabling our pupils to become lifelong readers; we believe reading is the key to academic success. We want our pupils to understand and use reading as a tool to access information and to communicate with the world. We want them to become independent learners, so that they become confident and comprehensive readers; that they learn to read and read to learn.  

We have a consistent, whole school approach to the teaching and enjoyment of reading.  

The National Curriculum states that it is essential that the teaching of reading focuses on developing pupils’ competence in word reading and comprehension. Skilled word reading involves both the speedy working out of the pronunciation of unfamiliar printed words (decoding) and the speedy recognition of familiar printed words. Underpinning both is the understanding that the letters on the page represent the sounds in spoken words. This is why phonics is taught rigorously as soon as they start school.