At King's School we are clear that developing students' literacy effectively is crucial to their academic progress and success, and to their wider well-being. We seek to promote a love of reading widely and often amongst our student body, and we place value on working to improving our students' ability to understand and analyse texts, and to produce extended writing.
All of our academic departments promote reading and support the development of the accuracy of students' spelling, punctuation and grammar.
Year 7 students sit baseline reading assessments in the autumn term (once settled in the school) and we use results from these to identify students who would benefit from intervention and enhanced support. We run a range of internal interventions to support students and buy-in expertise from the Literacy Support Service.
We are in the process of developing our library to be a inspiring space for students to work in, and we are continuing to build stock for our lending service. We curate recommended reading lists for students and for staff who want to read young adult fiction to be able to promote it to our students. We have also worked with external groups to encourage reading widely and to ensure our students are exposed to diverse texts, including the Brighton-based Open Minds Project in 2020-21.
We have Year 9 'Reading Ambassadors' who commit to reading and reviewing texts with the aim of encouraging their peers to read more widely and of publicising texts to their peers that they might find interesting.
We have introduced a 'Form Reader' scheme, starting with Year 7 in 2021-22, with the aim of increasing the time our students spend reading and ensuring that all our students read some enriching fiction and non-fiction texts during their time with us. Students' form tutors read to students either twice a week for 15-20 minutes each time or three times a week for 10 – 20 minutes each time. Students have their own copies of the text to follow the reading. In 2021-22 students in Year 7 are reading:
- 'The Supreme Lie' by Geraldine Mccaughrean
- 'The Bone Sparrow' by Zana Fraillon
- 'The Ruby in the Smoke' by Phillip Pullman
- 'The Wolves of Willoughby Chase' by Joan Aiken
- 'The Graveyard Book' by Neil Gaiman
- 'Private Peaceful' by Michael Morpurgo