The Harefield Academy Literacy Strategy

Our aims:

• To focus on learning and how literacy is used as a tool for teaching and progression in every lesson and across the curriculum.
• To create opportunities to develop and enhance reading, writing, speaking and listening, grammar, spelling and articulacy.
• To support all teachers to develop their own deeper understanding of how to enhance the literacy skills of students, assess with confidence and develop learning opportunities as a result of improved literacy skills.
• To ensure teachers embed reading, writing and communication effectively across the curriculum, equipping all students with the necessary skills to make progress.
• To ensure students are eager to know how to improve their learning; to capitalise on opportunities to use feedback to improve.

We adhere to the following principles:

• Literacy supports learning. Students need vocabulary, expression and organisational control to cope with the cognitive demands of subjects.
• Reading enables us to learn from sources beyond our immediate experience.
• It is through language that we make and revise meaning.
• Writing helps us to sustain and order thought.
• Responding to higher order questions encourages the development of thinking.
• Better literacy leads to improved self-esteem, motivation and behaviour. It allows students to learn independently. It is empowering.
• All teachers and adults who students come into contact with during the school day are teachers of literacy.

We are striving to ensure students can:

• Express their ideas effectively and speak clearly.
• Develop a wider vocabulary.
• Use and understand more formal, standard registers of speech.
• Use spoken language to develop a deeper understanding of the ideas they are grappling with in their different subjects.
• Develop subject-specific terminology.
• Share ideas with other, using teachers and peers to enhance their knowledge and understanding.
• Develop skills in presenting arguments and points of view in a judged, balanced and appropriately assertive manner in both formal and less formal contexts.
• Focus more on what others are saying.
• Listen carefully to others’ points of view and learn from them, adapting their own views as appropriate.
• Understand more readily the formal language of text books and other subject-related materials.
• Recognise and adopt different written forms through exposure to a wide range of different types.
• Use accurate punctuation and grammar.
• Write at greater length and with more confidence.
• Adapt their written styles to suit a range of purposes and audiences.
• Write persuasively.
• Write at greater length and with increasing complexity.

Teachers will:

• Model high standards of literacy in their own teaching.
• Have displays in classrooms which include key terms on walls, technical equipment labelled, useful phrases to help students link and develop ideas in writing, grade descriptors/information related to examination courses, exemplar pieces of work, literacy signposts.
• Choose texts that are appropriate for their students’ prior knowledge, purposes and potential.
• Expect and encourage students to read for themselves wherever possible.
• Use teaching approaches that give students ways of accessing demanding texts.
• Know and demonstrate a range of reading strategies.
• Provide a range of opportunities for active engagement with texts that help to motivate students as readers.
• Know, understand and make explicit to students the main types of text used in their subject.
• Ensure that students with EAL are supported in their language needs.
• Apply the school marking policy.
• Provide writing frames or scaffolds to support extended writing and provide models of extended writing.
• Prepare students thoroughly for the reading/written requirements of examination papers, including signposting examination terminology.
• Plan lessons which make good use of opportunities to develop students’ literacy skills.

At-a-Glance Strategies

• Focused reading during tutor time.
• Building links with local primary schools to explore debating, reading and performance in the autumn and summer term.
• Book looks; developing marking of literacy and dialogic marking process.
• Word of The Week on display and shared in tutor time; students are rewarded for correct use of the word in context.
• Participation in local debating competitions.
• Celebration of World Book Day.
• Subject based Key Word displays in rooms.
• Reading lessons in the library for year 7 and 8 students.
• Staff training and development in literacy strategies.
• Close links with our library and celebrating reading through participation in the Hillingdon Book of the Year event.