Teaching, Learning and Curriculum at St Barnabas Trust

Early Reading & Phonics: Read Write Inc. (RWI)

To give our children the best possible start, we use Read Write Inc. (RWI) Phonics, a highly successful, systematic synthetic phonics programme validated by the Department for Education. RWI is designed to create fluent readers, confident speakers, and willing writers.

How We Teach Phonics

Phonics is the method of learning to read by converting letters or letter-groups into individual sounds, which are then blended together to read a word.

• Speed Sounds: Children learn the 44 English sounds and the corresponding letters using memorable picture mnemonics.
• Fred Talk & Blending: We use a toy frog named ‘Fred’ who can only speak in individual sounds (e.g., c-a-t). Children help Fred by blending those sounds together to say the whole word (cat).
• Fred Fingers: When writing, children use ‘Fred Fingers’ to break a word down into its sounds, pinching each sound on their fingers before spelling it out.
• Storybooks Matched to Ability: Children read lively, engaging stories that contain only the sounds they have already been taught. This builds instant success and prevents guessing.

Rigour, Fidelity, and Success

• Absolute Fidelity to the Programme: Every teacher and teaching assistant across our Trust is fully trained in the RWI method. We deliver daily phonics lessons with absolute consistency, ensuring that the routines, language, and high expectations are identical in every classroom.
• Rigorous, Regular Assessment: Children do not stay in the same phonics group based on their age. Instead, they are assessed half-termly (or sooner) by our Reading Leader and grouped strictly according to their current phonic ability. This dynamic grouping ensures that children are always being challenged at exactly the right level.
• No Child is Left Behind (Fast-Track Tutoring): If a child struggles with a specific sound or falls behind, we spot it immediately. They receive daily, targeted one-to-one fast-track tutoring to address their specific gaps, keeping them on track with their peers.
• The Three-Reads Approach to Fluency: In school, children read their RWI Storybook at least three separate times. The first read focuses on accuracy, the second on speed, and the third on comprehension and expression. By the time the book comes home, children should read it to you with absolute confidence.

Here are some videos you may find useful to support your child’s learning:

• Understanding Phonics
• How To Say the Sounds
• The Phonics Screening Check
• 10 Things to Think About When You Read to Your Child

Reading Comprehension Curriculum

Our Intent: What Do Good Readers Do?

At St Barnabas Multi Academy Trust, our curriculum is driven by evidence-backed research, including Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) guidance and insights from Alex Quigley’s Closing the Vocabulary Gap. We aim to develop proficient readers who:

• Decode fluently, mapping word meanings quickly to their prior background knowledge.
• Possess deep vocabulary knowledge and a sound understanding of text structures.
• Deploy metacognitive strategies (predicting, summarising) and actively self-monitor comprehension.
• Read with stamina, persistence, and appropriate expression (prosody).

The Bridge from Phonics to Shared Reading

We ensure a seamless transition from our systematic synthetic phonics programme to whole-class reading, making sure no child is rushed before they are ready.

• When Do Pupils Transition? Pupils move off the Read Write Inc. (RWI) phonics programme only once they have completed the full phonetic sequence, are securely off the RWI ‘Grey’ book level, and demonstrate age-appropriate decoding fluency.
• The Transition Focus: The initial phase of our Shared Reading model prioritises fluency as the vital gateway to comprehension.
• Protecting Cognitive Load: For children who have completed the phonics program but still require support with automaticity and speed, our heavy focus on Guided Oral Reading ensures their working memory is freed up from decoding, allowing them to successfully access the full, vocabulary-rich curriculum.

Developing Reading Fluency

Fluency frees up limited cognitive resources from word recognition so pupils can redirect their focus entirely toward comprehending the text. We explicitly teach accuracy, automaticity, and prosody using EEF-supported approaches:

• Guided Oral Reading: Adults or peers model fluent reading before pupils read the text aloud with feedback.
• Repeated Reading: Pupils re-read short, meaningful passages to build confidence and speed.
• Reader’s Theatre: A collaborative framework combining oral modelling and repeated practice.
• Targeted Support: Specific weaknesses in decoding or comprehension are diagnosed before selecting targeted fluency interventions.

Core Comprehension Strategies

To foster independent, self-regulated learning, we explicitly model and practise five key strategies:

• Activating Prior Knowledge: Linking background experiences to the text to infer and fill in missing details.
• Prediction: Anticipating outcomes to encourage pupils to monitor their own understanding closely.
• Questioning: Generating internal questions to check comprehension.
• Clarifying: Identifying and breaking down unfamiliar words or phrases to unpack meaning.
• Summarising: Succinctly capturing core meanings, often utilising graphic organisers.

Implementation: The Shared Reading Lesson

Our 45-minute daily lesson follows a structured sequence designed to avoid premature independence and prioritise the co-construction of text meaning:

• Active Focus: Pupils sit still, tracking the text with a ruler held in both hands, writing unfamiliar words on whiteboards to clarify meanings.
• Scaffolded Practice: Teachers model complex questions (“I Do”) before pupils collaborate in pairs or groups to co-construct meaning (“We Do”).
• Independent Application: Independent question practice (“You Do”) is only introduced once the text meaning is successfully secured.
• Live Feedback: Lessons conclude with class reviews, peer marking, and live over-the-shoulder teacher marking (prioritising focus intervention pupils).

This daily sequence is delivered via a weekly rolling plan that systematically cycles through varied reading modes (Echo, Paired, Silent, Reciprocal, and Choral reading) alongside explicit vocabulary instruction.

Fostering a Reading Culture

• Accelerated Reader: Star Reader tests accurately establish individual reading bands. Home-school records are checked daily; pupils who do not read at home are prioritised to be heard in school.
• Class Novel: Teachers read a gripping novel daily to model prosody, expose children to rich vocabulary, and promote listening for pleasure.

Our Trust Reading Spine

At St Barnabas MAT, we believe that reading for pleasure brings creativity, empathy, and lifelong curiosity. To help our families navigate the vast world of children’s literature, our reading specialists have curated a dedicated Reading Spine for every year group from Nursery to Year 6.

Why These Books?

For each year group, six high-quality fiction books have been carefully selected. These titles are chosen to act as both mirrors to our children’s own lived experiences and windows into the lives of others. The collection features a diverse range of genres, authors, and characters, including:

• Local Cornish authors alongside award-winners and timeless classics.
• Underrepresented gems rather than highly famous authors, encouraging children to expand their horizons with new genres, graphic novels, and illustrated chapter books.
• Joyful, engaging, and enlightening stories that celebrate a wide range of diverse backgrounds.

How It Works

• The Goal: Every child can borrow these books across the year, with the goal of reading (or sharing) all six titles by the end of the academic year.
• Shared Connection: Limiting the selection to six books creates a manageable goal and gives classmates a brilliant opportunity to share, discuss, and debate the same stories.
• Tracking Progress: Children are given a special Reading Spine bookmark for their year group to track their progress, celebrate their achievements, and take pride in their literary journey!

Writing begins in our Nurseries through purposeful mark-making and the ‘Helicopter Stories’ approach. This practice of verbally composing and acting out narratives continues into the Reception year, providing a consistent bridge for children to develop their storytelling voice and narrative sequencing.

Reception and Key Stage 1: Imagination & Transcription Alongside Helicopter Stories, children in Reception and through to the end of the Autumn Term in Year 1 engage with ‘Drawing Club’. This approach immerses children in high-level vocabulary and creative expression.

Key Stage 1 Writing Curriculum

At St Barnabas MAT, learning to write is a fun, memorable, and irresistible adventure. While we use high-quality model texts to build structural frameworks and confidence, our core philosophy empowers children to move quickly beyond simple imitation. We encourage them to use these stimuli to invent, create, and explore their own unique ideas, ensuring they become independent authors rather than just copyists.

Our Intent

Our writing curriculum is designed to foster articulate, imaginative, and highly capable communicators from the very start of Key Stage 1. We intend for pupils to develop a deep, internalised understanding of a broad range of genres across fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, enabling them to write with fluid adaptation for multiple audiences and purposes.

Central to our intent is a rigorous approach to cognitive load theory: by prioritising transcription as the essential physical engine of writing, we aim to automate the mechanical skills of handwriting, spelling, and basic punctuation. This systematic automation frees up critical working memory, allowing children to focus their cognitive energy entirely on creative innovation and sophisticated vocabulary choices. We build directly upon the EYFS baseline from day one, ensuring a seamless, high-expectation transition into Year 1.

Furthermore, our intent is for all pupils to master the National Curriculum expectations for spelling, punctuation, and grammar (SPaG). Rather than teaching these as isolated rules, we intend for SPaG to be acquired as a meaningful tool that enhances the impact and clarity of the pupil’s own voice.

Our Implementation

We bring our curriculum intent to life through our immersive Drawing Club and Curious Quests framework, ensuring that every piece of writing is anchored in a meaningful purpose.

The Transcription Engine: Physical stamina and automaticity are systematically built via a Daily 15-Minute Dictation session, delivered entirely separately from the main English lesson. This daily retrieval practice ensures letter formation, common exception words, and sentence boundaries become second nature.

Contextualised SPaG and Spelling: All statutory National Curriculum expectations are explicitly taught, but they are delivered entirely in context through our writing projects. By weaving punctuation, grammar, and spelling patterns directly into the weekly quest, we secure strong long-term knowledge retention.

The Curious Quests Learning Journey: To guarantee rigorous pedagogy and high oracy, our units of work follow a dynamic structure. Teachers flexibly weave these core pedagogical elements across a unit of work to respond to their class’s needs:

• Word Bathing: Immersing pupils in rich, spoken “WOW” vocabulary modeled by the teacher.
• Letters from the Portal: A purposeful hook (such as correspondence from a character like Professor Klunk) that establishes the “why” for writing and specifically introduces the week’s target SPaG skill, ensuring engagement always drives learning.
• Quest Codes & Hidden Treasures: Direct, focused grammar instruction tailored by year group to teach sentence mechanics (Year 1) or advanced complexity (Year 2).
• Application: Independent application where children apply their SPaG skills to “earn” their treasure.
• The Book Snuggle: High-quality shared reading to spark imagination and expose children to authorial voice.
• The Gadabout: Structured, mandatory oracy where children must orally “Say it & Hold it” before a pencil ever touches paper.
• Modelled Drawing & Shared Writing: Live teacher modeling that explicitly demonstrates innovation and structural scaffolding 

Same Context, Different Depth: To guarantee perfect equity in our single and mixed-age classrooms, all pupils share the same high-vocabulary, immersive hook, but independent tasks are precisely scaffolded to match distinct progression milestones, ensuring every child, including our most vulnerable learners, is appropriately supported and stretched.

Responsive Feedback: Lessons conclude with Time Together using a classroom visualiser. This allows teachers to provide immediate, live feedback, address misconceptions on the spot, and showcase exceptional examples of stamina, handwriting, and grammatical application.

Our Impact

The impact of our curriculum is evidenced by fluent, enthusiastic young writers who transition to Key Stage 2 with high levels of physical stamina and a rich vocabulary. By effectively managing cognitive load, our pupils consistently meet and exceed National Curriculum expectations, but more importantly, they view themselves as capable authors. The success of our transcription engine ensures that mechanical accuracy and creative flair go hand-in-hand, allowing every child to communicate their unique ideas with confidence and clarity.

Key Stage 2 Writing Curriculum

Our writing instruction is driven by Pie Corbett’s acclaimed Talk for Writing framework. This approach defines our curriculum intent, shapes our structured fiction, non-fiction, and poetry units, and empowers every child to become a confident, creative writer.

Our Intent: The Talk for Writing Approach

Our writing curriculum is built upon a profound yet simple principle: if a child cannot say a sentence, they cannot write it.

To unlock pupil creativity and maximise attainment, we engineer writing success through deep preparation. By anchoring our fiction units to universal plot templates, we make narrative layouts predictable and secure in a child’s mind. This deliberate structure frees up their working memory, allowing them to focus entirely on advanced vocabulary selection, sophisticated sentence construction, and managing reader impact.

Our Implementation

A typical Talk for Writing unit spans roughly 3 to 4 weeks depending on the year group. Every unit follows a non-negotiable core rhythm that systematically transfers independence to the pupil:

• Cold Task (Baseline Assessment): Before any instructional input begins, pupils complete a diagnostic writing task entirely unaided. This establishes a clear, genuine baseline of what pupils can achieve independently.
• Phase 1: Imitation: The focus here is internalising language patterns. Units launch with an engaging sensory ‘Hook’ that creates an immediate, emotional “need to write” and serves as vocabulary fuel. Pupils learn a high-quality model text orally using visual maps and physical actions. They analyse the text both as a reader and a writer to co-construct a class toolkit.
• Phase 2: Innovation: This serves as the critical bridge to independent writing. Using “Boxing-Up” grids, pupils strip the model text down to its underlying narrative skeleton. They systematically modify elements—such as characters, settings, or events—while receiving heavy teacher scaffolding through live Shared Writing at the board.
• Phase 3: Independent Application: The structural scaffolds are completely withdrawn. Pupils apply their newly acquired tools and techniques to compose a completely original story within the same genre or pattern.
• Hot Task (Summative Assessment): The unit concludes with an independent progress assessment. This allows teachers to directly and accurately measure value-added growth from the initial Cold Task baseline.

Our daily classroom practice relies on explicit, high-accountability instructional routines to move writing skills from passive imitation to absolute mastery:

• Rapid Sentence Games: Daily 5-minute games build grammatical precision and syntactic flexibility. Teachers use a strict instructional cycle: Read & Say, Live Teacher Model, Partner Rehearsal, Independent Whiteboard Application, and Instant Feedback.
• Tiered Vocabulary Instruction: Academic words (Tier 2) and domain-specific words (Tier 3) are explicitly taught using a vocal cycle (Say It, Define It, Activity, Use It). These are prominently displayed on classroom working walls for easy access throughout the unit.
• Visual Paragraph Architecture: Pupils are protected from structural drifting by breaking blocks of text into explicit visual components. These include a Topic Sentence (the roof/top bun) to set the theme, Supporting Sentences (the pillars/filling) to add detail, and a Concluding Sentence (the base/bottom bun) to manage transitions.
• Responsive Adaptation: Teachers carefully match the degree of text alteration to pupil stamina and structural security. Lower-attaining or SEND pupils “hug closely” to the model text by substituting key nouns and adjectives, while high-attaining writers are stretched through deep structural alterations and viewpoint shifts.
• Revising vs. Editing: Pupils treat these as separate, rigorous disciplines. Revising reshapes composition for reader impact by refining pacing and vocabulary, whereas Editing systematically addresses mechanical accuracy in spelling, punctuation, and grammar.

Our Impact: Inspiring Confident, High-Achieving Writers

The true measure of our writing curriculum is the exceptional, visible progress made by our pupils. By systematically comparing independent outcomes from the final Hot Task against the baseline Cold Task, we track and celebrate distinct value-added growth for every child.

The standard of writing across Key Stage 2 demonstrates that our pupils:

• Write with precision and flair: Pupils develop the technical stamina, structural security, and deep vocabulary required to write with distinct writerly effect across all subjects.
• Become self-regulated editors: Children confidently take active ownership of their work, using tailored checklists to independently revise for reader impact and edit for mechanical accuracy.
• Communicate with confidence: By stripping away the anxiety of plot structure, we foster highly articulate, creative individuals who genuinely look forward to writing.