We value words highly, knowing that familiarity with decoding strategies breeds confident readers and having a wide vocabulary supports students to develop expertise in their writing and oracy. We are a word rich school with informative displays encouraging the use of key terms and academic language.

In lessons, students are explicitly taught strategies to decode new words by each of their teachers. Following the best research, we have a whole-school approach that uses context, morphology and etymology to support students’ understanding and these are complemented by subject specific strategies developed by the experts in each area.