1. Achieving outstanding progress in Reading and Writing
Kate Alderdice
Meadowfield School
November 2018

2. Meadowfield School is located in Sittingbourne and serves pupils with profound, severe and complex needs including autism. We currently have over 280 pupils on roll which are comprised of : - Lower School, which includes an observation and assessment unit - Secondary Department - 6th Form We work hard to ensure all of our pupils make excellent progress in phonics, reading and writing and that the skills they learn are transferred and applied to all areas of the curriculum.

3. What do we do at Meadowfield?
At Meadowfield, we use a range of phonic programmes to accommodate each pupils needs
Every pupil in KS1 & KS2 has access to a daily phonics intervention at their level

4. Beginning to Read & Write
Many schools have a whole school approach to phonics and deliver a synthetic phonics programme to all their pupils.
Meadowfield School recognised that whilst a synthetic phonics programme is the favoured approach, some pupils with Special Educational Needs find this a challenge due to the processes involved.
When teaching a synthetic phonics programme we are asking them to :
Learn grapheme/phoneme correspondences
Say the phoneme
Blend the phonemes and remember all the phonemes they have said
Read the word
Whilst a high percentage of our pupils were able to master the skills of segmenting and blending, a number of pupils could not and it became apparent that these pupils were missing out on an opportunity to learn to read.

5. What did we do to rectify this?
We introduced a programme called See & Learn
See & Learn language and Reading is a programme of activities designed to help children who have Down’s Syndrome learn to talk and read.
It is based on research into the visual learning strengths of young children who have Down’s Syndrome, and may be useful for other children who benefit from a visually-based approach to learning.
See and Learn Language and Reading teaches reading - both to support language development and to provide a foundation for later literacy learning. It includes activities to teach children to read sight words, simple phrases and sentences, letter-sounds, phonological awareness and phonics.
More details can be found at

6. Staff Training
As part of our school induction programme for staff, all teaching assistants attend phonic training sessions. We also hold phonic training sessions on Staff Development Days.
These sessions focus on how we deliver our phonic interventions to the pupils. Staff are also trained on how we record and assess pupil progress.

7. Engaging Parents
Earliest experiences with language, communication and print will take place in school, but much will also take place at home. Parents therefore need to know how they can best support their child’s emergent skills in reading and writing.
To address this we have :
- Regular open afternoons with literacy focus
- Parents evening displays
- Parent leaflets
- Demonstrations of phonics and reading interventions

8. How have we achieved outstanding progress in Reading and Writing?
One of the most important factors in our approach was the identification of appropriate resources and adapting them to be used along side the programmes, including communication aids. This has enabled phonics to be more accessible to all our pupils. Previous phonic resources and an old reading scheme that was not phonetically decodable were replaced. New games have been introduced based on the interests of the pupils

9. Activities to engage pupils
Phonics spin and read
Ping pong phonics
Fishing game
Roll and read
Phonic splat
Frying pan game
Washing line phonics

10. Phonic games

11. What is the impact of phonic interventions?
2018 End of Key Stage 1 outcomes show that:
Reading: 6% expected progress , 83% above expected progress
Writing: 27% expected progress, 55% above expected progress
A significant percentage of pupils have achieved rates of progress in line with mainstream expectations of 12 or more pupil asset points over the key stage.
55% in reading
41% in writing
41% in maths
2018 End of Key Stage 2 outcomes show that:
There are no pupil achieving below expected progress
Reading: 19% expected progress, 81% above expected progress
Writing: 17% expected progress, 83 % above expected progress
A significant percentage of pupils have achieved rates of progress in line with mainstream expectations of 24 or more pupil asset points over the key stage.
62% in reading
42% in writing
35% in math
Year 1 and Year 2 Phonics Screening Check Results 2018:
7 pupils in Years 1 and 2 took the PSC this year. 3 x Year 1 pupils and 1 x Year 2 pupil achieved 32 or above which is the threshold mark for the expected standard. A total of 4 pupils across the Department