Elm Park Primary School

Message for Year 1-Year 6

Dear Parents/ Guardians, 

We have thoroughly enjoyed welcoming your children back to school this week and as you may be aware, we have been busy checking what learning your child(ren) may or may not remember in order to ensure our curriculum is bespoke to their needs. 

Working hand in hand with this, we have changed the way in which we are assigning children’s reading books as previously we were basing our judgements solely on the child’s reading age. Whilst the reading age is useful in understanding what children are able to read, this score does not tell us how much a child can comprehend in their reading. We strive to instil a love of reading in our pupils and I’m sure you can understand, if a child cannot understand what they are reading then they are not going to enjoy reading the way they should. 

As a result, we will be using end of term assessments to inform children’s book bands in the hope that this will ensure all children are reading at a level that they can access; reading fluently and accurately whilst understanding the text they are reading. As such, your child may well be reading at a lower level than they were previously but I hope that this information will help you in understanding why this may be. This is a new system and we are fully aware that it won’t be perfect straight away; we would appreciate your patience as we smooth out any issues which we will endeavour to do as quickly as possible. In order to ensure this, staff will be listening to your child read their new banded books and changing these bands as appropriate based on their expertise so whilst your child may have been given a banded reading book already, this is subject to change.

I appreciate this may be frustrating but we are making these changes in order to really support all of our pupils to make the very best progress. Please reassure your child if they do move down a book band: they have not gone backwards, they are just working on developing a new set of skills (comprehension). If you have any questions or queries regarding your child’s reading level please do speak to your child’s class teacher via email or by phoning the school office in the first instance. 

Thank you for your continued support and understanding. 

Yours faithfully, 

Miss N Lee 

Literacy Lead/ Assistant Headteacher