Building a picture of every child as a reader

At the Whiteoak Academies, it is highly important to us that we build a comprehensive and accurate picture of each child as a reader. In order to do so, we employ a variety of both formative and summative assessment tools.

Listening to our children read on a regular basis and using Assessment for Learning strategies in the moment of teaching, provide us with invaluable insights into the progress a child is making in terms of decoding, fluency and comprehension.

In addition to this, we complete termly phonics assessments for those children learning to decode and complete NfER papers twice each year (from Years 1-5) to gain an insight into how language comprehension skills are developing. Year 6 pupils undertake a previous year’s Reading SAT at three points across the academic year for this same purpose.