At the Whiteoak Academies, we believe that reading is the key to unlocking imagination, creativity, and lifelong learning. We are committed to nurturing a genuine love of books in every child, helping them to see reading not just as a skill to be learned, but as a source of enjoyment, curiosity, and inspiration.

We proudly follow the Open University’s Reading for Pleasure pedagogy, which places children’s interests, choice, and engagement at the heart of our approach. This means we create a rich reading environment where pupils are encouraged to explore a wide range of high-quality texts, share recommendations, and develop their own reading identities.

Our classrooms are filled with carefully chosen books, regular opportunities for independent reading, and time to talk about stories together. Teachers act as reading role models, sharing their own enthusiasm for books and guiding pupils to discover authors, genres, and topics that excite them.

Through this approach, we aim to build confident, motivated readers who choose to read for enjoyment both in school and at home, laying the foundation for success across the curriculum and beyond.

The Whiteoak Reading Spine

Each year group has been provided with a carefully curated set of texts from which we drive our curriculum.  Our spine includes a range of picture books, novels, poetry anthologies and non-fiction texts linked to our wider history, geography and science curriculum.  

The creation of our spine has been captured as a best practice document and has been shared on the Open University Reading for Pleasure website for other practitioners to learn from.