At Legacy Learning Trust, reading teaching is balanced, coherent, and cumulative, ensuring that pupils develop all the skills required to become confident, fluent, and thoughtful readers. We understand that reading is more than decoding words: it involves fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, and engagement with a wide range of texts.

All Legacy Learning Trust schools embed the following practices to ensure pupils become fluent, confident, and reflective readers:

• Early reading focuses on systematic phonics, allowing pupils to decode accurately. As pupils become fluent, teaching gradually shifts to comprehension strategies, helping children to construct meaning, make inferences, and think critically about texts.
• Fluency embedded in comprehension. Pupils practise reading aloud with accuracy, pace, and expression. Fluent reading allows them to focus on meaning rather than word recognition.
• Explicit teaching of comprehension strategies: Pupils are taught to predict, summarise, question, clarify, and infer meaning.
• Vocabulary is explicitly taught
• Pupils read a wide range of texts, including fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and subject-specific materials.
• Pupils are provided with opportunities for independent application – decoding, fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary strategies
• Reading is planned with a clear progression, ensuring skills build from one stage to the next
• Assessment of pupils’ reading development to ensure that teaching is closely matched to pupils’ evolving needs

Through this integrated, research-informed approach, all pupils are supported to become not only accurate and fluent readers, but also reflective, strategic readers who can understand, analyse, and enjoy a wide range of texts. Reading becomes a tool for learning across the curriculum and a source of lifelong curiosity and enjoyment.