Four common barriers (listed below), if left unchallenged, will limit the progress, engagement and development of our students. We therefore remove barriers to learning and support students’ ability to access the curriculum through the development:

• Literacy and language acquisition
• Numeracy
• Oracy
• Vocabulary

The ‘Read All About It’ study, conducted by the organisation behind the NGRT assessments used in WPT schools, showed that there is a significant correlation between reading ability and achievement.

Every teacher understands the tremendous value of reading – for school success and so much more – but not every teacher is trained equally to understand how children ‘learn to read’ and go on to ‘read to learn’. All teachers at WPT support comprehension by modelling how expert readers read actively, including by monitoring their understanding, asking questions, making predictions and summarising in line with our own unique reciprocal reading model.

Through our numeracy curriculum design we aim to ensure all students are numerate and leave with the knowledge and skills required for everyday life. This is achieved through consistent teaching methods and terminology used in numeracy, maths and across the whole school curriculum. Through a consistent approach to models and methods we ensure that all students, irrespective of ability, can access the numeracy and mathematical content of their study. The maths departments in all schools work collaboratively with colleagues across the curriculum to embed core routines such as:

• Geography – Line graphs and compare data, we use an arid region and a fertile region
• Art – Ratio linked to mixing colours. Fibonacci sequence
• Food – Metric and imperial measurements linked to recipes – Ratio
• Science – Compound measures
• Music – Fractions linked to note value
• English – Averages from paragraphs, comparing two texts – will also embed reciprocal
  reading

All schools in WPT have clear expectations with regard to oracy including:

• Modelling high standards of language (including standard English)
• Challenge students’ use of language if unclear
• Be rigorous with questioning to develop depth of understanding and verbal articulation
• Use verbal sentence frames to facilitate the structuring of answers

Our approach to vocabulary is embedded to ensure students can access the whole curriculum. Once we have taught students the strategies that they need to become effective readers, through a consistent diet of reciprocal reading and explicit vocabulary instruction across the curriculum, students will become more effective learners. The Education Endowment Fund advises that schools ‘provide targeted vocabulary instruction in every subject.’ To achieve this, schools across WPT adopt a tiered approach to explicitly teaching vocabulary followed up with regular assessment through low stakes quizzing. The following strategies, from the guidance, we have adopted into the development of our own ‘Vocabulary Toolkit:’

• Explicit teaching of Tier 2 and Tier 3 words
• Using graphic organisers and concept maps (e.g. Frayer Model)
• Undertaking regular low stakes assessment
• Consistently signposting synonyms