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Falling in love… with reading! Hayley Pyrah (Hub Lead) - 22nd Apr 2025

With Valentine’s Day taking place in February, there is always a lot of chatter about ‘LOVE’. Showing the ones you love and care for your appreciation, hearts and flowers displayed in every shop window… but I would like to talk about a different kind of love… a love of reading! As educators, we know how important it is to teach children how to read. We know it is a life skill, one that enhances all academic areas but what happens next?
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Phonics- Is It Magic? Jodie Matthews (Strategic Lead) - 1st Apr 2025

Practical Tips for Strengthening Early Reading Let’s face it: getting our youngest learners reading fluently can sometimes feel like magic. But we know it’s not! It all starts with a solid foundation in phonics, and that’s where we, as reading leaders and teachers, come in. The Department for Education (DfE) Reading Framework, and the recent research is clear: phonics is non-negotiable when it comes to early reading success, especially in EYFS and Year 1.
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Phonics Techniques and Strategies Beyond KS1 - Louisa Webber (Marketing and Engagement Associate ) - 3rd Mar 2025

“I’m a KS2 teacher. I don’t need to know anything about phonics.” Is this something you’ve heard a colleague say? Well, as a year 6 teacher myself, it saddens me that you may have heard teachers state such things. Before moving over to teach year 6, I taught in year 1 for three years and I too probably dismissed phonics when I became a ‘KS2 teacher’.
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Look who's talking - Gill Wilcox (Literacy Specialist) - 24th Feb 2025

Let me pose you a question. As you look across the classroom at your children, what is it that fills your thoughts? Do you ever wonder how their futures will unfold? Are you ever overwhelmed with the responsibility that we, as educators, are in part, responsible for the ease at which children fit into society?
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Why don’t schools teach spelling like they teach phonics? Jodie Matthews (Strategic Lead) - 3rd Feb 2025

As I sat down today to help my ten year old daughter learn her list of ten spellings I pondered this question. Schools teach phonics so well and phonics schemes are mostly built upon the research and evidence bank of effective retrieval practice. Schools are so much more aware of retrieval practice now and over the last 5 or so years we have begun to understand long and short term memory much more and strategies for retaining information have found their way into the classroom. I have observed many retrieval sessions over the last 2 years in classrooms, revision sessions at the start of a maths lesson, a weekly or termly review of learning, lessons that link to learning last year or last month, all of which help children to embed their learning into their long term memory.
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From Solitary to Social - How book talk fosters a love of reading in classrooms - Jodie Matthews (Strategic Lead) - 6th Jan 2025

From Solitary to Social - how book talk fosters a love of reading in classrooms At Roade English Hub I work with a team of incredibly passionate individuals who work hard and are driven because they know, and research tells them that being literate has the potential to be life changing. Incredibly research also clearly shows us that if you are a literate child who reads for pleasure then this has more impact on your future life chances than any other factor. At Roade English Hub we believe that it is every child’s right to be literate, and to be given the opportunity to develop a love and passion for reading. In our travels around our vast area, we have yet to find a teacher who doesn’t also want these things.
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Getting Them Blending by Christmas: Strategies for Success - Janet Thompson (Literacy Specialist) - 3rd Dec 2024

Why is Blending Important? Blending—the process of pushing sounds together to form words—is a crucial milestone in early literacy. The sooner children can blend, the sooner they enter the world of reading. Learning the “code” of sounds has little value if children can’t use it to decode words.
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Reading is a Mathematical Equation - Hayley Pyrah (Hub Lead) - 2nd Dec 2024

Have you ever wondered why the simple view of reading is set out in quadrants? I recently attended a training event with Christopher Such, who explained the Simple View of Reading as WR x LC = RC… Word Recognition multiplied by Language Comprehension equals Reading Comprehension. Although I have seen this equation previously, shared the quadrants on many occassions and read various different representations about the Simple View of reading; I never really reflected on why it was a multiplication equation rather than an addition until Christopher Such explained it… You can’t have one without the other! If Gough and Tumner (1986) had shared the two skills of word recognition and language comprehension and shared it as WR + LC= RC then we might assume that if a child was lacking in one of the skills, you could fill it with the other and still achieve reading comprehension.
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"The SEND Phonics Puzzle: Every Child Deserves a Piece!" - Gabriela Neal-Gonzalez (Literacy Specialist) - 4th Nov 2024

When I sat down to write this blog post, one thought immediately came to mind: ‘How can we be better for our SEND learners?’ The teaching of phonics is fundamental for any child to learn to read, when I say any, I really mean ALL. For years there has been the misconception that ‘If this child has SEND they cannot learn to read in the same way as their peers!’ The truth of the matter is all children, no matter their starting point or their need, will learn in the same way as the rest of their peers – phonics is the way to teach reading. The phrase ‘teach reading’ is absolutely key here – we are not born with the inbuilt knowledge of reading – we have to be taught to read. So, if we take this into consideration – we all begin at the same starting point no one is born with reading skills (although how easy would it be if we were?!) we gain them over time through considerate and consistent high-quality teaching.
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Flourishing through Fluency - Jess Steele (Literacy Specialist) - 30th Sep 2024

Flourishing through Fluency…… On my many visits to schools around Northamptonshire and beyond, one of the things I take the most pleasure in seeing is a class full of children reading together. There is something truly magical and heart-warming about this wonderful, shared experience. When this is done well; the text is carefully chosen, the children are motivated and engaged, they are actively participating in the experience and sharing their enjoyment- there really is nothing better. But how do we ensure every child can enjoy this rewarding shared experience?
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