SCA Year of Reading- Showcase Event for Secondary Education Professionals

Is your school or trust struggling to engage all learners with reading?

Sutton Community Academy has been making remarkable strides in student outcomes through innovative reading strategies. Now they’re ready to share their journey at an exciting new event: SCA's Year of Reading. Over the past three years, their focused approach to reading has led to measurable improvements in student engagement, comprehension, and achievement.

SCA’s Year of Reading will highlight the key strategies, tools, and practices that have made a real difference in the classroom. At this full-day in-school event, you’ll have the opportunity to observe these powerful strategies in action in a classroom setting.

This event will explore:

Teaching & Learning Interventions

Using data to determine barriers to reading, building a successful reading curriculum and ensuring interventions help students access the curriculum.

Building a Culture of Reading

Embedding reading in your ethos, ensuring that reading extends outside the classroom and even outside of school.

The Thinking Reading Literacy Programme

Utilising Thinking Reading as part of a broader reading strategy to support learners who struggle the most with reading.

"In September 2022 at Sutton Community Academy, we made a pledge to do everything possible to make sure that all students left us with a reading age that matched their chronological age or above. Our initial data told us that a significant number of students in each year group did not have the reading ability to easily access the curriculum, and interventions were not closing the gaps quick enough. After a whole-academy review of our provision and research into what was working well elsewhere, we developed a new reading strategy with clear criteria for what intervention is required and when. Part of our strategy was the implementation of the Thinking Reading programme to sit alongside our other approaches. As a result, we have seen a significant increase in the number of students who are now reading at their chronological age and above; dozens of students making rapid progress in reading each year ad being able to access the curriculum as a result; increased use of the library and more students reading outside of school than ever before."

-Anna Paulson, Vice Principal for Teaching & Learning

About Thinking Reading

Thinking Reading is a literacy programme that aims to equip secondary schools to teach the lowest 10% successfully. Rigorous, research-based and systematic, Thinking Reading focuses on teaching more in less time using age-appropriate books and expert teaching methods. Highly detailed assessment tracks progress in every aspect of the customised, one-to-one lesson.

"The students that you didn’t think could learn to read will learn to read. They will catch up rapidly — and completely."

-Thinking Reading