Literacy

At Point View School, we use the Better Start Literacy Approach (BSLA) to support the development of strong foundations in reading and writing for all learners. Through structured literacy and explicit teaching, learners learn how sounds work in words and how these connect to reading and writing. This approach helps teachers identify and address literacy gaps early, ensuring students make steady progress and develop confidence as readers and writers.

Structured Literacy

Through a Structured Literacy approach through the Better Start Literacy Approach (BSLA) to support strong foundations in reading and writing. Learners learn to recognise and use sets of sounds (phonemes) and the letters or letter combinations that represent them. These sounds are taught in a carefully planned sequence so that learners can quickly apply their knowledge to read and write words.

Through explicit teaching, practice, and review, learners develop the skills to blend sounds to read words and segment sounds to spell them. This structured approach helps ensure all learners build strong literacy foundations and gain confidence as readers and writers.

Better Start Literacy Approach

Writing

At Point View School, we support learners to become confident and capable writers. Learners receive explicit instruction in a range of writing genres, including persuasive, recount, descriptive, report, and narrative writing. Through structured teaching, learners develop the skills to construct simple, compound, and complex sentences that form clear and well-organised paragraphs.

We also place strong emphasis on handwriting, ensuring learners learn correct letter formation, spacing, and presentation so their writing is clear and legible. Developing fluent handwriting supports students to focus more fully on their ideas and creativity when writing.

Our teachers guide learners through the writing process by modelling, practising, and providing feedback so that learners can plan, draft, edit, and publish their work with confidence.

Teaching Handwriting pdf

Reading

Once learners develop fluency in reading through our Structured Literacy approach, teaching increasingly focuses on strengthening comprehension skills. Learners are supported to understand and think deeply about what they read by practising strategies such as retelling key events in order, making predictions, identifying the author’s purpose, making inferences, drawing on prior knowledge, and evaluating and synthesising information.

Through the use of shared texts, stories, and poems, students also develop a love of reading for enjoyment. At Point View School we place a strong emphasis on comprehension, encouraging learners to think critically, ask questions, and engage meaningfully with the texts they read.