Stephen Morgan MP visited New Horizons Primary School today to see first-hand how national initiative Reading Recovery is supporting young students with their reading.
Reading Recovery is a literacy programme designed for the lowest achieving children aged around six that enables them to reach age-expected levels within 20 weeks.
Visiting the school, the Portsmouth MP was able to learn more about how Reading Recovery and a range of other literacy interventions, which are trained by a local Reading Recovery teacher at the school, supports vulnerable learners and offers a safety net to those beginning to fall behind in literacy.
Based at the UCL Institute of Education, the Reading Recovery network supports hundreds of schools across the UK, who use it as an early intervention strategy to reduce the number of children experiencing literacy difficulties.
Each school involved is able to personalise learning, making sure that the phonics teaching fits with the school’s phonics programme.
According to UCL’s Institute for Education, nearly 20% of children (126,356) in England do not meet the expected standards in the Year 1 phonics test. In 2017, nearly 20,000 11-year-olds had reading standards so low that they either could not be entered for the National Reading Test, or took the test but did not achieve any score.
The Member of Parliament for Portsmouth South, Stephen Morgan, said:
“It’s been really useful to see first-hand at New Horizons Primary School the work Reading Recovery is doing to support young people with their reading.
“Students have faced an unprecedented level of disruption to their learning over the last two years, so it’s vital they are able to get the extra support where it’s needed to help them catch up.
“Despite the work of schemes like this one, government cannot rely on them to paper over the cracks as more and more Portsmouth children continue to be at risk of being left behind.
“Only Labour’s Education Recovery has the ambition and vision to match the scale of the challenge ahead. I will continue to lobby Ministers to secure the very best for local students’ futures.”
