Helping our pupils to develop a lifelong love of reading is an absolute priority at Enstone Primary School. We encourage pupils to read for pleasure and for learning, and provide regular and meaningful opportunities for them to do this.

Books are a focus throughout our curriculum, providing an opportunity to broaden pupils’ knowledge and understanding in every subject area.  Books can also provide our pupils with a doorway into another world, or another perspective. 

In every class, we use carefully selected, high-quality texts that link with our termly topics and fire the children’s imaginations, ensuring that our pupils experience reading a broad range of genres, authors and styles, which in turn helps to develop their language skills and inspire creative ideas for their writing.

We use the "Bug Club Phonics" scheme to structure and support our teaching of Phonics throughout the Early Years Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1.  "Bug Club Phonics" reading scheme books support children's early reading development by closely matching texts to their stages in phonics development.  We also have extensive class libraries of age-appropriate picture books, novels and non-fiction books to further support reading development, plus a beautiful library which children are encouraged to visit regularly.

Our broader focus on the literary arts includes taking part in World Book Day, Chipping Norton’s Literary Festival, Oxfordshire’s Annual Book Awards and author visits to the school.  We also run two popular reading clubs – “Jackanory” for KS1 and “Bookworms” for KS2.

We are pleased to be a "Schoolreaders" partner school.  "Schoolreaders" recruits, places and supports volunteers in local primary schools to give children one-to-one reading support on a weekly basis, boosting their literacy skills, confidence, and reading fluency. We’re delighted to be able to provide our pupils with this valuable extra reading time each week.