Date and Time: Thursday 13 November 2025, 9am to 3.30pm plus optional twilight networking to 5pm.
Suitable for: Class teachers (EYFS-KS2), English Subject Leads, Senior Leadership.
Relevant areas of the National Curriculum: Language and vocabulary, oracy, reading, writing personal, social, emotional development.
Venue: Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, 44 Webber Street, London SE1 8QW (map).
Venue accessibility: Step free access, accessible toilets and accessible parking.
Description of session
Full day teacher CPD.
Explore a range of approaches designed to increase children’s motivation to read with a greater depth of understanding, leading to increased engagement and attainment across your school. We will focus on managing reading areas to make stock accessible, developing children’s self-selection and independence in reading and foster a love of reading in the school community.
Detail of activity
This Masterclass will be delivered by an expert advisory teacher from CLPE in partnership with award-winning children’s author S.F. Said. It will support teachers and leaders to plan for increased engagement and attainment in reading across the primary years.
We will explore the breadth of research that connects reading for pleasure with reading attainment, the role of all adults in school as readers, creating a culture in which children can be influenced to read widely and for pleasure and creative teaching approaches that give all children access to high quality texts.
Key areas of focus
- What do we mean by Reading for Pleasure?
- The importance of a rich knowledge of children’s literature and the role of teacher as reader, within a community of readers.
- Getting to know your children as readers, their interests and fascinations, their development, skills and understanding as readers, and draw on this to support the development of effective provision and practice.
- A greater understanding of what progression and development in reading looks like and the connection between reading identity and reading attainment.
- How to nurture positive reader identity and broaden children’s outlook through the use of quality inclusive literature.
- How to effectively choose and use a range of texts for different reading experiences, designed to promote reading for pleasure.
- Investigating and trialling key teaching approaches designed and proven to give all children access to quality texts and language and to raise engagement and attainment in reading across the school.
- The centrality of reading aloud as a key teaching approach that enables children to deepen response, improve access, develop vocabulary and draw attention to language models, while also modelling skilled reading behaviours and the pace, prosody and expression of fluent reading.
- Strategies for creating and maintaining a reading environment that is inviting and inclusive, that supports choosing and browsing, which invites re-reading and revisiting, and includes books that invite wider reading across forms, authors, poets and illustrators, topics or themes.
Takeaway
Participants will receive a high-quality children’s book for each primary phase (EYFS, KS1, KS2). They will also receive planning notes to help put strategies into practice in the classroom.
