Enabling every pupil to become happy, secure, enthusiastic life-long learners who can experience personal success.
Phonics
Phonics Intent
At Hilltop Primary Academy, we believe that reading is the foundation of all learning and that strong early phonics teaching is essential in enabling every child to become a confident, fluent reader and writer. Our phonics curriculum is built upon the systematic and rigorous teaching of Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, ensuring consistency, clarity and high expectations for all children.
We are committed to delivering a structured, cumulative and clearly sequenced approach to phonics, where children are taught to recognise grapheme–phoneme correspondences, blend sounds for reading and segment words for spelling. Through daily, high-quality lessons, children develop automaticity and accuracy, allowing them to focus on meaning and comprehension as their fluency grows.
Our phonics intent is to:
- Ensure all children secure strong decoding skills through systematic, explicit teaching.
- Develop fluent readers who can apply blending and segmenting skills independently.
- Build accurate spelling through secure knowledge of phonemes, graphemes and tricky words.
- Foster a love of reading by providing fully decodable books matched precisely to children’s phonics knowledge.
- Identify and support children who require additional practice through timely keep-up interventions.
Phonics teaching at Hilltop begins in Early Years and continues through Key Stage 1, following the progression set out in Little Wandle. Lessons are fast-paced, engaging and highly interactive, with regular review to strengthen retention and recall. Children read decodable books closely matched to their current phonic phase, building confidence, fluency and prosody through repeated practice.
Through a rigorous and nurturing approach to phonics, we ensure that every child at Hilltop develops the essential skills to become a lifelong reader.
