All pupils at Southover have an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP), and some speak English as an Additional Language (EAL). Their needs are met by our educational and welfare provision, which includes a broad and balanced curriculum and bespoke interventions.  We collect the information on whether pupils speak English as an Additional Language (EAL) when they are admitted to Southover. All school pupils and Outreach pupils on the Excelerator Pathway’s reading age is tested annually, and those with EAL may achieve a lower score. We test and analyse pupils’:

• Sentence completion
• Passage comprehension with questions related to:
  • Retrieval
  • Simple inference
  • Context comprehension
  • Inference and deduction
  • Writer’s purposes and viewpoints
  • Writer’s use of language
  • Organisation of texts
  • Social, cultural and historical traditions

Specific teaching and learning strategies based on pupils’ reading ability are generated and implemented throughout the curriculum. Additionally, we also plan differentiated work, mode of delivery and expectations for pupils with EAL as we consider the following:

• Are pupils with EAL likely to be able to understand the work set?
  • What can pupils access independently?
  • What level of support (i.e. shorter instructions, time to process, provide pupils with a dictionary or visuals) might pupils with EAL require?
  • Are interventions required? [See Implementation]
    • 1:1 or 2:1 working environment with further differentiated work or use of translation
    • Toe-by-toe reading intervention
    • Rapid reading
    • Universal, targeted or specialist intervention in Speech and Language Therapy (SALT)

Early reading

• Besides offering Toe-by-toe reading intervention to pupils (Readers) whose reading level prevents them from accessing the curriculum, Southover also have Outreach pupils who:
  • Are in Key Stage 2, whose reading ability is still developing
  • Are on the Immersive Pathways (Pre-National Curriculum Levels to Primary National Curriculum Levels)
  • Emerging readers 

• In order to meet their reading needs, we offer the ‘Rapid Phonics Scheme’, which comes with ‘Rapid Reading’ (Primary age-appropriate books) and ‘Rapid Plus’ (Secondary age-appropriate books). We implement the Rapid Phonics Scheme through:
  • Regular 2:1 (Staff to pupil ratio) phonics intervention
  • Regular reading and comprehension sessions with pupils
  • Assessing pupils’ phonics and reading progress during the intervention
  • Providing parents and carers with regular feedback, in addition to termly reports
  • Providing parents and carers with online reading platforms 
  • Providing parents and carers with hard copy books in all stages