With Christ at the centre of our curriculum, we aim to nurture each student so they can achieve their God-given potential and literacy is at the heart of this. Literacy is crucial to ensuring success as it bridges three fundamental strands: reading, writing and oracy. Literacy is essential to improving attainment at GCSE and A Level, as well as building cultural knowledge for students to flourish in their future lives. All departments regularly review and improve the literacy provision in their given domain and promote a culture of reading.
At The John Fisher School, we aim to inspire a love of reading and provide as much opportunity as possible for students to read freely, voluntarily, and with delight. Through events and programmes such as BookBuzz, Form Time Reading, bi-weekly library lessons, reading mentors, book clubs, writing workshops, author visits and so much more, we place reading in a position of prominence for our students. The benefits of regular reading are numerous and well-researched. Frequent readers:
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Have higher literacy scores, cognitive growth, and improvements in maths and vocabulary (Sullivan and Brown 2015)
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Are better positioned to handle the academic and cognitive demands across the curriculum (Schugar and Dreher 2017)
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Have higher levels of emotional wellbeing and better mental health (Kennewell et al. 2022, Sun et al. 2023)
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Develops perspective–taking and empathy (Mar and Oatlety 2008; Kidd and Castano 2013; Kummerling-Meibauer 2014)
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Better behavioural adjustment at the start of adolescence (Mark and Fancourt 2019)
However, we understand the challenges of getting young people to read outside the classroom. In the UK, the number of students who report enjoying reading is at the lowest level since 2005 (as reported by the National Literacy Trust's most recent 2025 survey). Please find a guide to encouraging reading at home and a selection of bespoke reading lists below.
“Works of art are surrounded by orbits of discussion.” - Keith Oatley
Literacy Team:
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Miss S. Carquez - Literacy and Research Lead
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Miss L. Burgess - Librarian
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Mrs V. Mukesh - Literacy Intervention Coordinator