Who is this template for?
This template is designed for school leaders in England who are responsible for driving standards in literacy. This includes roles such as the Reading Lead, Literacy Coordinator, English Subject Leader, and members of the Senior Leadership Team (SLT). It provides a robust framework to evaluate and improve reading provision consistently across the school.
Why use this template?
This template provides a clear, structured process to evaluate and strengthen your school's approach to teaching reading, ensuring it aligns with the latest DfE guidance. The benefits include:
- Ensures Consistency: It provides a cohesive and consistent method for evaluating reading across all year groups, departments, or even multiple schools within a trust.
- Aligns with National Standards: The evaluation areas are directly based on the DfE's Reading Framework, ensuring your school's self-evaluation is aligned with national expectations and best practices.
- Identifies Strengths and Weaknesses: The visual abacus model helps you quickly identify where reading provision is strong and where improvement is needed, allowing you to target resources and support effectively.
- Drives Focused Improvement: The process moves seamlessly from evaluation to action planning. By analysing the 'helping' and 'hindering' factors, you can create a targeted improvement plan that addresses the root causes of any issues.
- Empowers Middle Leaders: It equips Reading and English Leaders with a powerful tool to lead their teams, fostering professional dialogue and collective ownership of the school's reading strategy.
- Supports Strategic Oversight: For Headteachers and trust leaders, the template provides a clear, high-level overview of reading standards, making it easy to spot trends and share best practice across the organisation.
- Creates Clear Reports: Generate professional, one-click PDF reports to share with SLT, governors, or inspectors, providing a clear and evidenced summary of your reading provision and improvement priorities.
How does it work?
This template follows the standard, intuitive iAbacus process: make a judgement, verify it with criteria, provide evidence, analyse helping and hindering factors, and create a targeted action plan. The evaluation is structured around the following key areas from the DfE Reading Framework:
- Language comprehension
- Storytimes
- Poetry, rhymes and songs
- Teaching of phonics
- Teaching a systematic programme
- Developing fluency
- Assessment
- Keeping up from the start
- Older pupils who need to catch up
- Leadership and management
Gaining Strategic Insight
For senior leaders, this template provides powerful strategic insight. A Headteacher can overlay the 'Reading Evaluation' abacuses completed by different Reading Leaders across the school. This creates an instant visual 'heat map' of reading strengths and weaknesses, helping to identify common CPD needs or pockets of excellence that can be shared. Similarly, a trust-wide Reading Lead can stack the abacuses from each school. This facilitates a powerful comparison of different approaches, helping to identify which interventions are having the biggest impact on improving children’s reading across the trust.
Clear, Professional Reporting
With one click, you can export your completed evaluation into a polished, visually compelling PDF report. This is perfect for a Reading Lead sharing an overview of reading provision with the Headteacher and SLT. The report clearly outlines strengths, weaknesses, and evidence-backed priorities, ensuring senior leaders are kept fully informed and aligned on the areas for improvement.
References / Source Material
How to Get Started
New to iAbacus? Discover how this template can support your improvement strategy. Book a personalised demo or start a free trial to explore the full platform. Visit www.iabacus.com to learn more.
Already a subscriber? You can find this template in the template library within your iAbacus account. Simply log in, create a new abacus, and select it from the list to get started.
