Highlands School is committed to ensuring high standards of literacy for all students.

Our form time reading programme, in which students read a wide range of texts aided by audio books, helps to develop students' reading fluency and exposes them to a wide range of high quality literature.

All students are assessed on reading comprehension and vocabulary twice a year to monitor progress. These assessments produce a reading age for each student and ensure that appropriate levels of support are provided.

Students in years 7-9 whose reading ages do not correlate with their actual age are provided with additional support in the form of the Lexia reading programme.

Throughout all subjects, students are explicitly taught tier 3 vocabulary to ensure that they develop a rich and complex vocabulary. This will allow them to access the curriculum in a deep and meaningful way and aid in their ability to engage with these disciplines in the wider world.