Northern Ireland

Language/Reading Curriculum in the Fourth Grade

The Every School a Good School policy was launched in April 2009 with the goal of raising standards in every school at its heart. The statutory curriculum and assessment arrangements are centered on literacy and numeracy. The Count, Read: Succeed strategy brings these strands together and sets out how, by supporting the work of schools, the Department of Education will raise standards in literacy and numeracy and close the achievement gap.

The Northern Ireland curriculum, which was introduced in the 2007–2008 school year, applies to all 12 years of compulsory education. The primary school curriculum includes religious education and the following areas of learning:

• Language and Literacy
• Mathematics and Numeracy
• Arts
• The World Around Us
• Personal Development and Mutual Understanding
• Physical Education

The post-primary (secondary) school curriculum includes the area of Learning for Life and Work, which comprises employability, personal development, local and global citizenship, and home economics (at Key Stage 3). It additionally includes religious education and the following areas of learning:

• Language and Literacy
• Mathematics and Numeracy
• Modern Languages
• Arts
• Environment and Society
• Physical Education
• Science and Technology

At Key Stage 4, the statutory requirements have been reduced to learning for life and work, physical education, religious education, and developing skills and capabilities in order to provide greater choice and flexibility for students. The reduced requirements also will enable students to access the wider range of opportunities schools will have to provide through the curriculum entitlement framework.

Through each area of learning, students develop cross-curricular and other skills that they will need for life and work. These include communication, mathematics, and Information and Communications Technology (ICT). Additional skills include:

• Being creative
• Working with others
• Self-management
• Managing information
• Thinking, problem solving, and decision making

Reading Policy

The Northern Ireland Executive places particular emphasis on the development of literacy and numeracy skills for all young people, recognizing that “a solid foundation in literacy and numeracy is absolutely essential to ensure they can contribute effectively to the economy and society and live fulfilling lives.”⁸ The Executive’s Programme for Government 2011–2015 included a commitment to “improve literacy and numeracy levels among all school leavers, with additional support targeted at underachieving pupils.”⁹

The Department of Education’s Count, Read: Succeed strategy (“a strategy to improve outcomes in literacy and numeracy”) was launched in 2011 following earlier reforms that signaled the centrality of literacy and numeracy.¹⁰ Revised curriculum and assessment arrangements introduced during the 2007–2008 school year have literacy and numeracy at their core, with a focus on developing cross-curricular skills and teaching content through the curricular areas.¹¹ A 2009 policy called Every School a Good School—a Policy for School Improvement was designed to support and, where necessary, challenge schools in improving the quality of educational provision and outcomes for their students, particularly in literacy and numeracy.¹²

Count, Read: Succeed aims not only to raise overall standards in literacy and numeracy, but to close the gaps in achievement between the highest and lowest achieving students and schools.¹³ The strategy set a target that, by 2020, 90 percent of students at the end of primary education should achieve the expected levels in the cross-curricular skill of communication.

The role of school principal is seen as essential in ensuring that a literacy and numeracy “thread” runs through all aspects of school strategic planning, including the school development plan, teachers’ professional development, individual lesson plans, assessment techniques, and data collection. Count, Read: Succeed also emphasizes the importance of the central role of teachers in raising student attainment, early identification of and support for children experiencing difficulties with literacy and/or numeracy, and greater emphasis on the effective use of data in supporting teaching  and learning.¹⁴ The strategy also sets an expectation that primary schools provide a systematic program of high quality phonics instruction.

In 2013, a Northern Ireland Audit Office report noted that although levels of achievement in literacy had increased, the wide gap between the highest and lowest achieving students remained.¹⁵ The Delivering Social Change Signature Programme was launched in 2012 to improve literacy and numeracy as part of a wider government initiative tackling poverty and social exclusion. Recently qualified teachers who were not in a permanent teaching post were recruited on two year fixed term contracts to provide additional support for students at risk of underachieving. The program ran during the 2013–2014 and 2014–2015 school years and involved 151 primary schools.¹⁶

Summary of National Curriculum

The curriculum for students assessed in PIRLS 2016 is the Northern Ireland Curriculum, which was introduced during the 2007–2008 school year. The legislative basis for the curriculum is provided by the Education (Northern Ireland) Order 2006 and the Education (Curriculum Minimum Content) Order (Northern Ireland) 2007.^17,18

The statutory minimum curriculum for most subjects is managed and maintained by the Council for the Curriculum, Examinations, and Assessment and is available on the council’s website.¹⁹ The statutory core curriculum for religious education was drawn up by the four main churches in Northern Ireland and specified in legislation by the Department of Education. It is available on the Department of Education’s website.²⁰

At Key Stage 2 (Grades 5 to 7), the statutory minimum curriculum builds on the curricula for the two earlier stages of primary education, Key Stage 1 (Grades 3 to 4) and the Foundation Stage (Grades 1 to 2), which are organized with a similar model. The statutory minimum curriculum for Key Stage 2 specifies Language and Literacy as one of the areas of learning with the following broad aims:

“Literacy focuses on developing each child’s ability to understand and use language, both spoken and written, as an integral part of learning in all areas. The development of these skills enables children to interact effectively in the world around them, to express themselves creatively and to communicate confidently, using the four modes of communication (Talking and Listening, Reading and Writing) and a variety of skills and media. Language and Literacy should be considered in a holistic way, taking account of the integral nature of Talking and Listening and Reading and Writing which extend across all Areas of Learning.”²¹

The minimum content for Language and Literacy includes three contributory elements through which teachers are expected to help students develop knowledge, understanding, and skills: talking and listening, reading, and writing. At Key Stage 2, for the domain of Reading, students should be able to:²²

• Participate in modeled, shared, paired, and guided reading experiences
• Read, explore, understand, and make use of a wide range of traditional and digital texts
• Engage in sustained, independent, and silent reading for enjoyment and information
• Extend the range of their reading and develop their own reading preferences
• Use traditional and digital sources to locate, select, evaluate, and communicate information relevant to a particular task
• Represent their understanding of texts in a variety of ways (e.g., visually, orally, dramatically, digitally)
• Consider, interpret, and discuss texts, exploring how language can be manipulated to affect the reader or engage attention
• Begin to be aware of how media present information, ideas, and events in different ways
• Justify responses to texts logically by inference, deduction, and/or references to evidence within the text
• Reconsider initial responses to texts in light of insight and information that emerge subsequently from reading
• Read aloud to the class or teacher from prepared texts (including original works) using inflection to assist with meaning
• Use a variety of cross-checking strategies to read unfamiliar words in texts
• Use a variety of reading skills for different purposes

Standards of student competency in Language and Literacy are measured through the cross-curricular skill of communication. Across the curriculum, students should be enabled to develop skills in reading at a level appropriate to their ability and be able to:²³

• Read a variety of texts for information, ideas, and enjoyment^b
• Use a variety of strategies to read with increasing independence
• Find, select, and use information from a variety of sources
• Understand and explore ideas, events, and features in texts
• Use evidence from texts to explain opinions

The statutory minimum curriculum for Key Stage 3 (Grades 8 to 10) builds on the statutory minimum curricula for primary education and is organized with a similar model. The Council for the Curriculum, Examinations, and Assessment provides guidance and additional resources to support teachers in implementing the curriculum.²⁴

The curriculum outlined above applies to both English-medium and Irish-medium education. There is a difference in that, in Irish medium education, Language and Literacy (Irish) and Language and Literacy (English) are taught as separate subjects.²⁵