This course will cover:
• prepare you to deliver the 'Reading Together' programme to parents and year 2 to year 5 pupils in your school;
• the ''Reading Together' programme explains and models to parents how to support reading at home, ensures parents know the importance of reading and teaches them some shared reading techniques and promotes children reading for pleasure; and
• we use 'identity texts' for pupils from Pakistani Heritage or Polish heritage, but these could be used with pupils from any background and would benefit them.

The 'Reading Together' programme focuses on promoting reading for pleasure. Reading for pleasure has been shown to have a positive relationship with educational attainment and this is a stronger indicator of educational success than the family socio-economic background (DfE, 2012). We focus on changing parents' behaviour in terms of talking about books and promoting parental engagement in children's reading.

EAL pupils particularly benefit from book talk as they are very often well-able to decode, but struggle to comprehend as they cannot link the language to their own experiences and knowledge.

After trialling this project in a number of schools in Lancashire, we found:
• parents all said they felt very confident supporting their children with their reading; and
• pupils all had a more positive view of themselves as a reader.