What are English Hubs?
In 2018 the DfE launched 34 English Hubs across England to support schools to improve the teaching of phonics and early reading. Hubs are able to offer funding and free support to schools.
Support provided by the hubs focuses on the following three areas:
- Early language development and 'closing the word gap'.
- Age-appropriate phonics provision: encouraging best practice in systematic synthetic phonics teaching. This includes encouraging fidelity to a single systematic synthetic phonics programme and supporting the effective use of decodable books in the early stages of learning to read as a way of establishing phonic decoding.
- Promoting a love of reading through a focus on reading aloud, developing teachers' knowledge of children's literature, supporting whole school reading approaches and encouraging reading at home.