South Park Primary School has become the first school in the borough to win the Reading Recovery School of the Year Award.

The school, in Water lane, Seven Kings, received the award yesterday for making an outstanding contribution to children’s literacy through the Reading Recovery programme.

The programme aims to help the lowest achieving children aged five or six to reach their age group’s literacy levels within 20 weeks.

Reading Recovery teachers Ghazala Jabeen and Val Calver were singled out for praise as they worked with all the underachieving readers in year one through individual and group support work.

Ghazala and Val were delighted to see the school rewarded for their efforts and thanked the school’s senior figures for their support of the programme.

The school’s business manager Parul Gadhvi said the programme, “has shown how powerful Reading Recovery procedures are and how they can be used outside the programme to support the reading progress of all underachieving children”.