English

The intention of our English curriculum is

To equip students with the literacy skills they will need in adult life, teaching them about tone, style, context, nuance, bias and techniques that manipulate audiences in a range of fiction and non-fiction texts.

Our curriculum delves into the literary and cultural heritage of students’ own culture and that of others and invites them to discuss social, moral and ethical issues in a variety of socio-historical contexts.

Students have a wide range of opportunities to articulate their own opinions in both speech and writing.

Each Key Stage offers a range of opportunities to produce and analyse differing forms of creative and non-fiction writing, and to engage with and analyse modern and classical prose, poetry from different eras, drama, and plays by Shakespeare. The curriculum is interleaved so that skills and knowledge are developed with an increasing degree of complexity whilst also being differentiated for students of all abilities.

We look consistently to encourage engagement in the social issues arising from the discussion of a text so that consideration of SMSC issues and British values can be explored.

We also aim to develop a love of reading for pleasure and build on the literacy skills from the Primary phase.

Our English curriculum is implemented by:

Ensuring teachers deliver consistent lesson planning, often utilising PowerPoint presentations that include key terms, starter activities, discussions, and writing tasks to give students the chance to demonstrate their understanding.

Modelling written and analytical tasks is a key approach, as is the shared analysis of passages of text. We use a fortnightly writing challenge to build student “pen miles” and help them demonstrate their knowledge in extended writing.

Year by year plans begin with baseline written tasks that assess what students already know. From there, skills build cumulatively, be it adding ways in which students could improve their writing through changing tense, changing perspective, using unsettling grammar, through analysing increasingly complex poetry on a similar theme, or working through a text building on what we know about characters, themes and context.

Our planning is ambitious in order to help students acquire skills across a scheme from a baseline thereby making evident progress.

The impact of our English curriculum will be:

Evidenced by the development of independent young people who can write effectively for a range of purposes and audiences, read critically and analytically, who enjoy books for pleasure, are able to debate and see others’ points of view, and understand the culture in which they live and cultures of others.

They will achieve good exam results that open the doors to future opportunity.