English
Intent
The English Department aims to instill in our students a lifelong love of reading, writing, and the power of the spoken word. We strive to guide pupils on a voyage of discovery through great literary works from Chaucer to the present day while also exploring each pupil's personal ideas and responses to texts of all kinds, including fiction, non-fiction, and multi-media. Our goal is to inspire students to be creative thinkers and to provide fluent written and verbal responses to the ideas presented to them.
Knowledge and Skills
English encourages the development of a wide range of transferable skills. Students of English should be capable of:
- Reading and writing fluently and accurately.
- Enjoying reading for pleasure, including fiction, autobiography, magazines, and newspapers.
- Speaking with confidence, using Standard English and a range of rhetorical devices to engage the listener.
- Presenting arguments and considering different viewpoints.
- Evaluating, commenting on, or reviewing a written or spoken text.
- Engaging in spoken games, such as charades, and participating in role play or acting.
Curriculum Overview
Key Stage 3
All students study English at Key Stage 3. During Years 7, 8, and 9, students will read full novels, explore a range of poetry, and study a Shakespeare play. The aim is to introduce them to the Literary Canon, seminal world literature, and the evolution of texts from Middle English (Chaucer) to contemporary fiction. There is a strong emphasis on developing literacy skills, building vocabulary, and ensuring accuracy in writing, as well as fostering confidence in expressing ideas and engaging in public speaking.
Key Stage 4
Career Opportunities in English
Year 7 Curriculum Overview
| What are we learning? | What knowledge, understanding and skills will we gain? | What will excellence look like? | How will this be assessed? |
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Students will learn about autobiographical writing using Roald Dahl’s ‘Boy’ as a key text. |
Students will read and enjoy the class reader. They will analyse Dahl’s use of language, looking at techniques such as simile, metaphor and personification. They will aim to use more sophisticated vocabulary and language devices in their own writing. |
Students will be able to analyse the use and effect of a range of language devices and to comment upon the effect on the reader. Their own autobiographical writing will be ambitious in terms of vocabulary choices, language devices and varied sentence structures and punctuation.
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Formative assessment of smaller sections of autobiographical writing will lead to a summative assessment where students write their own mini-autobiography.
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| Students will study the genre of Gothic fiction through a range of extracts. | Students will become familiar with the key features and important writers in the Gothic genre. They will begin their studies of 19th century literature which will be spiralled, as the curriculum progresses, to GCSE. | Students will be able to read extracts from nineteenth century literature with understanding and insight and become familiar with key ideas and themes. They will be able to replicate this style in their own piece of fluent and entertaining Gothic literature. | Students will complete formative assessment tasks based on the extracts they read in class and will complete a summative assessment of their own Gothic short story. |
Year 8 Curriculum Overview
| What are we learning? | What knowledge, understanding and skills will we gain? | What will excellence look like? | How will this be assessed? |
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Students will read the novel ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ and excerpts from Anne Frank’s diary. |
Students will understand the wider context of World War 2 and the Holocaust. They will become familiar with the plot, characters and themes in ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.’ They will make some comparisons between the fiction and non-fiction text. |
Students will be able to write fluently about the novel, using embedded quotations and commenting on the effect on the reader of language and structure techniques.
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This unit will be assessed through a piece of transactional writing, where students will write, in role, as one of the characters. During the teaching, there will be several opportunities for formative assessment. |
| Poetry Unit. | Students study a range of poems, which are paired by theme. This unit builds upon the Year 7 poetry unit to look at comparisons between poems based on context, language, form and structure. Students learn to make comparisons and to embed quotations to back up points made. | The aim of the unit is for students to be able to make interesting and original comparisons between poems, pointing out similarities and differences between the ways a particular theme or idea is conveyed in two poems. Students will write fluent essays comparing a range of different aspects. | Throughout the teaching of the unit there will be many opportunities for formative assessment but the unit ends with a formative assessment comparing two poems on the topic of ‘old-age’. |
Year 9 Curriculum Overview
| What are we learning? | What knowledge, understanding and skills will we gain? | What will excellence look like? | How will this be assessed? |
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Students will study the novella ‘Of Mice and Men’ by John Steinbeck. |
Students will understand the wider context of The Great Depression in 1930s America and issues of segregation and racism at that time. They will read and analyse the novella, looking at how Steinbeck uses language and structure to interest and engage the reader and to practise GCSE analytical skills.
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Students will respond to characters and themes in the text with insight and understanding. They will write fluent paragraphs giving detailed and sophisticated analysis looking at context, language and structure. Well-chosen quotations will be skilfully embedded in the analysis.
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Throughout the teaching of the novella, formative assessment will be integrated to ensure the progression of skills. The summative assessment will be a character study of the character ‘Slim.’
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| Winter Themed Imaginative Writing Unit. | Students will read and analyse a range of short extracts representing writers from Shakespeare to the present day. The anthology of texts will include both fiction and non-fiction all united by a winter theme. | Students will be increasingly confident in reading and understanding a range of fiction and non-fiction text extracts, from all literary genres and eras. They will be able to analyse the writers’ use of language and structure and its effect on the reader. They will write creatively and engagingly on the theme of Winter. | Formative assessment will be interweaved into the teaching of the unit, in the form of analytical and written tasks. The summative assessment is a creative piece, entitled ‘Winter Journey.’ |
Year 10 Curriculum Overview
| What are we learning? | What knowledge, understanding and skills will we gain? | What will excellence look like? | How will this be assessed? |
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‘A Christmas Carol’ |
Students will study their nineteenth century novel for English Literature GCSE. They will learn how to analyse the effect on the reader of the writer’s language and structure techniques and how to write a thesis statement and explanation of how a particular theme or character or setting is presented in the whole text. |
Extract analysis is focused and detailed. Relevant subject terminology is used accurately and appropriately to develop ideas. When writing about the whole text, there is an assured personal response, showing a high level of engagement. |
Formative assessment will take place throughout the teaching of the text, including extract analysis in half-term one and whole text responses in half-term two.
In each half-term there will be a formal summative assessment. |
Year 11 Curriculum Overview
| What are we learning? | What knowledge, understanding and skills will we gain? | What will excellence look like? | How will this be assessed? |
| ‘Conflict’ Poetry |
Students will study eight poems from the ‘Conflict’ collection on the topic of personal and emotional conflict. (The seven ‘war’ poems were previously studied in Year 10.)
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Students will make perceptive comparisons and contrasts between poems in the collection. They will show a perceptive grasp of form and structure and their effect. Relevant subject terminology will be integrated and precise. Students will show a good understanding of the context in which the poems were written.
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Students will practise writing comparative poetry essays as formative assessment with a formal summative assessment at the end of the unit.
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| English Language Paper 2. |
Students will recall skills learned for English Language Paper 1 (analysis and evaluation) and apply them to non-fiction texts, for Paper 2. In addition, they will learn how to compare non-fiction texts and how to approach the transactional writing section of the exam paper.
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Students will show confidence in analysing and evaluating texts, showing a sustained critical overview and making perceptive comments. Their transactional writing will be suitable for audience and purpose, using a range of vocabulary and sentence structures. |
Formative assessment will be interweaved into the teaching of the unit. Summative assessment will be a piece of transactional writing. |
