English and Literacy
Subject Vision Statement – English
The Vision for the English Curriculum
- All children leave the British Section as readers – people who read for pleasure, read with purpose and read lots.
- All children know themselves to be writers – writers who enjoy the process of writing and have the resilience to thrive on the challenges being a writer brings.
Content Rationale
- Much of the technical content is dictated by the National Curriculum
- Writing purposes (genres) have been selected to meet the statutory demands of the NC and to provide the opportunity to master a carefully selected number of purposes for writing – the focus is on mastery of those purposes.
- Text choice is at the discretion of the class teacher, but should be an age appropriate text which has the capacity to engage and inspire the reader.
- In KS1, a daily discrete phonics lesson is planned as part of a systematic programme for the teaching of phonics.
- Texts should be chosen with the two key principles of the English Curriculum as the primary driver: they should give the children the opportunity to love the act of reading and to gain fulfilment from the writing opportunities it inspires.
Structure Rationale
- Structure of the progression of technical content is dictated by the National Curriculum.
- Phonics teaching follows the Letters and Sounds teaching programme designed by the Department for Education.
- Text difficulty and complexity will broadly progress in difficulty parallel with year groups. There is flexibility within this general trend depending on the needs of the cohort and the purpose of the lesson (s).
- Writing purposes increase in variety and complexity in parallel with the year groups. In KS1, it is important to master a small variety of writing purposes that are suitable for the developmental stage of the writer. This creates a strong foundation of expertise to support the development of older children as they progress in terms of the complexity and variety of writing purposes.
Pedagogical Approaches
- A robust, systematic phonics programme is taught in conjunction with access to inspiring, global texts.
- Reading is experienced and taught in a wide variety of ways: whole class, small group, individual, and being read to.
- Children are given plenty of opportunity to read aloud.
- Children are read to frequently and as an embedded element to the curriculum
- Children are given significant opportunities to talk about books and their reading. This type of oracy is modelled by the class teacher but independence is explicitly nurtured.
- Model for teaching writing:
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Plan – collecting ideas and mapping out the piece of writing Draft – writing the first draft following the plan, but deviating from it when inspired by a better idea Evaluate - consider the strengths and weaknesses of the first draft Edit/redraft – an opportunity to make improvements to their first draft in light of the evaluation stage |
- All feedback provides clear and specific guidance on how a pupil can improve their writing.
- All feedback is designed and delivered as to require effort and improvement by the pupil
- The impact of feedback is clearly visible in the work and learning of the children.
- Grammar and punctuation are taught, wherever possible, within writing models and is given context and purpose.
Below you can find the Curriculum Overviews for this topic.
