Curriculum, Teaching & Learning

English

The English department prides itself on encouraging all of our students to develop an intellectual curiosity and rigour. We support the development of high levels of literacy and writing competency whilst providing engaging and enriching opportunities to extend students’ self-knowledge and knowledge of the world around them. The students will develop strong interpersonal skills, working in discursive classroom environments, and will also be supported to become independent learners who take responsibility for their own learning. We aim to foster a lifelong love of learning using engagement with literary culture and the written word. As a subject area, we are perfectly placed to widen students’ horizons, building on their cultural capital and interleaving skills essential across the entire school. Our students become excellent communicators, in writing and speech, who are skilled at both interpreting the world around them and navigating that world, morally, intellectual, spiritually, and socially.

We have crafted, through a constant process of reflection, a curriculum which is broad, rich, inclusive, and challenging. All our schemes revolve around cyclical revision and refinement of key skills associated with reading, writing, speaking and listening. Each unit builds on the previous in terms of skills and more broadly with thematic threads connecting the content of the units. Our interleaving schema supports understanding over time and a mastery of life long skills.