How we deliver English

All students have four lessons of English per week (Year 10 have 5 lessons per week).

Qualifications delivered by the English department:

• AQA GCSE English Literature
• AQA GCSE English Language
   

Department Information

English is a subject that allows our students to explore a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction texts. These texts will touch upon many themes that will open up their imaginations and equip them to develop their literacy skills for their everyday lives. As an academy, we place importance on English, reading particularly; due to the benefits it can have for our pupils both academically and personally.
Students study a range of topics which can be viewed in the curriculum plans below. A range of texts are chosen to engage all our students and to ensure that a range of cultures and topics are explored. The curriculum includes a range of classic literature from authors such as Shakespeare, Shelly and Dickens along with contemporary writers such as Malorie Blackman and Benjamin Zephaniah, and a variety of non-fiction texts.

Our English curriculum aims to be a curriculum that explores and utilises the best of what is already known to our students, but also takes them beyond their lived experience; a curriculum that gives all pupils the chance to read, understand and question great literary texts in their diverse forms; a curriculum that gives them the linguistic and expressive tools to read, question and respond to the world around them. Our curriculum covers the National Curriculum in full. 

The English curriculum aims to:

• Offer a broad, knowledge-rich, and intellectually challenging curriculum that gives students a solid grounding in the debates surrounding the ‘best of what has been thought and said’ but also gives them the texts, tools and skills to identify, question and challenge the gaps in the canons. 
• Teach texts which are diverse, inclusive and anti-racist alongside the more traditional canonical texts to provide our students with a broad experience of English
• Teach students the substantive and conceptual knowledge required to understand the literary periods that they study. By doing this, we create confident and knowledgeable students, regardless of their starting points 
• To ensure knowledge is sequenced by our subject experts to ensure the substantive and conceptual knowledge they acquire is returned to and built upon to form strong foundations for their future learning 
• To ensure the most important concepts, vocabulary and substantive knowledge are interleaved throughout the curriculum so that students develop strong, long term memories of our ambitious and intellectually challenging curriculum, preparing them for their next steps.
   

Curriculum Overview