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English
BackWe have sky high ambitions for our students and want them to be given the means necessary to study English at university.
Through our English curriculum, students read high-quality literature from a repertoire of authors who have stood the test of time, are taught to write clearly and confidently with a strong grasp of technical accuracy and learn how to speak eloquently and fluently in a variety of contexts.
Guiding them on this journey are teachers who are passionate about their subject and share their love of literature in class.
Our students follow a knowledge-rich curriculum, guided by the principles of direct instruction and cognitive psychology, so that they know more, understand more and remember more about English.
Social justice underpins our English curriculum, with all students having access to the same core curriculum so that they may succeed no matter their prior attainment, background or educational need.
By providing students with a strong core of knowledge in English, we create the foundation for them to criticise, question and evaluate other texts by themselves throughout their future lives.
Course Structure
Our curriculum is structured around the disciplinary knowledge that students would need in order to continue their studies of English at university and in the wider world.
These academic disciplines share the common ground that knowledge in English can be viewed as ‘the exploration of truth through beauty and power’; a guiding principle of our curriculum.
Lying beneath these disciplines are the substantive knowledge and concepts needed by students, which are mapped out across the curriculum so that they build cumulatively, providing students with specific quality examples.
For example, knowledge of the 'bildungsroman genre' is explored in Year 8 in Oliver Twist and then revisited in Year 9 with Jane Eyre, allowing pupils to see how genres can be manipulated in different types of texts.
Texts have also been chosen with chronology in mind, so students can understand how literature fits into a structure overtime. This allows students to see how texts talk to each other, are built on the back of other texts and how our culture has been shaped by our literature.
