English
Context
English is where enquiring minds are fostered, where young people have the chance to learn how to express themselves eloquently and with decency, where the most difficult philosophical and societal questions are debated and explored, where the pages of a book transport our youths to cultures, histories, ideas and worlds beyond their own personal experiences and where creativity is cultivated and nurtured. The moral duty of any school must be to teach young people what they ought to learn, not simply because it is on a GCSE specification, but because of its intrinsic value. By valuing what is truly important in the English classroom: enquiry, culture, creativity, reading, writing and oracy, our English curriculum has been designed to prepare our girls for life beyond our classroom.
Curriculum
The curriculum, first of all, has been designed to offer pupils a clear and coherent pathway from Year 7 through to Year 11, where skills and content are introduced in Year 7 and revisited over the course of the five-year learning journey. Along the way, pupils are immersed in a broad range of literature and the content covered becomes increasingly challenging. We begin in Year 7 with the basic skills: how to express and discuss ideas formally; how to write formally, including how to structure sentences, paragraphs and whole texts; how to elicit meaning from what is being read, including how then to express an understanding of a text; how to think critically about what others say and believe and also how to evaluate one’s own thoughts coherently; metacognition and reflection skills.
Alongside this set of skills, vital in an English classroom, but more importantly, vital for success in any subject and in any future vocation, we foster creativity and individualism, seeking through our curriculum, to encourage our pupils to take risks, go beyond their own expectations of their limits and to begin to form their own (informed) opinions about the world in which they live. From this starting point, year on year, we continue to teach these skills and foster these character traits in our pupils.
Within our five-year curriculum, we seek to enrich our pupils with just a taster of the great works that simply should be read by everyone at some point in their lives: we listen to some of the most important speeches of all times, study plays and novels that have had genuine societal and literary impact, read poems of cultural, historical and literary importance and, of course, we teach our pupils to love Shakespeare. Alongside teaching the best of the best literature, we focus on teaching pupils to be able to write or formally present their point of view and to write creatively. To do this, we model our expectations through our own teacher-written or spoken models but, of course, take the opportunity to read more of the best that there is to be read.
English and literacy is at the heart of learning: without an ability to read, write and communicate effectively, young people simply cannot succeed. Without knowledge and understanding of the world in which we live, of our history and of those who are unlike us, we cannot be decent, principled members of society. We plan and measure our curriculum and our teaching against these principle and steadfast beliefs which remain, always, at the heart of everything we do.
