English

"When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language." - James Earl Jones

English is a fundamental element of all children's education which, through high-quality teaching, enables children to access all areas of our whole-school curriculum and enables them to think, talk and write about their world.

Our carefully sequenced English curriculum allows our children to develop our three core values of community, respect and perseverance, while building their knowledge of phonics, reading, writing and speaking and listening in a language-rich environment.

The speaking and listening strands of the curriculum teach children to listen to other people's views with respect and enables them to participate actively and respond appropriately to their peers and wider community. The children are given opportunities to develop their speaking and listening skills by taking part in discussions, debates, performing and leading assemblies. There are daily opportunities to practise grammatical conventions and different sentence structures using oral composition to ensure all children are able to speak clearly and express their ideas. Our children use language effectively to offer opinions, explore ideas and justify answers with confidence and perseverance when questioned by others. We believe it is important for children to be able to talk about their own learning with confidence. 

Reading is at the very heart of our curriculum. Every child reads widely and often, beginning every day with reading sessions across the school. The early stages of reading allow children to have a secure and embedded phonic knowledge to support them with sounding out unfamiliar words. As these skills develop, they will become fluent readers who are able to use their knowledge and skills across the curriculum, beginning a life-long love of reading. This allows them to become successful members of a literate community. Children are encouraged to explore texts in depth, answering questions, giving opinions and showing a growing understanding of a wider vocabulary. Children demonstrate perseverance when answering questions about texts when the answer is not immediately available to them. 

Story time is a special and important time of the day in every year group, where children are able to hear rich stories which further embed their love of reading.

Children are able to access a wide range of up to date quality texts in our beautiful school library, further enhancing our English curriculum.

We believe that developing writing skills enables children to become fluent and confident writers. Our "Chance to Shine" writing opportunities give children chance to apply their learning and then evaluate their work and recognise their next steps. The children write for real purposes, about real life events so that their writing has meaning and links to our community. They are also immersed in a range of fiction genres throughout their school life and they are able to apply their writing skills across all subjects. 

English is essentially about learning to use reading, writing and spoken language in real and important ways. Being literate is a vital life-skill that allows children to feel like they belong and can achieve. When we help children to become readers and writers with expansive vocabularies, we give them the keys to a worldwide community of opportunities.  

To find out more about our English curriculum, please visit the Reading, Writing and Phonics pages and explore the Literacy Subject Handbook, which outlines the progression and sequencing of children's Literacy learning as they move up through the school.