ENGLISH

Teaching Staff

  • Miss Schunmann - Head of English 
  • Miss Thomson - Deputy English Lead
  • Mr Hogan-Steel - Assistant English Lead
  • Ms Way - Assistant English Lead
  • Mr Doolan
  • Mrs Gillett
  • Mrs Harold
  • Mrs Strafford
  • Miss Bol

Aims

KS3

In English we aim to introduce students to a broad range of Literature – including poetry, plays, short stories and novels – from across different time periods and from different places.  They study poetry chronologically as follows:

  • Year 7 – Homer to Milton: An Epic Journey
  • Year 8 – Romantics and Victorians
  • Year 9 – The Moderns and World Poetry

This journey takes them from Homer to Milton and then onto the Romantics and Victorians before looking at 20th and 21st Century poetry from across the world. They also study a series of major novels and shorter novellas and stories. Over the course of KS3 they will all read:

  • Year 7 - Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and Call of the Wild
  • Year 8 - Animal Farm and A Christmas Carol
  • Year 9 – The Woman in Black and The Woman in Black

Across KS3 we also introduce students to Shakespeare studying:

  • Year 7 - Romeo and Juliet
  • Year 8 - The Tempest 
  • Year 9 - Julius Caesar

Students will also study one of two modern plays by Arthur Miller in Year 9 – either The Crucible or A View from the Bridge.

Literature and reading are at the heart of our curriculum and we encourage students to read widely and for pleasure, with monthly library lessons in KS3.

To this end each student is given a Reading Passport where they keep a record of their reading and are awarded House Points and other awards based on their reading. We encourage students to share and recommend books based on their reading through discussion and reviews.  

Embedded into the study of literature and the development of our students as readers are the teaching of writing and speaking and listening. Students begin to engage with essay writing from the start of Year 7 and the skills continue to be developed across KS3. We also embed creative writing – including descriptive, story and point of view writing – into all of our units of work. Within each unit there are opportunities for discussion and presentation and students are encouraged to develop as confident speakers.

Our aim is for our students to be confident and fluent readers, able to engage with and understand varied texts. Our goal is to further develop our students into confident young people, able to speak and write with conviction, consciously crafting their language for different contexts: to be able to speak and write imaginatively, discursively and analytically.

KS4

At KS4 our students follow the AQA English Literature and English Language courses. In Literature we study:

  • Macbeth, William Shakespeare
  • The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
  • An Inspector Calls, J B Priestley
  • AQA Poetry Anthology: Power and Conflict poems

These text choices are directly linked to the work completed at KS3. Students have already studied three Shakespeare plays in year 7 – 9 and end KS3 with the study of Julius Caesar, a play with direct thematic links to Macbeth. Furthermore, they have studied The Yellow Wallpaper in year 9, a story also concerned with ideas about identity and duality, linking directly to Jekyll and Hyde. The modern plays studied in Year 9 are also concerned with issues relating to class, power and society – ideas which are developed in a different context in An Inspector Calls. Across KS3, students have read and explored a range of poetry preparing them for the poetry they will study in Years 10 and 11. The text choices provide continuity for our students and allow them to engage with the texts at the highest level.

We continue to build on the essay writing skills that have been developed across KS3, teaching students to write confident and exploratory pieces of writing, where students develop their own arguments in response to the texts studied.

In the Language GCSE, we continue to develop the students’ independent reading skills in Paper 1 and 2, emphasising the cross-over between skills in Literature and Language. We encourage the students to read broadly in terms of fiction and non-fiction, setting reading and vocabulary homework to continue to expand the students’ ability to engage with a range of texts and to build their confidence as readers. Alongside this, they continue to learn how to develop effective pieces of creative writing in terms of description, narrative and point of view pieces, looking at how to effectively use language, form and structure to develop coherent and powerful pieces of writing.

Our aim is to align our KS3 and KS4 curriculums to enhance our students’ potential, to allow them to develop to the best of their ability, and to achieve the highest levels in their GCSE examinations, opening up opportunities as they venture into Higher Education.

Qualifications

  • GCSE English Language
  • GCSE English Literature

Please see below for Curriculum Overview Maps for a breakdown of what is taught in each year group and by term: