English: Key Stage 3 and 4
Confident communicators, reflective and critical readers, and thoughtful, articulate writers.
Curriculum Overview
The English curriculum at Spalding Grammar School is designed to produce students who are confident communicators, reflective and critical readers and thoughtful, articulate writers. We aim to equip our students with the skills they need to join in an ongoing conversation about the world they live in, informed by carefully-selected texts from a wide range of genres and periods.
Staff have worked together to develop a curriculum that is tailored to the needs and interests of boys in Years 7-11, making careful choices of set texts and activities to spark enthusiasm and ensure challenge. Resources are produced in-house and can be adapted to meet the needs of different groups, depending on whether students need support to embed specific skills or tasks that offer greater depth and challenge.
The curriculum is divided into five units per year. In KS3 the same text types are covered by all three year groups in each unit (Unit 1 – novel, Unit 2 – poetry, Unit 3 – Shakespeare, Unit 4 – non-fiction, Unit 5 – original writing). This allows us to revisit specific skills and text types: the curriculum is a ‘spiral’ in which successive units introduce more challenging texts and concepts and build on and extend the disciplinary knowledge, skills and understanding gained in previous years. Students in Year 7 are taught by two English teachers and study two units simultaneously; students in Years 8 and 9 have one teacher for the majority of their English lessons and another member of the department for their fortnightly 250-Word Challenge lesson, which focuses on developing skills in extended writing.
In KS4 English Language and English Literature are taught alongside each other, so students will tackle part of the English Language course alongside one of the English Literature set texts in each phase. Students have all of their lessons with the same English teacher, and keep the same teacher for the two years of the GCSE course.
Skills and knowledge are mapped out across all five years in order to ensure coverage of all elements of the two GCSE courses. In KS3 students develop the skills of exploring themes, ideas and characters in a range of texts. They examine the ways in which texts from all four genres can be used to tell stories, convey thought and represent the world. They learn how to describe and analyse the methods writers use to create particular effects, and begin to consider the ways in which writers are influenced by the contexts in which they live. They also learn to evaluate the effectiveness of particular texts and are encouraged to develop their own opinions and interpretations.
The texts chosen for study present increasing levels of challenge and are drawn from a range of periods and genres. We are working hard to diversify the curriculum by introducing a wider range of texts written by women and by writers of colour, whether as part of the key units or within students’ wider reading. To this end, we have introduced Zana Fraillon’s The Bone Sparrow in Year 7 and novels such as The Other Side of Hope (Beverley Naidoo), Coram Boy (Jamila Gavin), Between Shades of Gray (Ruta Sepetys) and Hell and High Water (Tanya Landman), together with the English and Media Centre’s multicultural short story collection Iridescent Adolescent, in wider reading lessons. Our Year 8 unit on The Tempest explores issues of colonialism and representation through a close study of the character of Caliban, and students in Year 9 explore the representation of marginalised groups further in their unit on nineteenth-century non-fiction.
Students are introduced to the literary canon from the beginning of Year 7, in their unit on poetry, which includes poems by Tennyson and de la Mare alongside the work of more contemporary writers whose work reflects the diversity of our heritage. Students study Once in Year 8 to build on their understanding of how fiction can be used to explore different experiences and illuminate particular historical events, and examine the Gothic genre in their Year 9 unit on The Woman in Black. Work on Shakespeare, which begins in Year 7, aims to give students a grounding in Shakespeare’s life, times and stagecraft and to build their confidence in handling Shakespeare’s language, beginning with guided work on short extracts and building towards the development of a sustained exploration of whole plays. Our unit on Romeo and Juliet in Year 9 introduces the concept of tragedy, and also includes work on the sonnet, preparing students for the work they will do in GCSE English Literature.
In writing, students learn to write for a range of audiences and purposes, and are taught the skills of planning, drafting and revising their work through activities that include modelling and shared writing and the use of WAGOLLs and peer assessment. From September 2023, we are also introducing an explicit focus on writing through a fortnightly 250-Word Challenge lesson. Emphasis is placed on accuracy of spelling, punctuation and grammar and students are encouraged to develop a rich vocabulary and to craft their work using a range of stylistic and structural methods. All original writing tasks, from Year 7 upwards, include time for planning, drafting, self-assessment and review. RAFT tasks – again from Year 7 upwards – require students to focus on redrafting specific parts of their work and adding comments to reflect on what they have changed and why. We give frequent opportunities for students to recall key aspects of knowledge and embed them within carefully-crafted sentences, in order to build their fluency in academic writing. Subject-specific vocabulary is taught and tested explicitly in a number of units, and activities in all units require students to reflect on the words that would be most appropriate to describe particular characters or convey particular atmospheres. Discourse markers and the planning of discursive essays receive a particular focus in relevant units.
At GCSE, we follow the AQA specifications in English Language and English Literature. We begin with an Original Writing unit that draws on the creative writing skills that students will have developed during KS3. We then embark on our study of the GCSE Poetry Anthology (Power and Conflict). Work on the Anthology is spaced throughout the two years of the course, encouraging students to make connections between poems and build on prior knowledge. We study A Christmas Carol early in Year 10 because of its accessibility and start Macbeth at the end of Year 10 when students are more able to cope with the challenge that it poses. Our work on An Inspector Calls, which demands a level of maturity and an understanding of issues such as inequality, exploitation and toxic masculinity, takes place in the spring of Year 11. Work on English Language is threaded through the course, with students being introduced to Paper 1 in Phase 1 of Year 10 and Paper 2 in Phase 4, and then revisiting each of these papers in Year 11.
Students in Years 7-11 benefit from a departmental subscription to Educake, which enables staff to set targeted, low-stakes activities and encourages self-testing and the development of mastery.
Within the classroom, enrichment is offered through activities that encourage students to make connections between their work in English and the wider world (such as the Year 7 non-fiction unit on persuasive writing and speaking and the Year 9 ‘Back to the Future’ unit on C19th science writing), to empathise and question, and to discuss increasingly complex themes such as social justice and personal morality. Film adaptations are used to supplement the study of many texts, and aural and visual stimuli – including film and theatrical stills – help to spark students’ imaginations. We organise visits from theatre companies to enrich students’ work on The Tempest and Macbeth, and arrange theatre trips when possible. Opportunities for enrichment include wider reading and the Creative Writing Club.