Curriculum Overview:
Our English curriculum has been designed to immerse all students in a range of opportunities which challenge, inspire and promote curiosity. We want all learners to be passionate, resilient, and articulate. We want them to be equipped and engaged to live ambitiously, being proud of their local and wider communities.
It will enable learners to gain confidence by exploring their immediate and wider world through varied forms of communication and reflecting on their learning. Our curriculum has been designed to inspire learners to be passionate and confident in thinking independently, empathetically, and critically.
All learners will show resilience to grow and develop to become literate and articulate as they approach unfamiliar concepts, knowledge, and skills.
Key Skills and Dispositions:
Passionate Readers: We aim to encourage all learners to be engaged, enthused and independent readers. They should be able to make ambitious choices about their reading and share their opinions with others – both their peers and their teachers. We will encourage them to develop a lifelong love of the written word – finding genres or writers they are interested in and making connections to other texts, writers, and the wider curriculum. Their reading skills will enable them to become reflective and empathetic about themselves, the wider world, and others by exposing them to a wider range of concepts, ideas, cultures, and experiences.
Competent Writers: Our students will all develop the tools to enable them to demonstrate accuracy and appropriacy when writing in any genre, for any purpose or audience. They will be able to create texts that demonstrate they can adapt their vocabulary and structural choices to suit a range of forms and formalities, matching conventions of different genres and adhering to the technical rules of writing from letter formation and spelling to grammar and whole-text devices.
Key Themes:
| Writing to entertain | narrative, poetry, play scripts |
| Writing to inform | reports, recounts |
| Writing to persuade | persuasion, discussion |
| Writing to explain | instructions, explanations |
The text types that are covered :
| Narrative | Re-telling the story, alternative endings, new chapters, writing from an alternative point of view |
| Poetry | Shape, acrostic, haikus, narrative, elegies, sonnets, free verse |
| Reports | nonchronological reports, newspaper, eye-witness accounts, police reports |
| Recounts | Biographies, autobiographies, visits and experiences, in role characters |
| Persuasion | Invitations, posters, advertising, travel brochures, letters, arguments, speeches. Formal and informal |
| Instructions | showing progression through year groups |
| Discussion | Debates, arguments |
| Explanation | Processes and cycles (cause and effect) |
Key Stage 3 Overview:
Students in Key Stage 3 study a range of sources, including a wide variety of poems, novels and non-fiction. Different time periods and cultural backgrounds are studied, so that our students gain an understanding of the history and diversity in literature. This helps them to become confident readers and writers able to understand the world around them and communicate their thoughts and feelings articulately. There are also plenty of opportunities for our students to develop writing styles, with units dedicated to writing stories, speeches and letters. We know that the ability to critically evaluate and analyse texts is incredibly important. These skills are utilised throughout this key stage, building on the work already completed in primary school.
Key Stage 4 Overview:
Throughout Key Stage 4 BLC students’ study AQA English Literature and Language. Continuing from key stage three, the students are exposed to a diverse range of plays, poems and novels. From Shakespeare to Malorie Blackman. It’s important that our students explore both fiction and non-fiction texts, as this further develops their ability to write in a range of text types and explore their own style. The GCSE course also explore a range of purposes when writing including discursive, persuasive and evaluative writing. Students will look at structural features, vocabulary choices and how to craft engaging content.