English Literature

Overall English Intent: 

English at HGS will foster a life-long love of English.  

• English will teach students to communicate orally and in writing with conviction and precision; to develop an independent voice underpinned by the wide vocabulary necessary to express it. This will include the rhetoric of effective engagement. 
• Students will read widely and learn to decode inferentially and metaphorically, evaluate the impact of language effectively and recognise patterning and literary tropes. 
• Our curriculum will teach students key literary contextual knowledge and cultural capital from which to build skills and develop as empathetic global citizens. 

Key Strengths of the Curriculum

English at HGS exceeds the National Curriculum for English

• We deliver one explicit reading lesson per cycle for Yr7 and 8 in the LRC. 
• We also teach two ‘Big Write’ lessons per half term in Yr7 and 8 which improves students’ written literacy and stamina for extended writing.
• In Yr9 we teach an explicit Oracy and Debate lesson which improves students’ independent research skills alongside developing their spoken oracy.  
• Students are exposed to a range of appropriately challenging literary and linguistic texts (novel, poetry, plays) which build incrementally across KS3 allowing students to face the challenges of KS4 with success and independence.  
• Students are given the opportunity to write in polemical and creative forms whilst presenting and debating verbally. This writing is modelled and scaffolded successfully early in KS3 with students becoming increasingly independent as the curriculum progresses.  
• Literacy is explicitly taught alongside an overt focus on widening students’ vocabulary (as inspired by topic and theme), revisiting basic KS2 word categories, spellings and sentence functions through to grammatical sentence forms and higher-level punctuation. 

Golden thread themes include – social in/justice and morality; love, patriarchy and the role of women; supernatural, spirituality and the Gothic; diversity and difference. 

Key strengths within English

• Teacher Subject Knowledge and enthusiasm for sharing expertise. 
• Questioning – targeted for challenge and accessibility. 
• Checking for understanding – particular focus on checking the learning of Disadvantaged students. 
• Sharing success criteria/objectives and careful modelling.  
• Explicit focus on literacy and vocabulary. 
• Feedback to students linked to 7 principles – verbal and written
• Participation in Readathon (We are a Readathon Champion School 2019) Raising around £1500/£2000 a year. 
• Targeted use of Accelerated Reader to support Reading development at KS3. 
• Ilkley Literature Poetry competition winner (Yr7,8,9) – Children’s and Young people’s Poetry Competition 2021 

Curriculum overviews