Head of English: Mrs C Eveleigh (c.eveleigh@swr.gloucs.sch.uk)
As a subject, we know that English is essential in offering ways of sensitively understanding the world around us, communicating within that world as active, diverse citizens, and broadening horizons for our students to allow them to understand how they might contribute. English is the opportunity to invent an imaginary world, debate the issues of the real world, and learn from the history of a past world – sometimes all in the same lesson!
We are committed to developing our students’ progress in wider reading, accurate and crafted writing and confident oracy skills within each year and key stage of our curriculum. We revise and build on students’ literacy skills in homework tasks and library sessions. Finally, we believe English is a gateway to creativity and escapism. We encourage the creative freedom of our teachers and the inquisitive nature of our students, believing this approach leads to better, high-engagement teaching and learning experiences
The skills we cover across our KS3 and 4 Curriculum are:
Reading for meaning: Inference, Analysis, Comparison and Evaluation – to ensure our students become critical readers
Writing skills: adaptive to audience and purpose; accurate and ambitious, crafted and coherent, fiction and non-fiction – to ensure students can communicate accurately and skilfully,
Speaking and Listening: Public speaking, forming a coherent persuasive argument, debating skills, active listening skills (asking questions) to ensure confidence and clarity in communicating to an audience