SMSC in English

Spiritual development in English

In Year 7 students study environmental issues and learn how to write a campaign text empowering them to learn about world issues and write to change the world.

Moral development in English

For their English Literature GCSE, students study a range of poems related to the themes of power and conflict. Students learn about the social, political and personal impact of war.

Social development in English

For the English Language GCSE, students are required to complete a spoken language component. This involves research a topic they are passionate about and delivering a speech to their peers. Students are taught the correct grammar needed to speak correctly and confidently, including the use of a range of persuasive language techniques. Further students are taught presentational skills related to using body language techniques and using their voice for effect.

Cultural development in English

In Year 9, students study a playscript adaptation of ‘Small Island’ by Andrea Levy. Assessment Objective 3 requires students to explore the social and historical context of the story. This involves researching racism and understanding the Windrush generation. Students then develop an empathetic response through analysing the impact/effect of racial discrimination and violence in society.

 The KS4 English curriculum builds on the knowledge and skills our pupils acquire through our KS3 Mastery curriculum. The KS4 curriculum seeks to offer a knowledge-rich and intellectually challenging curriculum that provides our pupils with the knowledge, language, and grammatical skills to converse intelligently and confidently on a wide range of literature. We seek to instil our pupils with a love of reading and writing, in order to be fluent and confident readers, writers and speakers.

We seek to empower our pupils: to provide them with the opportunity to develop their ability to think deeply about various concepts; to evaluate ideas and the writers’ craft in fiction and non-fiction texts spanning genres and eras. We aim to develop our pupils’ conceptual knowledge required to understand the literary periods they study, but also develop their ability to link these to significant national and international issues that are relevant to today’s society. By doing this, we create confident, knowledgeable and inspirational global citizens.