Intent
Our English curriculum is intended to provide students with essential language skills to be able to function in society with confidence and competence. We want to empower our students by enabling them to speak and write fluently so that they can communicate ideas and emotions to others and through their reading and listening, others can communicate with them. We are steered by the national curriculum.
Our school intent is built around our six characteristics and values that we believe are essential for our students to be successful young citizens. These will become embedded within our English curriculum through a rich coverage of genres and many opportunities to review and apply their learning to ensure our students leave with self-esteem and confidence to achieve in college placements or apprenticeships in the workplace.
| Key driver | Outcome |
| Team Work | I can express my opinions and justify them with clear reasons. I can talk about words, ideas, values and beliefs. I can listen to other people’s views and understand why it is okay that their views may not be the same as mine. I can work with others to explore evidence, reach decisions and draw conclusions. I can contribute to plans. I can ask appropriate questions, listen to answers and be inspired to think about new things through working collaboratively. |
| Showing Empathy | I have read about different experiences of different people from different times and places. I understand how the beliefs and attitudes of humans in different times have shaped the world around me, I can understand how ideas and beliefs change over time. I can understand how when something is written and set affects the attitudes and information that is communicated. I can consider how experiences and circumstances affect writers and the characters and circumstances they write about. |
| Showing Commitment | I can read texts with support and by myself. I can persevere to find the information I need from a text. I can understand that stories written at different times and in different places might include events or situations that are unfamiliar to me. I can take risks to try using new words, methods and structures when I am writing. I recognise that the things that I read may be more difficult as I move through the school, but I am ready for the challenge and know that I can ask for help when I need it. |
| Self -Awareness | I know that writers choose words to make readers understand their ideas and I can be responsible and careful when I choose words. I recognise that my words, when I speak and write, communicate ideas and emotions to the people who hear or read them. I can choose to develop my independence when I read and write. I can make decisions about what is important to include when I respond to texts and when I write my own texts. |
| Problem Solving | I can think about who I am speaking to or writing for and what I need them to understand, think or feel. I can consider the problems I might have in helping them to understand my views and ideas or the information I want them to know. I can make decisions about what order to structure my work in, what layout to use and what language to choose to make sure my meaning is clear. When reading, I can recognise the problems faced by writers and characters. I can make predictions about how issues might be resolved. I can think of alternatives and approach situations in texts in a personal, original way. |
| Showing resilience | I know that I am learning. I understand that a mistake is a chance to learn something new. I know that if something is complex I may have to practise it many times so that I really understand it. I understand what ‘sustained’ and ‘developed’ mean. I know that I may have to give several reasons why and give evidence to prove that my reasons are correct. I know that I have to explain how and why writers choose language to communicate their views and ideas. |
Our texts will be reviewed to ensure they are diverse and of high-quality to develop our students’ passion for reading, which for many is a low baseline. This will be a key theme in our reading strategy to determine all our students are readers and through immersion in texts to develop them as effective writer. Within the English curriculum we want to ensure strong models of vocabulary and structures for communication.
Implementation
For the students who need it, identified through baseline assessment, the phonics intervention programme Fresh Start (Read Write Inc) will be used to support them to make rapid progress to become readers and ‘gap fill’ from previous learning experiences. All students will be assessed for the programme on arrival to the academy.
Units of work are built around progression in reading and writing skills. Formative and summative assessment is used to identify ‘next steps’ in learning. Students will have greater knowledge, skills and understanding of the following key English concepts and learning:
- Reading: read easily, fluently and with good understanding; develop a habit of reading widely and often; increase their vocabulary banks; and be able to talk confidently about what they are reading;
- Writing: know how to plan, revise and evaluate their own writing; be able to write for different audiences, purposes and for a range of text types; have a neat and legible handwriting style;
- Speaking and Listening: be able to listen to each other; contribute successfully in groups; undertake presentations to their peers; and adapt their language for different social contexts;
- Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar: understand the key rules of written and spoken English language; and demonstrate this understanding in their own written and oral work.
Impact
Our aim is that every student will leave the Academy with a suitable English accreditation, that they will build the foundational skills for life, and develop a love of the subject. We understand how crucial building skills, knowledge and understanding in English can support our students to thrive into adulthood. To enable this, students at Orion Academy can access a range of qualifications, to ensure that they are able to access opportunities in later life.