English
MAB’S CROSS PRIMARY SCHOOL
ENGLISH CURRICULUM – INTENT, IMPLEMENTATION & IMPACT
INTENT
At Mab’s Cross Primary, we believe English, in particular reading, is a key skill and essential to all aspects of everyday life and helps us make sense of the world around us. We want our children to develop a love of reading, read fluently and have a good understanding of a wide and diverse range of texts. For children to be able to access the wider curriculum as a whole, they need to be confident and fluent readers, and we strive to develop their independence and fluency wherever possible to enable this.
Our drivers thread throughout our English curriculum. High levels of literacy are important to independence and aspiration, and reading is essential for our children to find out about their local area and heritage as well as the arts and culture. We also give children access to texts that promote and help children to understand diversity.
To ensure that children’s learning has meaning and context, we plan our English units with a cross-curricular approach which is tied to our pupil offer and provides opportunities for trips, visitors and enrichment, to ensure that children’s learning is meaningful and engaging.
We firmly believe that children should leave primary school being able to read fluently, write for a range of purposes and confidently communicate. With this in mind, we have carefully sequenced progression documents for spoken language, phonics, reading and writing: this enables us to have clear start and end points for year groups and key stages.
Proficiency in spoken language is paramount for our children: without good receptive and expressive language, accumulating and developing skills and knowledge is impossible. In EYFS, we have clear end points to ensure that children develop their communication and language: this is a focus for our school as, on entry, a large proportion of our children are below national expectations. By the end of EYFS, we expect children to listen attentively and respond to what they hear with relevant comments, questions and actions. We also expect them to participate in small group, class and one-to-one discussions using recently introduced vocabulary. By the end of key stage one, we want children to have continued to improve their speaking and listening skills, and respond with increasing appropriateness. We want children to be able to ask and answer questions and start to use subject-specific vocabulary to begin to explain and add detail. They are encouraged to speak for a range of purposes and participate in discussion. By the end of key stage two, we want children to be able to follow complex directions and instructions and ask relevant questions to extend their knowledge and understanding. We also want them to be able to use adventurous and ambitious vocabulary, which is appropriate to the audience and purpose, to articulate and justify their ideas with confidence in a range of situations.
Phonics at Mab’s Cross aims to build a solid foundation in early reading, beginning in EYFS. The teaching of systematic synthetic phonics is taught daily with a structured approach from the beginning of reception. We follow the Essential Letters and Sounds scheme with fidelity to ensure a well-paced progression of skills through Reception and Year 1. We place high importance on the teaching of phonics so that children’s reading skills are developed as early as possible to enable them to begin reading and developing a love of literature as soon as possible. The sequence of reading books shows an accumulation of phonics knowledge, matched closely to the children’s progress, to allow consolidation of learning.
Reading is the main vehicle for driving literacy standards at Mab’s Cross, therefore we place high priority on it in our school timetable. Children are regularly read to from the beginning of reception, to the end of key stage two, to foster a love of reading. To further promote a love of reading, we ensure reading areas are well cared for and welcoming and ensure that all children are accessing them throughout the week. The school’s reading progression document has been developed with a focus on question stems to ensure content domains such as retrieval and inference are taught consistently across the school, with each year group building on content from the previous year groups to ensure a clear progression. This allows children to consolidate their skills and be challenged effectively. A wide range of high quality texts have been chosen to ensure children are exposed to new and ambitious vocabulary. Children are encouraged to read widely and are exposed to a range of genres to provide them with the skills for life beyond the classroom.
Writing at Mab’s Cross enables children to have ample opportunity to write for a range of purposes and audiences that will allow them to embed core skills for the future. In order to make writing purposeful and meaningful for pupils, writing is taught through a cross-curricular journey that embeds transcription, composition, grammar and punctuation. Medium term plans have been developed to ensure coverage of a range of genres that are linked to other curriculum areas, where possible, to give a clear purpose and audience . Our writing is planned as a journey that is a gradual progression of skills encompassing planning, drafting and editing to become confident and motivated writers.
All children follow the same topics in the curriculum for English with the class as a whole. However, gaps and barriers to learning are removed through the use of carefully sequenced lessons and scaffolds for children with SEND and EAL, looking back at previous steps in the progression documents.
IMPLEMENTATION
Our English subject leaders have a wealth of experience, and are members of SLT and each lead one of the key stages. Teachers have good subject knowledge, which has been developed through training run primarily by SLT. This CPD has been implemented over a sustained period of time, with subject leaders developing and leading training on the teaching of reading, writing, phonics and spelling, punctuation and grammar. This CPD has allowed the teaching staff to plan and deliver effective units of work based around the progression documents developed by subject leaders, and ensured consistency of approach and progression and sequencing of knowledge and skills. In addition to this support, teachers share knowledge and expertise through weekly joint planning sessions.
The subject leaders themselves have also undergone further CPD, completing the English Specialist Teacher training, which was run by the North West Teacher Hub. Coupled with their work within the local schools cluster group, this enables them to keep appraised of curriculum developments and ensures that their monitoring and support of colleagues is effective and meaningful.
The school has a wealth of experience in the teaching of phonics and early reading. Teachers and teaching assistants who are new to reception or key stage one are well-supported by the subject leaders and colleagues in school and through appropriate training courses.
When developing the current English curriculum, we chose not to use a published scheme of work as we feel that our progression documents and medium term plans provide the necessary rigour and coverage, and also allow us to link our work thematically with our foundation curriculum to enable more meaningful and contextualised learning, unique to our pupils’ life experiences.
When organising the progression documents, leaders carefully mapped out objectives from the national curriculum, tied with end points for the key stages, to ensure that skills and knowledge are sequenced appropriately through the year groups and allow objectives to be revisited, consolidated and developed in subsequent year groups.
Children in EYFS and Key Stage One receive a focused phonics session each day as well as a guided reading session and comprehension lesson each week. Children also read one-to-one with an adult, particularly the lowest 20% in each class. Phonics is assessed regularly as part of the Essential Letters and Sounds scheme, and imputed into the Phonics Tracker online to support targeted intervention. Year 3 children receive SoundsWrite intervention if phonics support is still required.
In Key Stage Two, teachers use a consistent approach in guided reading and comprehension sessions. Vocabulary and question stems within each content domain are standardised, so children build on previous learning. Children take part in five guided reading sessions per week, allowing them to practice and rehearse the skills they have been learning independently and with an adult. Within this, children in key stage two also work on Reading Plus, a personalised reading intervention.
Teachers work hard to promote a love of reading, ensuring that reading areas are comforting and appealing, and that new texts are made available often, so there is a wide range of texts. The school library is well maintained and offers a wonderful environment to read in; books are kept in good condition because we foster a respect for them. Also, weekly and termly rewards are in place to help encourage home reading, along with a book recycling scheme in every class, where children bring in and share their own books.
At Mab’s Cross, the writing journey has been developed to allow children the opportunity to write for different purposes and audiences. Throughout school, we follow the same journey of reading and analysing quality models: these are used to identify success criteria. Skills are developed based upon the teachers’ ongoing assessment, leading to a first draft. The children then work on specific editing linked to teacher assessment of their work and undertake redrafting sessions to improve their work to a final draft. This is then self-assessed against the success criteria.
Teachers make formative assessments in guided reading sessions, comprehension sessions and through children’s writing to inform their planning, with misconceptions and common knowledge gaps becoming the focus of subsequent lessons and units.
Termly and end of year NFER assessments are completed in reading and SPAG for Year 1 to Year 5, where Year 6 uses previous SATs assessments. All test results, standardised scores and teacher judgements are recorded and fed back to SLT within in depth termly pupil progress meetings. This allows teachers to make judgements, informs them of gaps in learning and enables them to put steps in place to support children where needed.
In EYFS, we continually assess children’s understanding through observations and interactions to ensure that focus tasks and activities are placed as challenges in areas of provision for children to access independently. Interventions for phonics, reading and writing and put in place where and when needed, and any support groups remain fluent throughout each term.
We develop and improve provision in English by carefully monitoring and evaluating the subject to ensure the curriculum aims are implemented consistently across the school. The subject leaders plan for in depth scrutiny of planning, children’s work, drop ins and observations. Areas for development are identified by individuals or groups of staff, and they are then supported with planning and teaching by the subject leaders or deputy head teachers, or via observation of good practice across school.
IMPACT
At Mab’s Cross, our well-constructed, well-taught curriculum allows our children to enjoy, understand and achieve highly in English. Our monitoring demonstrates high expectations and challenge for pupils, which results in children achieving well.
Children at Mab’s Cross read widely and often and have a love of reading: they have fluency and comprehension appropriate to their age. Children articulate their thoughts and ideas both in writing and verbally with confidence. Overall, we feel our English curriculum is pivotal in ensuring our children develop into well-rounded and well-informed individuals who are ready for their next stage of education when they leave Mab’s Cross.