Our English curriculum is designed and sequenced to ensure that we provide our pupils with the necessary progression of skills, knowledge and attributes to allow them to develop a love of reading, writing and discussion. We intend for all our pupils to develop creative, enquiring minds. Through our carefully crafted curriculum, enhanced with engaging, exciting class topics, we aim to develop pupils who flourish as resilient, independent learners, and have the skills and literacy toolkit to conquer challenges and become lifelong learners of reading and writing. 

Children take pride in their writing and presentation; they write clearly and accurately and adapt their language, style and vocabulary for a range of purposes. Through our various learning styles and approaches, children become confident readers with a joy of reading and love of literature helping them develop into lifelong readers.

Our teaching and experiences enhance their opportunities to develop their speaking and listening skills so that they can communicate their ideas in various forms. We also encourage our children to express themselves effectively and to listen and learn from each other.

Our English curriculum is firmly embedded and established, and is at the forefront of everything that we learn across the whole school. We offer challenges, learning experiences and engaging lessons that allow pupils to love, learn and shine in their English lessons. We provide our pupils with a variety of broad, engaging texts from a range of genres that engage and fully immerse them with a wealth of literature for various purposes.

Through carefully planned and progressive lessons, children learn the essentials of the English language such as phonics, spelling, grammar, punctuation and composition, together with learning about different text types and writing structures. These fundamental skills, including handwriting, are developed progressively and integrated into various curriculum subjects.

Through the use of English working walls and displays around school we aim to create a learning environment that promotes excellence in literacy and that is vocabulary rich. Our working walls are often littered with a rich banks of vocabulary across all subject areas. English is not taught solely as a discreet subject, but instead, permeated and consolidated in a cross curricular approach allowing transferable skills to be applied to the wider curriculum. 

Phonics is developed through structured daily lessons. We use Soundswrite to deliver a highly successful, rigorous literacy phonics programme, which is carefully matched to the curriculum. Children progress through sets of sounds, allowing them to learn the essential skills in order to read and spell with greater fluency.

A lot of time and encouragement at Aspull Church is given to the pupils to re-read, edit, self and peer assess and improve their writing so that every piece of writing they produce is to the best of their ability. Our children produce work, with longer pieces of written work being showcased in their special wonderful write books which move through school with them.

We aim to provide access to a wide variety of differentiated reading materials to ensure our children become competent and confident readers. All our children from Reception to Y6 have access to high quality texts that are banded to suit their needs and are tracked carefully by school staff. As well as this, we have relaunched and revamped our school library, which is run by our pupil librarians. Whole class reading sessions take place daily using VIPERS, which include a combination of teacher-led questions, follow on activities, independent reading and sometimes to simply read for pleasure.

At Aspull Church our children are encouraged to express themselves creatively and imaginatively across a range of platforms. We offer children a wealth of rich learning experiences: including speaking competitions; poetry and writing competitions; local schools spelling bees; outside speakers; theatre productions; drama groups and role play. These opportunities are fundamental to unlocking potential and helping children to become confident in all areas of literacy. 

Annually, we celebrate an ‘English Week’ that showcases all the wonderful work that goes on in English. This week is full of shared celebrations, special activities, special guests and a great way for the children to be fully immersed in the brilliance of English. Every March, we also celebrate ‘World Book Day’ and hold events within school to promote a love of reading and encourage reading outside the classroom and within our school community. Additionally, we have English champions who help raise the profile of our subject and create different ways to share their love of our subject together.

The impact of English is measured in numerous ways. Our robust assessment approach means that we can track pupil progress and attainment regularly. It is evident from our consistently high results at both key stages that our English curriculum motivates, engages and captures pupil enthusiasm, thus enabling children to increase in competence and confidence. This allows teachers and SLT to set high expectations and standards across all forms of English. Evidence of measuring impact comes from a variety of sources: teacher assessments; shared writing moderation opportunities; formal assessments using NFER or SATs. From half termly analysis of this data, progression can be reviewed, gaps in learning addressed and intervention plans put in place to support children immediately.

As well as more formal types of assessment to measure impact, at Aspull Church we also value of pupil voice, and use structured time to gather information for our pupils about how we can make our English curriculum even more motivation and engaging.