ENGLISH

CURRICULUM DESIGN

At Cranbury College our intent is to engage and inspire learners, enabling them to become confident, creative and critical readers and communicators. We want to empower our students to access and participate in society and aid transition back to mainstream settings, where appropriate.

Our curriculum intends to approach the dual purpose of providing students with the opportunities for a rich and deep love of the study of English Language and Literature, whilst also equipping them with the skills, knowledge and qualifications they need for the future, so that students leave Cranbury being able to express themselves successfully and empathise with anyone they encounter in their futures.

Whilst we are ambitious for all students, with a focus on them working towards their GCSE in English and encouraging a culture of reading for pleasure, we support all students to achieve a qualification appropriate to their ability and to excel from their individual starting points. To achieve this, we use our assessments to place students on the appropriate programmes of study.

The national curriculum aims that underpin our curriculum can be found online: National curriculum in England: English Programmes of Study

IMPLEMENTATION

All students, on entry to Cranbury College, and throughout their stay, are profiled for prior attainment and gaps in their knowledge. We enable our students to embed core knowledge and skills required for English through the sequencing of our curriculum content and skills. This supports students to embed knowledge into long-term memory and facilitates deep learning.

Our sequential ordering allows us to maintain our broad focus across year groups each half-term. We are also able to make fluid transitions between novel study, poetry study, genre study, and non-fiction study. We end each year with narrative writing as it provides the basis for our summative writing assessment as it is the task which best allows students to demonstrate the range of skills from the entire year.

KEY STAGE 3  

In English at Key stage 3, we follow a program of study to support our students to develop the fundamental skills required to become confident and critical readers with the ability think creatively. We study texts from a variety of genre and cover both fiction and non-fiction reading and writing.  We also build reading for pleasure into our lessons regularly. allowing students to experience a range of literature from different voices through the vehicle of reciprocal reading.

Each year 7-9 Scheme of Work content is accompanied by a focus on a literacy writing-skill- with sentences, vocabulary, spelling, paragraphs and punctuation each having a Scheme of Work location during which it is explicitly taught and assessed. This systematic approach ensures the basics are not missed and also generates data to support targeted interventions throughout the year. 

KEY STAGE 4  

In English at Key Stage 4, we follow AQA’s English Language specification, ensuring that students are able to read, respond and create fiction and non-fiction texts. We also offer AQA English Literature for those students for whom this is appropriate. This is taught in a sequential way so that students returning to mainstream schools can apply their learning during their time at Cranbury directly into their new setting.  As a school, we have made the decision to follow AQA English as, following discussion with our local secondary settings, it is the most common paper to sit and, therefore, most familiar with our students.

ASSESSMENT

In order to gauge and track students’ reading ages, we use Lucid Exact Skills assessments in both KS3 and KS4 throughout the year.

KEY STAGE 3 

In English at KS3 we assess students' half termly across Reading and Writing benchmarks in line with the National Curriculum. 

KEY STAGE 4   

GCSE pathway: AQA GCSE English Language QN 601/4292/3 
Vocational Pathway: Pearson Edexcel Functional Skills Qualification in English Entry Level 1-3 and Level 1& 2

• Entry level 1 QN 603/4286/9 

• Entry Level 2 QN 603/4287/0 

• Entry Level 3 QN 603/4288/2 

• Level 1 QN 603/4289/4 

• Level 2 QN 603/4290/0 

HOSPITAL ENGLISH 

Lessons are provided for both short term and long-term patients and personalised learning journeys are created based on the needs of the students/patients. All curriculum plans are bespoke and are designed, considering the students physical health, mental health, and academic ability in conjunction with the students' main registered school.