English

Trust Curriculum Intent

Our mission is to provide a cradle to career education that allows our children to enjoy lives of choice and opportunity. By the age of 18, we want every child to have the option of university or a high quality alternative. 

Subject Curriculum Intent

Through their study of English, Brigshaw students will be immersed in a vast array of texts which are designed to challenge, enthuse and inspire them both now and beyond their schooling. We equip learners with the tools and knowledge to appreciate the power and relevance of our subject by engaging them on an exploratory journey across the history of English.

 Our lessons place valuable emphasis on inspiring and cultivating creativity through active learning, as well as championing exploratory talk. We empower every Brigshaw student with a voice with which they can hold an opinion, critically evaluate and challenge ideas. We believe that oracy is an integral part of the communicative ability our students are entitled to and, as such, we place academic vocabulary at the heart of our classrooms; it is the key which unlocks the doors for our students!

“High expectations for all” is the cornerstone of our ethos. It is our view that every Brigshaw student has the ability to understand any given text with the right guidance, structure and support - we do not shy away from teaching challenging content. For writing, we use high quality reading material as a stimulus, aiming to provide students with a basis for their ideas and encouraging their own talents to blossom.

Our team feels a strong moral imperative to teach for life beyond exams. Through our exploration of contextual history, as well as current and relevant topics, we provide them with the knowledge, skills and understanding, allowing them to thrive and navigate their way through the world in which they live, furthering their spiritual and moral development. 

At Brigshaw, the job of our English teachers is to provide a spark, ignite a passion and then fan its flames. 

Curriculum Principles

• Reverse Planning in English means that the contextual knowledge needed for students to access the top grades at A Level and GCSE is interwoven into our schemes from year 7. For example,  the Victorian Context needed to access our 19th C England texts at GCSE is introduced in Year 7 through our studies of Ruby In the Smoke.
• Powerful Knowledge is cultivated in English through a focus on debates, intellectual firework questions and classroom oracy tasks. In turn students can then begin to explore how literature has the power to make social statements, question political landscapes and break down cultural barriers.
• Cultural Capital is an integral part of our curriculum as students are given the opportunity to explore a range of texts across the history of English throughout their time at Brigshaw. We do not shy away from challenging content and use our texts as a basis for respectful discussion. 
• Substantive (“Know That”) knowledge happens through the sharing of expert knowledge and regular retrieval and discussion. Vocabulary is at the core of all our schemes of work, building on high level and accessible vocabulary that can be used for success all the way to KS5. We ensure that critical knowledge and skills are interleaved across the academic years. Our skills mapping for spelling punctuation and grammar includes skills from KS2 that are spiralled, recalled and interleaved. Each half term writing styles and skills are revisited and built upon.
• Procedural and Disciplinary (“Know How”) Knowledge takes place through a curriculum that teaches beyond what is merely required for the exams, strengthening their skills and deepening their understanding of how English is relatable to them, now and beyond. In KS3, we focus on broadening our student’s knowledge whilst in KS4 and KS5 we work on deepening and specialising this knowledge. They are taught to analyse and evaluate texts within specific genres, topics or approaches, in order to allow students to foster an evaluative and critical approach to exploring texts and writers’ purpose. As the curriculum progresses, their writing must adapt in response to genre and context, celebrating the development of their knowledge. 

• Cognitive Psychology. Our curriculum focuses on developing evaluation skills through debates, intellectual firework questions and classroom oracy tasks. We embed recall into our starter tasks so that students can revise plots, characters, quotes and SPaG skills in every lesson.

What will this look like at implementation?

Please use the links below to explore how our curriculum looks, for each year group, as a result of these guiding principles

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How can you support students’ learning from home?

Wider reading: encourage your child to discuss recent events and news stories. Read articles together and discuss.

GCSE Bitesize offers excellent support for KS3.

For KS4, Brigshaw has membership to MASSOLIT and GCSEpod. These are excellent revision tools that students can log onto with their Brigshaw email.

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