Our vision for English in our school

Our school aims to develop pupils’ skills in reading, writing, speaking and listening. By the time that pupils move on from our school, our aim is for them to:

• Be fluent readers and writers
• Have a positive attitude towards books and reading, reading widely for pleasure and information
• Enjoy writing in different contexts and for different purposes and audiences
• Write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting language and style accordingly
• Be curious and creative when it comes to reading and writing – for example, by being interested in learning the meaning of new words
• Have a wide vocabulary and understanding of grammar
• Feel confident speaking in class and be able to clearly explain their understanding and ideas

    Approach to teaching Writing

 From EYFS onwards we promote communication and oracy opportunities. WELLCOMM (a screening tool) is being used to not only assess speech and language skills but to fill in gaps from the earliest age.

The school has worked with Closing the Gap to incorporate high quality texts across our writing long term plans. This ensures that our pupils are exposed to a range of genres, themes, vocabulary and sentence structures.

Vocabulary and grammar is thread throughout the unit and we focus on a range of short writing outcomes written for a range of audience and purpose to reduce cognitive overload and promote a pleasure for writing.

Oracy is also thread throughout units with plentiful opportunities for oral rehearsal before writing. Strategies used for this will be based off work we have previously done with Voice 21. Scaffolds such as oracy sentence stems and colourful semantics are used to support our developing writers. Reading is very much the heart of our English lessons as units are book-based and include reading as a reader, hooks to engage the reader and opportunities to explore the text.

 By the end of Key Stage 2, our pupils will have a bank of writing styles, vocabulary, genres, authors and themes that they can draw upon so they can develop mastery in writing.