English

Home / English

Statement of Intent

The LDA English Curriculum intends to inspire young people to value and appreciate the power and beauty of language.


Curriculum Aims

The English curriculum at Lord Derby Academy builds on the National Curriculum.  Curriculum intent within the English subject area is founded upon providing pupils with opportunities to gain powerful knowledge and the cultural capital they need to become confident and culturally aware citizens. The English curriculum is designed to develop young people who can value and appreciate the power and beauty of literature and equip them with a broad range of knowledge and skills that will allow them to participate in society beyond the school walls.  Exploring a varied range of seminal world literature and exposing pupils to challenging literary heritage texts helps them to understand how art can shape our understanding of the world we live in and effect social and political change.

The study and discussion of high-quality journalism makes our pupils aware that writing can be used to interrogate society as well communicate their ideas and feelings. By writing for a range of purposes, pupils are able to grasp the idea of conventions and varying degrees of formality and find their own mode of expression: providing them with the skills and confidence to articulate their own thoughts and ideas. The curriculum is sequenced to build pupils’ understanding of thought-provoking concepts and increasingly complex ideas, beginning with the reading of texts that explore ideas and issues around childhood through the ages to the more hard-hitting concepts of conflict and protest writing. As pupils mature, the curriculum design ensures that they develop a heightened political awareness and become increasingly discerning in their appreciation of literature.

Curriculum Pathway

Click here to view the English Curriculum Pathway.

Curriculum Model 2022-2023

In Year 7, pupils have five lessons of English per week; one of these lessons dedicated to the Our Place in the Universe project. In Year 8, pupils have five lessons of English per week with selected classes doing a discreet lesson of reciprocal reading. In Year 9, pupils have four lessons of English per week.

Overview

Year 7
At the start of Year 7, pupils transition into secondary school through The Writer at Work I: Growing Up the study of Peter Pan as a core text. Pupils also study a range of high-quality satellite texts, thematically linked in order to both harness and broaden their knowledge of creative methods and develop a personal response to literature. They will be introduced to the skill of commenting on the writers’ methods in a more developed way than in Key Stage 2, using textual evidence to support their interpretation and explaining how this evidence supports their interpretation. Pupils also apply this knowledge to their own creative writing and practise the skill of crafting and redrafting a description. Following on from this, pupils will be introduced to Shakespearean Comedy through the study of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This module allows the pupils to expand their knowledge of creative methods by studying dramatic devices and commenting on their effect whilst also considering the social and historical context in which the play was written. They will continue to apply earlier skills, advancing their interpretive skills through the study of themes such as relationships (friendship, romantic, family) and magic in the more challenging context of a literary heritage text. In the final term, pupils continue to cement their reading skills through the study of The Weight of Water, a verse novel written from the perspective of a child, building on the skills introduced in a more sustained way, tracking character, theme and the writer’s structural choices over a longer text. Carefully selected satellite texts build on the pupils’ knowledge of creative methods by learning rhetorical methods, allowing them to now compare how writers’ present their ideas and perspectives across a text and to apply this knowledge in their own perspective writing, focusing particularly on letter writing.

Year 8
At the start of Year 8, pupils return to a focus in the writer at work in The Writer at Work II: Literature as a Window into the Past. Pupils revisit creative methods through studying of a range of Gothic texts to cultivate their understanding of the genre and how it can be influenced by historical events of the past. They investigate its impact and enduring popularity. This understanding will be applied by producing their own piece of creative writing, revisiting skills from Year 7 but enhancing their writing style by imitating the style of seminal writers and borrowing heavily from the key elements of the genre. In their narrative, pupils demonstrate an understanding of more sophisticated structural methods of foreshadowing, tension and creating suspense and will also make effective use of a first-person narrator. As the pupils move through the year, they continue to master reading skills of interpreting both implicit and explicit information and analysis in different contexts. Pupils build on their Shakespeare study in Year 7 in Shakespearean Tragedy: Romeo and Juliet with a focus on language, theme, genre and character, revisiting contextual knowledge from the Elizabethan era. They become increasingly adept at explaining how Shakespeare explores issues around family relationships, gender roles and identity.  Next, pupils will explore imagined worlds in Supernatural in which they will study the novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane building on the comparative skills that they developed in Year 7 by exploring a range of similarities and differences in writers’ ideas and perspectives and developing their explanations of how they are presented. Writing will now focus on Articles allowing pupils to present their perspectives in a powerful way.

Year 9
Pupils begin Year 9 with, The Art of the Short Story where they study three short stories from the modernist era: The Darkness Out There; Anil and When the Wasps Drowned, introducing them to a new and increasingly popular genre. They build on their understanding of narrative theory by learning about narrative tropes, different narrative structures and more complex narrative voices in order to appreciate how professional writers in the modernist era will break away from traditional modes of expression to explore complex ideas. They then experiment with these different narrative styles in their own writing.  Pupils learn to evaluate writers’ ideas and methods, debating more mature themes such as the nature of evil, violence, stereotyping and return to familiar themes of gender roles and family relationships in a darker setting. Pupils then move onto Shakespeare’s Political Plays exploring extracts from Richard III. This broadens their understanding of genre and sharpens their analysis of how Shakespeare exploited historical sources to interrogate Tudor society, making cross curricular links with pupils’ study of the Tudors in Year 7 History to enhance and support their articulation of these challenging ideas. Pupils will then move onto the darker imagined world of Dystopia in their study of the novel The Giver. In this module, pupils will fortify their knowledge of the genre whilst learning how to track and compare how different writers challenge society through their presentation of dystopian worlds. Pupils will use some of these powerful ideas to write their own speeches that also challenge aspects of the society in which we live.

KS3 Modular Overview

Click here to view the detailed overview of the English curriculum content taught throughout KS3.  Each modular overview provides information on the knowledge and skills taught at each stage within the intended curriculum.

Faculty

Mrs F Fletcher: Head of Department, English
Mrs S Venables: Head of Whole School Literacy
Miss A Barry: Responsibility in English
Miss L Morris: Classroom Teacher, English
Miss C Thwaite: SEND Lead/Classroom Teacher, English
Mrs H Grisdale: Classroom Teacher, English
Ms E O’Reilly: Head of Year/ Classroom Teacher, English
Mrs C Phillips: Assistant Headteacher
Mrs C Sergison: Assistant Headteacher
Mrs H Lancaster: Classroom Teacher, English
Mrs J Mullally: Classroom Teacher, English
Mrs J Ashcroft: Classroom Teacher, English
Miss A Kelley: Classroom Teacher, English

Documents available to download:

Select Language