National Curriculum and Curriculum Information

English

The teaching of English at Ethelbert Road is designed to instil in children a love of speaking and listening, reading and writing that will last them a lifetime. Giving pupils the key skills in English enables them to access material in all curriculum areas, and provides a foundation for their learning throughout their school career. To achieve this, teachers are focused on delivering a rich and exciting curriculum, teaching key skills through topics and texts. Our aim is to engage pupils with the joy and wonder of books, piquing their imagination and creativity. At Ethelbert Road, we view the teaching of English as a fundamental part of the holistic development of the pupil, fostering positive behaviours and attitudes toward learning, and providing key knowledge and skills to benefit pupils throughout their education and beyond.

Our Approach to Reading

We use Rocket Phonics as a structural basis of our phonics programme, which provides the sequence of learning and the structure for our assessments, but we enrich the programme with carefully chosen resources and activities in order to meet the criteria set down by the DfE for good phonics teaching.

Our Literacy/Early Years Leader regularly monitors provision of our phonics programme, to ensure that learning meets our high standards, that lessons are multi-sensory and that children’s progress is carefully tracked. We make sure all new staff are given high quality phonics CPD, and we provide regular ‘refreshers’ in terms of monitoring and feedback, staff twilights, and peer coaching, using our own experts to demonstrate lessons and share experiences. We all teach to the same programme.

As we believe the reading scheme should fit the child’s needs, and not the child fit into one scheme, we use a range of reading schemes to support reading. These include Oxford Reading Tree, Collins, Rigby Star and Osbourne Books. We have a Literacy Teaching Assistant who supports the delivery of phonic and reading lessons across the school.

Questioning and metacognition

The Ofsted research highlights the importance of effective questioning as a key feature of teaching that has an impact on learning. Subject leaders should identify best practice in the use of questioning within their subject and share this with colleagues.

The Education Endowment Foundation has identified metacognition as having the greatest impact on pupil progress.

This is taken from a Focus publication which provides suggestions for questions at each stage of the knowledge dimension for each level of Bloom’s revised taxonomy: