What is the rationale for your subject specific intent statement?  (Make reference to links to the whole school intent statement)

In Westerings, children are creative, independent and resilient.  To improve our children’s vocabulary and writing skills they read ambitious, high quality texts.  We teach a variety of genres and text types including playscripts and poetry through writing and reading lessons.  The exposure to these different texts and genres allows them to become resilient and ambitious readers and writers by developing their knowledge through texts, skills, passion of staff and reading/writing for pleasure.

What are the National Curriculum Statements for EYFS, KS1 and KS2 for your subject? (use hyperlinks)

Early Years Documents

Development Matters 2020 

Early Learning Goals 2021

KS1 and KS2 Programmes of Study for English - National Curriculum

English National Curriculum 

What are the key areas of your subject? What does this look like in the classroom? (headings from the subject progression subject) Are there any key approaches to your subject? (i.e. use of the mastery flow model)  Why have they been selected? Give a brief outline of their structure.

In Early Years, children progress through different stages of early writing.  These are adult-led and child initiated mark making activities which will be seen in continuous provision and teacher carpet sessions.  Children then progress from mark making to applying their phonics knowledge to writing with a purpose. By the end of Early Years, children are expected to be writing short sentences using their phonics knowledge and understanding basic sentence structure.

In Year 1, we use continuous for the first 6 weeks in English, beginning transition to formal lessons instead of group work from week 4.  Their work is recorded in an online journal.  From Autumn term 2, the children are in whole class lessons and focusing on the skills they need.  We do not have formal units until Summer 1 to enable children to embed skills for handwriting, spelling and sentence structure.

In Years 2 to 6, children have daily writing lessons which are designed and sequenced to ensure progression of skills in composition and transcription.  Each unit begins with a hook lesson which gains the children’s interest in the unit.  The units are planned to ensure the explicit teaching of text types and genres with the corresponding grammar and punctuation.  The children apply these skills in a final piece, known as the hot task.  Children also learn to draft and edit within the process. Our writing units are planned to enable children to build on their prior learning.  More challenging narratives and poetry tasks are found in upper key stage 2 to build on the foundations built in the younger years. Each unit has a corresponding text, identified by the English team to support writing.

Lessons contain starters which are planned to explicitly teach handwriting, spelling or grammar skills.  A set of spellings are taught weekly to ensure the rule is embedded before moving on. Grammar is taught explicitly at the start of a lesson before allowing children time to apply their skills in independent writing.

At the end of year 6, children will have been taught all the skills they require to be secondary school ready.  They have been exposed to high quality texts and a variety of genres and text types.  

To teach handwriting, we use Letter Join.  This teaches cursive writing and ensures our children have legible joined writing by the end of year 6.

How is your subject linked to SMSC? How is your subject linked to British Values?

(SMSC Guidance)           (British Values Guidance)

Social - Writing sessions at Westerings promote cooperation and teamwork through being able to work in groups, listening to presentations and asking questions. Real issues encourage students to think about the world outside of school and give opinions on topics that may affect them in the future.

Moral - Students learn about respecting others through the study of a range of texts which form the basis and inspiration for writing. Children develop a sense of being able to put themselves in other’s shoes by writing in characters - through considering how those characters may think, feel and behave based on their experiences.

Spiritual - Pupils are encouraged to develop a sense of awe and wonder in the power of words. We strive to inspire all pupils to become creative, accomplished writers who do so for a range of purposes.

Cultural - Speaking and listening activities promote the opportunity to share their own experiences and appreciate other students’ perspectives and experiences.

How and why have resources been selected? How should they be used in class? Where can they be found? (Please include a hyperlink to your resources register) How do they link to current topics? (Consider placing this on your resources register to save you time explaining it here.)

We invest in high-quality resources to support the delivery of our English curriculum, such as:

Texts used for writing units

Grammarsaurus

Write Like a Ninja

Descriptosaurus

We continually review our resources, interventions and texts to ensure they are the most ambitious we can offer.

How are pupils supported and challenged in your specific subject?  (Describe any methods of differentiation unique to your subject i.e. using dictation feature on chromebooks etc)

At Westerings, adaptive teaching and scaffolding gives all children access to their age appropriate learning.  

Staff may use:

• Chromebooks
• iPads
• Widgit
• Dictionaries
• Thesaurus’
• Online teaching tools

All writing interventions are delivered by highly trained staff and are monitored on a regular basis to ensure targeted interventions are having intended impact.

How is your subject represented in any home learning tasks?

At Westerings, children are given homework tasks through our intelligent learning platform.  They have access to Doodle English and Doodle Spell.   Remote learning can be delivered through google classroom. Year 6 complete SATs companion which enables the children to watch videos to support learning and then answer questions to check their understanding.

How are resources, knowledge, skills, guidance and provision available due to our place in the Academy Enterprise Trust utilised? How does your subject link to the AET values?  (Be unusually brave. Discover what’s possible. Push the limits. Be big hearted.)

Be unusually brave - Pupils are encouraged to take risks with their reading and writing. Children may be required to be unusually brave when selecting challenging books to read, or when choosing ambitious vocabulary.

Discover what’s possible - Pupils learn what’s possible through exploration of texts and stories which have a moral or lesson to be learnt. They are enabled to discover the extent of their own talent and abilities in Literacy through a language rich environment which encourages and embraces challenges for all.

Push the limits - Pupils have opportunities to challenge themselves further throughout the Literacy Curriculum. When editing and improving their writing, they can develop and build upon their skills using a ‘purple polishing pen’.

Be big-hearted - Pupils learn about themselves and their place in our community and in society through texts. Reading a range of texts based in different places, on characters with lives very different from our own, children learn to value and respect others and embrace what makes us all unique.