English

The Futura Learning Partnership (FLP) intent for English is that a high-quality education will inspire children to become creative and critical thinkers. We believe that it is the right of every child to become a competent and confident user of the English language; able to live, work and succeed in the literate world. Children will be able to communicate fluently and confidently, using a wide vocabulary accurately and effectively. They will be able to critique a range of fiction and non-fiction texts, appreciating a rich and varied literary heritage.

Children will be inspired to become imaginative writers who can write coherently with a high level of accuracy in spelling, punctuation and grammar; children will be able to adapt their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences. English provides the fundamental building blocks for students to succeed in all subjects; a high level of literacy provides the vehicle needed to unpick key concepts across the curriculum. This, alongside carefully selected texts appropriate to our contexts, develops the cultural capital needed to succeed in life. Crucially, we aim to foster a love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment.

Reading and Writing

From EYFS to Year 2 (and pupils from older year groups that require additional support), children are taught how to read and write through the phonics scheme Read Write Inc. It is the UK’s leading synthetic phonics programme that ensures the teaching of reading and writing is rigorous, consistent and of the highest quality. The scheme includes the programme RWI Get Writing which uses books that contain a range of writing activities for each of the Core Storybooks and selected Non-fiction books. They include step-by-step guidance to help children move from writing simple sentences to extended texts such as invitations, letters, descriptive texts and non-fiction texts.

For pupils in Key Stage 2 who have completed the RWI scheme but still require additional support in reading, we use Fresh Start as a catch up intervention to aid reading accuracy, fluency and comprehension.

Pupils in Key Stage 2 use VIPERS to develop their reading skills. VIPERS is an acronym for the 6 core reading domains: Vocabulary, Infer, Predict, Explain, Retrieve and Summarise. Children are exposed to rich and varied texts in whole class teaching lessons where they will use the core reading skills to understand and unpick the text. 

Writing across the school is taught through a model text. Pupils first analyse features of the text, respond to questions to better understand the text and practise grammar that they have observed. They then use the features and structure of the text to plan and write their own, including their own imaginative ideas. Once drafted, pupils edit and revise their writing to improve it further. A broad range of fiction and non-fiction texts, including poetry, are covered across the year. Fiction texts cover a variety of narrative genres e.g. suspense, historical, science-fiction, fairy tale etc. Non-fiction texts model how to write to inform, write to explain and write to argue. 

For more information, please see the Futura Curriculum for English (Pdf)