The English Lead Teacher at St Joseph and St Teresa Catholic Primary School is Mrs Nicola Willmott.

Intent Statement 

At St Joseph and St Teresa’s Catholic Primary School we have developed a curriculum that encourages our children to communicate effectively and listen with understanding. We want our children to be strong communicators and develop confidence in their speech and language skills in order to express their needs, wants, feelings and emotions. We have worked hard to create a curriculum that enables our children to become fluent and responsive readers as well as enthusiastic and engaged writers. Through our English curriculum, we endeavour to teach the importance of reading, writing, speaking and listening and embed skills that are transferable across our whole curriculum.   

Implementation Statement

To develop our pupils as speakers and listeners we create opportunities for oracy that ensure pupils learn to express their ideas in a range of ways, to a range of audiences. Our English lessons give the children opportunities to take part in group discussions and drama activities that further encourage their oral language. Throughout our curriculum, we give our children the confidence to listen and respond appropriately to others.  

To develop our pupils as readers we employ systematic and consistent strategies. We teach our children to read using the phonics scheme ‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised’ and ensure children learn to read as quickly as reasonably possible. Our children are thoroughly and systematically assessed to ensure progress throughout phonics phases and additional support is given for those children with gaps in their knowledge.  Children further develop their Reading comprehension skills from Year 2 onwards through the use of the Destination Reader scheme. We also ensure their experiences develop their notion of reading for pleasure, for example through the use of First News. Teachers are enthusiastic about engaging the children in high quality fiction and non-fiction texts embedded within our Writing curriculum and we prioritise reading for pleasure through ‘Whole Class Texts’ that are read regularly. We help our children to understand and respond to what they are reading using inference and deduction within their English lessons and through explicit teaching of reading skills from Year 1 onwards. We are enthusiastic about engaging our children with local and national reading workshops and opportunities such as the Wells Literature Festival and National World Book Day.  

To develop our pupils as writers we are have developed a writing curriculum alongside other schools in our MAT based on high quality texts. We ensure progression across our year groups through our Writing Curriculum Map where a variety of text types are studied. We have a progression of writing objectives that we use to track children on a termly basis. We prioritise writing for a range of audiences and purposes to ensure our children are engaged within their writing, adapting their vocabulary and style as appropriate. We explicitly teach our children how to evaluate and edit their writing in order to improve their work and show them how to use punctuation to make meaning clear to their reader. Teachers are committed to giving their children the knowledge and strategies to become accurate spellers through weekly explicit spelling lessons. We teach handwriting skills from Reception, through KS1 and beyond through and promote an understanding of how to present writing appropriately. Writing skills are further prioritised within our curriculum through our ‘Writer of the Month’ certificates and visits from authors, either virtually or through our work with the Wells Literature Festival. 

Impact Statement 

We know our reading and writing curriculum is successful through the monitoring procedures we have in place. The English Lead Teacher monitors the impact of reading and writing across the school on a regular basis. This includes and prioritises the use of pupil conferencing as a way of measuring the attitudes and affects our English curriculum is having on our children. Next steps for the English curriculum are regularly identified.

The impact of our English curriculum is that the majority of our children are fluent readers by the end of KS1 and are therefore ready to access the curriculum at a more independent level. As children move throughout the Key Stages, they are exposed to many high-quality texts which contributes to an effective reading culture within our school. These high-quality texts further contribute to the children’s positive attitudes to their writing. They are engaged in their writing sessions and inspired by the books they read.

Writing

Please find below our writing curriculum map which details the high-quality texts that are used in English sessions in all classes:

Phonics

Little Wandle Letters & Sounds Revised - Years R-1

Within Early Years and Key Stage One we use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised Programme to teach phonics to our children. This is an approved systematic synthetic phonics teaching programme. 

Please find below a Phonics Information video for parents and carers produced by Ruth Thompson (Phonics Lead Teacher) and Nicola Willmott (English Lead Teacher). 

Please find below a link to the Parents Page on the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds website. There are some really useful videos which provide details about how we teach Phonics and the books that will be coming home. 

Reading 

Destination Reader - Years 2-6

We use Destination Reader to teach reading in Years 2-6. Destination Reader is a pedagogical based approach to teaching reading through engaging daily, structured sessions that support children to read with greater understanding, enjoyment and purpose. 

Spelling & Grammar (SPAG)

For further ideas on how you can support your child at home with Spelling, please see the following booklet: 

Speaking & Listening

For further ideas on how you can support you child at home with their language and vocabulary development, please see the document below.