At Flanshaw School we have designed our English Curriculum with the intent that all children, regardless of background, will become, fluent, enthusiastic readers and skilful, creative writers.  We have carefully implemented a range of approaches to ensure that the needs of the children are met effectively.  A strategic system of monitoring and evaluation is undertaken by the Deputy Head Teacher, including lesson observations in each phase, book scrutiny exercises and frequent staff training and coaching sessions to ensure that teaching and learning is reviewed.  To ensure that the importance of English is consistently promoted, we appoint a ‘Head of English’ from the Junior Leadership Team who oversees a group of reading ambassadors.  These pupils complete 1:1 reading with our younger children and they organise a range of exciting events to promote reading.

In the early years and Year 1, writing is implemented through the ‘Talk for Writing Approach.’  This ensures that our youngest pupils are immersed in a language rich curriculum that effectively develops their language and communication skills.  As the pupils progress into year 2, we introduce them to a ‘Text Based Approach’ to writing in order to increase their independence and focus more heavily on writing composition.  The Text Based Approach allows for one inspiring, exciting text to be the stimulus for the pupils to write in a range of genres and for different audiences and purposes.  We aim for the majority of the chosen texts to reflect other areas of the curriculum so that cross curricular writing can take place.  Wherever possible we endeavour for the children to write for a real purpose and for a real audience to provide extra motivation. 

 

At Flanshaw Junior, Infant and Nursery School we believe that reading is a vitally important transferable skill where children use their knowledge of words, sentences and texts in order to understand and enjoy literature and gain new learning across a range of curricular.  We have created a very strong reading culture, where children have a genuine love of reading.  We acknowledge that children learn in different ways and as a result aim to equip them with a range of tools to support the development of reading skills.  In the Early Years this will predominantly be through phonics; we use the structured Read Write INC phonics programme and this progresses into Key Stage 1 and in Key Stage 2 the children progress through a structured banded reading programme that gives the children a rich, progressive and challenging reading diet.