Our aims for English teaching (Intent)

At Barlow Church of England Primary School we understand that English is at the heart of all learning. We know that quality speaking, reading and writing can bring joy, spark creativity and allows children to express themselves clearly. Being able to speak, read and write well allows children to understand the wider world around them and allows them to become skilled communicators at this school, their secondary schools and in their future adult lives. With this in mind, we want all children to leave Barlow school with the tools to enable them to participate in wider society using English for both pleasure and function.

How we teach English (implementation)

We ensure that our English teaching and learning provides many purposeful opportunities for reading, writing and discussion. We use a range of tools to support our children’s progression in English. These are:

• Drawing club and curious Quests in reception and years 1 and 2. This allows children to work in small groups and focus on their writing skills with an adult to support them. They also get lots of opportunities to write for pleasure and practise the skills they have been working on.
• Wordsmith – a scheme to support reading into writing which offers quality texts to promote strong writing outcomes. It is adapted to our mixed age year groups and allows children to work at a level appropriate for their age and also provides a structure to the teaching of grammar.
• Little Wandle – our phonics scheme used across school that provides a firm foundation for early reading and writing. It is delivered through daily phonics sessions in EYFS and years 1 and 2 and is also used to help children who need additional time to secure their phonics skills in key stage 2.
• Alan Peat sentences – across school, we use sentence types with a handy name that are designed to help children to write exciting, sophisticated pieces of writing. We simply call them star sentences.
• Headstart and Cracking Comprehension – to assess our children’s comprehension ability we use Headstart and Cracking Comprehension. These provide quality comprehensions covering all the reading domains appropriate for the year group.
• Whole Class reads – we provide quality texts for children to enjoy and analyse in groups. These allow us to develop and assess children’s reading fluency and prosody, exposes them to ambitious vocabulary and gives children opportunity to respond to books in meaningful ways that promotes a love of reading.
• Handwriting – each class has dedicated handwriting time during the week to support the development of handwriting skills so that their writing becomes effortless and pacey.
• Spelling - In year 2 children follow the Little Wandle spelling scheme. In Key Stage 2 we use the Purple Mash spelling scheme to help children learn spelling rules.
• Precision teaching – for children needing more support with spelling and phonics we use precision teaching to enable them to make accelerated progress.

In the long term we want to provide a firm foundation so that when children leave our school they are ready and able to take their next steps on their English journey with confidence.