In English at Yavneh, we want to create real readers, real writers and real critics: pupils who can communicate clearly, read critically and hold their own in an argument. It starts with a love of story in Year 7 and builds into confident, independent analysis by Year 11. Every pupil should leave us able to read closely, write with precision and speak with confidence.
Reading like an English specialist
Pupils learn to read a text before they respond to it, noticing a writer’s choices of language, structure and form, and asking what the writer wanted the reader to think or feel. At KS3, pupils read ambitious modern novels aloud together as a class, with key vocabulary taught before they meet it on the page. Reading remains teacher-led through KS4, so pupils are taught how to read difficult texts rather than being left to work them out alone. By GCSE, pupils are using the same habits of close reading to explore increasingly complex questions: not just what a text says, but why the writer has chosen to say it that way. Pupils are asking bigger questions of what they read: not just what a text says, but what it reveals about the world beyond the page.
Speaking like an English specialist
We want pupils to extend an argument, not simply state an opinion: building from one point to the next, using precise vocabulary and being ready to defend or revise their thinking. In lessons, we model the language of academic discussion, including stems such as “I agree with this because…” and “An alternative interpretation could be…”. This begins in Year 7 and builds towards the formal GCSE Spoken Language assessment. Most importantly, we want pupils to develop their own voices and feel confident using them beyond the classroom. We want them to be heard when speaking about the things that actually matter to them.
Thinking like an English specialist
English is about more than finding a technique or giving a first impression. Pupils learn to hold different interpretations in mind, weigh the evidence for each and reach a judgement of their own. We push pupils beyond what does this word mean? towards why this word, here, and not another? That thinking also takes them beyond the page. We want pupils forming their own opinions on important, complex issues, not simply repeating ours, and understanding that a book can do something powerful. Through literature, pupils encounter experiences and perspectives different from their own, learning to question ideas, form their own opinions and understand how stories can build empathy and make us feel less alone.
How we teach it
Our curriculum is a five-year journey, not a series of separate units. The same important ideas, vocabulary and skills return again and again, each time at greater depth. These are our golden threads: the concepts and ways of thinking that pupils carry with them from Year 7 to Year 11. Every pupil meets ambitious texts and challenging ideas, but we build the steps needed to reach them through modelling, guided reading, vocabulary teaching and carefully chosen scaffolds. As pupils become more secure, those supports are gradually removed.
How we check understanding
Every lesson begins with a short retrieval task, bringing important knowledge back to the surface and showing us what pupils have remembered and what needs revisiting. We check understanding through questioning, discussion, reading and writing throughout lessons. Written work receives focused feedback, with time built into lessons for pupils to respond and improve. Assessments across the year help us identify what is secure and what needs to be taught again.
How we support every learner
Every pupil meets the same ambitious curriculum. We don’t lower the bar, we build the steps to reach it. Reading is led by the teacher throughout Texts are provided in clear, dyslexia-friendly formats, with vocabulary taught before reading and guided reading strips used. Teachers model difficult thinking and writing explicitly, while sentence frames and worked examples give pupils a way into challenging tasks without doing the thinking for them.
What great looks like
This is the standard we are reaching for with every pupil, not just our strongest readers and writers. It’s about genuine mastery of language, interpretation and independent judgement, year on year.
Year 7
Pupils understand ideas in what they read and begin to recognise different types of writing, styles and audiences. They can use taught vocabulary to explain their ideas and experiment with expressing them creatively.
Year 8
Pupils analyse how writers create meaning, using increasingly precise English terminology. They make deliberate choices in their own writing, adapting vocabulary, style and structure for different purposes and audiences.
Year 9
Pupils explore bigger ideas and concepts in what they read, making connections between texts and the wider world. They communicate their own ideas creatively and precisely, developing them across a sustained piece of writing.
Year 10
Pupils apply their reading and writing skills independently to GCSE texts and tasks, developing interpretations and ideas with increasingly precise vocabulary and evidence. Pupils craft sophisticated interpretations and purposeful writing, selecting vocabulary, evidence, structure and form precisely to communicate and develop ideas.
Year 11
Pupils can produce a sustained, conceptual response at the standard the exam demands, under timed conditions, retrieving and applying knowledge fluently, and can defend their own interpretation the way an English specialist would. This is the standard we want every pupil to reach, not only our most able.
Help at home by…
- Asking your child what they’re reading for Sparx this week, and what happens next. Two minutes of conversation does more than ‘have you done your reading’.
- Reading something yourself and asking their opinion of it, or even reading the same book together like a family book club. Having to explain their thinking to you, out loud, is one of the best ways for it to actually stick.
- Setting a regular family reading time each week. Even fifteen minutes together, everyone reading their own thing, helps build a real habit.
- Talking about a book, film or news story together and asking ‘why do you think that’, not just ‘what happened’.
- Encouraging thirty minutes of reading a week outside Sparx, in whatever they enjoy. Comics, graphic novels, fanfiction, nonfiction and magazines all count as reading.
- Asking them to argue both sides of an issue they’ve studied, such as social responsibility in An Inspector Calls. If they can only see one side, that’s worth another look together.
