At St Anthony’s Catholic Primary School, we believe that a high quality English curriculum develops a children’s love of reading, writing and discussion.

We have a fun, interesting, relevant and text-based English curriculum that provides an array of many purposeful opportunities across the whole curriculum, for children to develop their reading, writing and discussion skills.

Our curriculum closely follows the aims of the National Curriculum for English 2014 to enable all children to:

● read easily, fluently and with good understanding
● develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information
● acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language
● appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage
● write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences
● use discussion in order to learn; they should be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas
● are competent in the arts of speaking and listening, making formal presentations, demonstrating to others and participating in debate.

These aims are embedded across our English lessons and the wider curriculum. We provide children with the means to develop a secure knowledge-base in Literacy, which follows a clear pathway of progression as they advance through the Primary Curriculum.

Rigorous assessments and reviews ensure that we are able to provide targeted support so that all children experience success and enhance their Literacy skills each day; we believe that a secure base in literacy skills is crucial to a high quality education and will give our children the tools they need to participate fully as a member of society.

When our children at St Anthony’s leave us, we feel that we have strived and encouraged them to be avid readers: children who read fluently and widely and are able to express preferences and opinions about the texts that they read.

We want them to read for pleasure, having had access to a wide range of text types, genres and authors in order for them to make informed opinions about their favourites.

We want to produce children who write with confidence and accuracy for a variety of purposes and for an audience, whilst developing their own individual flair.

We want our children to be able to write with grammatical accuracy and be able to apply learnt spelling patterns correctly using a neat handwriting style: taking real pride in all the work they produce.

We aim to expose our children daily to a wide range of vocabulary so that they able to decipher new words and then apply them when speaking both informally and formally and when writing.