Intent - what do we want children to learn?

The English curriculum at Bucklesham Primary School is made up of phonics and reading, GAPS (grammar, punctuation and spelling) and writing. Quite simply, it our intention that every pupil, irrelevant or needs, achieves their full literary potential and develops a love of life-long reading, writing and literature. 

At Bucklesham, we believe that literacy and communication are key life skills. Through the English curriculum, we will help children develop the skills and knowledge that will enable them to communicate effectively and creatively through spoken and written language and equip them with the skills to become lifelong learners. We want children to enjoy and appreciate literature and its rich variety.

Literacy is at the heart of all children’s learning. Literacy enables children both to communicate with others effectively for a variety of purposes and to examine their own and others’ experiences, feelings and ideas, giving these order and meaning. Because literacy is central to children’s intellectual, emotional and social development it has an essential role across the curriculum and helps pupils’ learning to be coherent and progressive. 

Implementation - how are we going to achieve our intent?

Bucklesham’s curriculum is driven each term by a key literary texts that are central to the topic using the CUSP curriculum. A central key text each term enables us support literacy across the curriculum as all topic areas focus around this. The initial ‘driving text,’ is then supported with additional literature around the same topic enabling the introduction of non-fiction, poetry and other genres. Carefully selected classic and high quality modern texts ensure that all children are immersed in a rich vocabulary-based curriculum. In addition to this, challenging context derived vocabulary is woven into the curriculum in each topic. These cross-curricular academic word lists are shared with parents and children at the start of each topic and are clearly displayed in each classroom. Over the course of a term pupils are encouraged to rehearse, revise and revisit the new vocabulary and embed them into both their spoken and written English.

Impact - what will it look like when we have achieved our intent?

The impact of our English curriculum is seen through our academic achievements at Year 6, with children leaving us having written books, stories, poetry, instruction booklets and other high quality texts.  Our older pupils have the confidence to talk to our local Parish Councillors and present their ideas and challenge others.  The children go to High School being able to read and appreciate high quality texts, and our results are always above National for reading.