English is taught daily in all classes: 4/5 bespoke English lessons per week plus Oracy, Reading, Key Skills, Phonics and cross-curricular writing.

All class teachers teach English. Pupils tend to arrive in KS2 with little to no Phase 2 phonics knowledge.  We have collaborated with DM Education on the development of their All Aboard Phonics programme, which has been validated by the DfE.  This forms the foundation of our progression guidance and assessment systems which combine expectations of the National curriculum with bespoke developmental aims and our oracy objectives into Reading, Writing and Oracy (replacing S&L) assessment and target-setting criteria.

The Scheme of Work (SoW) provides genre specific learning objectives and success criteria at the Experience, Express and Assert stages.

English sessions for all classes follow a weekly progression from context through reading and drama and then into writing, detailed in Medium Term Planning (MTP).  All pupils write and read daily with individual feedback in-situ. 

All Aboard Plus interventions are in place in all key-stages to tackle barriers to decoding and encoding phonetically. 

A central school library houses all the resources which can be borrowed to refresh classroom reading areas each half-term. 

All classrooms have a reading area.  Reading and writing opportunities are also built into independent learning-through-play activities for classes with elements of continuous provision.