At Sir Bobby Robson School, we want all our students to leave us as confident speakers, readers and writers. Students are empowered by a high-quality, structured and creative English curriculum, including oracy, so that they can communicate not just ideas, but also emotions to others. Our learners are taught that effective communication comes from the understanding that there are a variety of different audiences and purposes that they will come across beyond their educational setting; adapting to these effectively and effortlessly will give them lifelong skills to contribute to their successes.
Students are supported to develop as passionate readers, where reading is used not just to develop their subject-specific knowledge, but to widen their understanding of their own and other cultures and societies, to build their emotional intelligence and to grow their imagination. Students will experience the shared reading of a broad range of texts and be motivated to read widely both inside and outside of school. They will build a strong understanding that reading is for gaining information across the curriculum and for pleasure.
All teachers (not just in the English subject) will directly teach ambitious vocabulary drawn from the books and texts they read, as well as the wider curriculum and the world around them so that children have a wide vocabulary throughout school and are able to make connections between texts, their lives and the wider world. Explicit vocabulary instruction is a key component of all our lessons to ensure our pupils have a wide-ranging vocabulary to not only understand the world around them but to be able to communicate back confidently and with ease. Children’s strong understanding of grammar and transcriptional skills enable them to develop as confident writers, especially in this digital-literacy age, where using appropriate accessibility tools (speech to text, word processors, reading-pens) can ensure full participation and engagement across all of their subjects.