What they will learn
Our KS3 curriculum uses Ark’s English Mastery curriculum and is made up of three strands that are taught concurrently:
- Literary Heritage
- Writing Mastery
- Reading for Pleasure
The Literary Heritage curriculum explicitly teaches and tests the knowledge that will support students’ understanding of future texts in the English Literary Heritage curriculum and English GCSE and A-Level curricula. Core concepts are revisited and deepened in complexity to support the retention of knowledge, inspire awe and wonder and develop fluency in literary discussion. For example, in ‘Oliver Twist’ (year 7), students learn about why poor families were sent to workhouses and what the conditions were like there. This is knowledge worth learning and remembering because it helps students understand that overcoming adversity, and the strength of the working class are important themes in literature.
With every further text studied in Key Stage 3, students augment and refine their understanding of this powerful knowledge: students can explore the literary themes of adversity, oppression and corruption in ‘Animal Farm’ (year 8) and Brocklehurst’s hypocritical treatment of the girls in ‘Jane Eyre’ (year 9). This knowledge offers a powerful foundation for study at Key Stage 4 and beyond, where students encounter the hypocrisy of Stevenson’s London in ‘The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde’ and the various depictions of individual struggle against institutional power explored in AQA’s ‘Power and Conflict’ poetry anthology.
To develop students’ spoken language, our curriculum builds from a text performance in Year 7’s short stories, to students writing and performing rhetorical speeches in Year 8 and writing a range of texts in Year 9’s Reading for Study which students present as speeches.
The Writing Mastery curriculum explicitly teaches and tests the fundamentals of clear composition and self-expression. Writing is taught discretely from reading so that students can focus their attention on the precise skill or knowledge they’re trying to master at any one moment. It sequences knowledge – and revision of this knowledge – in a way that represents the way students make progress in writing and by taking a “stage not age” approach, students engage with a curriculum that meets the specific challenges and misconceptions affecting their ability to write clearly and expressively.
Reading for Pleasure supports our students to read for engagement and joy. Led by their English teacher, students will share the knowledge and experience of reading a text for pleasure to foster a lifelong enjoyment of reading. These sessions also support students in developing their reading fluency through echo reading.
Further details of Ark’s English Mastery curriculum can be found at:
https://www.arkcurriculumplus.org.uk/our-programmes/secondary/english-mastery
How it will be assessed
Our assessment eco-system provides the teaching team with an accurate understanding of each students’ attainment across the curriculum.
NGRT – A nationally standardised reading test sat by all students at the beginning and end of the academic year.
NMM – A nationally standardised writing test sat by all students at the beginning and end of the academic year.
Grammar – a pre-test, mid-year test and end-of-year multiple-choice test automatically marked using NMM Automark website.
Essay – a long-form written piece that assesses Literary Heritage procedural and declarative knowledge against standardised exemplars. This means that we can compare our own students’ substantive and procedural knowledge to identify whether they are maintaining their relative position in the National Percentile Rank (thus making expected progress), or are they slipping down the National Percentile Rank, and therefore making below expected levels of progress.
Multiple-choice tests – regular multiple-choice tests that assess substantive knowledge.
