 ENGLISH - Department Information
Miss P Liddle (Head of Department)
Mrs P Mitchinson
Miss C J Smith
Mrs S Holmes
Mrs N Tate
Mrs E Halsey
Mr A Stobart
Mr J Love
Miss L Thompson
Miss S Harvey
 Within the English department we offer our students a balanced and rewarding curriculum that is also inclusive. We already have in place mechanisms to support lower attaining students as well as to provide a framework that offers provision for those identified as gifted and talented.
We start from the assumption that an English Department should function as a team, that its members ought to be actively engaged together in developing and sharing common approaches to the teaching of the subject.
Working together on what happens in practice has immediate rewards. It reduces the pressure on each teacher to find, adopt and produce materials alone. It also broadens individual teachers’ ideas of what can be done in the classroom. It creates common ground for people to examine and evaluate their own practice.
 We continue to plan together to satisfy the demands of the National Curriculum while retaining our own departmental “style” and, within that, our own individual “classroom styles”.
The English Department School endeavours to present the National Curriculum in an integrated, interesting and challenging manner so that pupils are encouraged to explore language and literature in a variety of ways, leading to an interest in and love of the subject.
At key stage 3 we have spent a large amount of money buying a wide variety of National Learning Strategy related textbooks. These are kept in the English stock cupboard and available to staff on a sign out basis.
The KS3 Units of Work incorporate many of these books and where necessary the teacher responsible for writing the unit, provides any extra material.
There is also a bank of ‘one off’ resources kept in the English Office. Plus there is a bank of ready-made starters available.
 English classrooms contain attractive display of appropriate work that pupils can both admire and be proud of having produced. Work that is produced by the teacher, or which is purchased commercially, can also be very useful in displays to stimulate pupils in the production of their own work.
Each of the English classrooms has their own OBP and whiteboard. Room 48 and 46 also have a new inter-active whiteboard for use by the whole department on a room swap basis.
Pupils within an English classroom are engaged in communication and for that reason, unless the situation particularly demands it, there are not special merit in pupils working silently. Pupils feel able to discuss their work freely with their teacher and, where appropriate, other pupils.
Monitoring involves a celebration of good work and good practice, and alerts those responsible to issues that need to be addressed.
The procedures employed in the English Department include:
- Regular sampling of work from across year groups.
- Teaching and evaluation of units for a particular year group by all the staff involved
- Up to date completion of individual teacher's "School Planner and Organiser"
- Following the department Programme of Study for KS4
- The monitoring policy of the department supports the Performance Management Policy of the school.
|
