English Curriculum at Leigh C of E

Our vision states that we provide an education of depth and quality as we want our pupils to flourish and to be the best they can be. 

Why and what?

Writing has become a whole school focus this year, and to raise attainment and accelerate progress in this area we have taken on The National Literacy Trusts programme known as Pathways to Write.  Pathways to Write is a programme which focuses on a mastery approach to the key skills of writing, and these are applied and built upon, term on term, and year on year. Starting in reception with the notion that words are put together to form sentences, to in year 6, recognising vocabulary and structures for formal speech.

How and when?

Each unit is built around a text, which they will work on for a half term.  Throughout the unit, they will embed previously taught skills (gateway keys) and learn new writing skills (mastery keys), practicing these through a variety of daily writing outcomes.  Towards the end of the unit, they will plan, draft, edit, review and publish a longer writing outcome.  All the skills that they have learned throughout the unit build up towards this final writing outcome based on a particular genre of writing (feature keys). The pathways to write approach to teaching is as shown:

How do we ensure progression?

The learning journey below shows which text and writing outcome each year group works on each half term, from Reception to Year 6, the order they are taught and the progression of the genres of writing.  Within this, the progressive key skills of writing will be built upon each year in line with National Curriculum expectations.

Which teaching tools enable a mastery approach?

We ensure that the writing process, its skills and models of good practice are built upon daily and that these incremental teachings of writing are visually shared and accessible through the use of working walls. The pupils can always look back at what they have already learned to support them with their current writing. Here are some examples of these working walls:

Here are just a few examples of our pupils writing:

We look forward to sharing more information with you about supporting your child with writing as we work through this new approach.