Purpose of study

English has a pre-eminent place in education and in society. A high-quality education in English will teach pupils to speak and write fluently so that they can communicate their ideas and emotions to others and through their reading and listening, others can communicate with them. Through reading in particular, pupils have a chance to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually. Literature, especially, plays a key role in such development. Reading also enables pupils both to acquire knowledge and to build on what they already know. All the skills of language are essential to participating fully as a member of society; pupils, therefore, who do not learn to speak, read and write fluently and confidently are effectively disenfranchised.

Colville English Vision 

At Colville Primary School, we aim to develop a positive ‘can do’ attitude in all children across the English curriculum using a range of learning strategies. We aim to provide the children with opportunities to develop their own style and preferences in reading and writing, with the aim of giving them the skills to thrive in the collaborative world we live. The children will develop skills to be able to work both cooperatively, collaboratively and independently in English, using sequential skills to successfully build on knowledge. The children will gain confidence to express themselves confidently and fluently when talking about the subject. English, in particular reading, underpins all other areas of learning and sits at the core of our curriculum aims and ambitions. 

How do we track learning?

We use a range of assessment techniques throughout the year. Pupils learning to read with our phonics programme have systematic learning checks built into the sequence of individual lessons and the overall pathways they use to progress. Each child's individual progress is checked against each individual phoneme so we are able to build these into sets of sounds which relate to increasingly harder and more complex texts to read. Learning is consolidated with assessments towards the end of each scheme level. This can look like individual reading with a staff member, a more formalised phonics check or test, flashcards recall of particular sounds or the application of a phoneme using whiteboards and pens to write the grapheme for a sound. As the students move up the school these learning checks remain regular and consistent but look more like traditional tests, such as spelling checks, that parents may remember from their time at school. In reading pupils take more formal, standardised assessments three times a year. These look more like the statutory tests at the end of Key Stage Two. Every pupil is assessed against the year group expectations for our English curriculum. In writing, pupils are assessed throughout the year, but we put particular emphasis on our writing progress pieces of work. This is where all children across the school use the same starting point to create their own written response. This is then assessed against the year group expectations and provides an easy to interpret record of their writing development over time.