English
English Intent
At Culverhill School, we are passionate about creating a positive atmosphere of learning through the teaching of English. Our highly skilled class teams work hard to support and develop the reading and writing skills of all our learners. Our differentiated curriculum and personalised pedagogy means that every child can access our curriculum and make progress. We believe our book based curriculum promotes a love and understanding of stories which enables our learners to make links and make sense of the world around them. Our reading and writing curriculum also provides ample opportunities for reading and speaking and listening activities for the pupils to experience and enjoy. Speech and Language Therapy (SaLT) service contributes to the provision the school makes with specific reference to speech sounds, comprehension and key vocabularly.
Following the Inspire Curriculum from Class 1 – year 9 will explore different writing genres in English through 6 texts throughout the year. Some genres will be revisited regularly to ensure they are embedded as pupils progress through the school. Our aim is to ensure every Inspire student has the confidence and resilience to explore different writing styles and be able to play an active role in each activity in their English lessons as independently as they can. Pupil’s progress is tracked through our assessment trackers which measures progress through their core literacy skills. In line with our spiral curriculum these skills are revisited every term to ensure these skills are embedded across the curriculum. Most pupils in Key Stage 4 work towards and Entry Level Certificate (AQA) Step Up to English Silver (Entry Level 1 and 2) or Gold (Entry Level 3)
Our aim is that all our students leave Culverhill with the resilience and confidence to be as literate as they can be, to be able to express themselves clearly and develop their ideas as well as they can within a range of different contexts.
Information on the approach to Reading & Writing at Culverhill School.
Culverhill recognises that reading is the key to learning and we in the process of developing a high quality reading curriculum to ensure most of our pupils are able to read to the best of their ability by the time they leave us in Year 11.
Culverhill School
Reading
Our Vision for Reading
Culverhill School is a Special School for children with a wide range of complex and co-existing learning difficulties aged 7 - 16. Every child has an EHCP and we promote an ethos and culture that provides every child with a learning experience to develop their independence, skills and knowledge. Our aim is to enable our children to make a positive and valuable contribution to their own lives, the lives of their communities and society as a whole.
At Culverhill School we believe that reading is the gateway to our pupils’ empowerment, lifelong learning, enjoyment and achievement. We therefore place a high value on reading as a priority for all children and our staff are dedicated to promoting reading for all pupils. We recognise that, prior to joining us, our pupil join Culverhill with a range of different reading experiences and we work hard to encourage, support and engage all pupils with a love of reading.
As well as the mechanics of reading (decoding, phonic awareness), it is important that children are exposed to a love of reading and this is instilled at an early age by the adults around them: their parents, families and school staff. If this is encouraged at an early age, children will develop their own ability to fulfil a life-long love of reading and therefore learning. Our reading vision at Culverhill fosters this love, and opportunities for children to be read to and to read to others are embedded in our curriculum.
We also recognise that our children learn to read in different ways at different stages of their development. For our pupils who are at the pre-phonics stage, we will employ a bespoke multi-sensory approach using input from the SALT team and other professionals, delivered by our highly skilled staff. Our professional experience at Culverhill School tells us that many of our children who have a range of complex needs, fit with this cognitive and developmental profile. Therefore we have identified that these children primarily need a combination of learning word recognition and individual letter phonics before they are exposed to more complex phonological components such as blending and segmenting, digraphs and trigraphs. We will also be adopting the ‘See and Learn’ structured programme to support the development of early reading with children who require this approach as their initial pathway into learning to read. Bug club phonics is a systematic synthetic phonics programme approved by the Department for Education.
Active Learn: Bug Club Phonics, Rapid Reading.