English

During Years 10 and 11 at UTC, students will study English at GCSE level. The content that they study is listed below for your information, if you need any more information please contact UTC on the numbers provided on the contact page.

English curriculum

When students finish their English education at UTC@MediaCityUK, we want them not just to have a grade 4 or above in English, but to have the skills and knowledge they need to be successful in further education and the workplace. Through teaching of reading, writing and Oracy skills we are able to provide young people with the reasoning, creativity and analytical skill they need to do this. We want to leave no student behind and believe that even our hardest to reach children should have the competitive advantage to secure the next steps on their learning and career journey.

We follow the AQA English Language and Literature syllabus.

Our curriculum is a robust, two-year curriculum. We teach the Language and Literature pathways across Y10 and Y11 with more emphasis on Literature in Y10 and more emphasis on Language in Y11.

In Language we ensure we cover a varied range of fiction and non-fiction texts to cover a breadth of content and allow students to amass cultural capital.

In order to ensure there is consistency and a balanced approached to selecting Literature texts, we have selected Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ for our current Year 11 and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ for our current Year 10s, 19^th Century’s ‘A Christmas Carol’, ‘An Inspector Calls’ and Power and Conflict Anthology Poetry. Teaching Literature allows students to apply the skills they learn in their Language lessons to a range of literary texts while considering the social, historical and culture contexts in which these texts sit.

Student progress is an absolute priority in the English department – everything we do is an intervention. We work collaboratively to ensure lessons are tailored to individual classes and students.

Within lessons, we use Aggressive Monitoring (live marking) and Exit Tickets to provide live data to inform teaching. Teachers use this to inform reteach of key knowledge and skills in the following lesson. This makes teaching responsive to student needs and students are making better progress within and across lessons.

Student progress is then assessed using fortnightly DDI assessments and from these we are able to identify where gaps and misconceptions remain re-teaching to the highest leverage point on the Know-Show charts.

Beyond the classroom, we aim to provide students with a range of opportunities they may not otherwise experience, to see how English is integral to British culture and how relevant the subject they study in the classroom is to the outside world. We organise theatre trips, Shakespeare performances and revision workshops. We are also able to provide enrichment opportunities within our lessons be that introducing an explorer who has written about their experiences or starting the lesson with a famous painting and discussing the artist and their life.

Individual learning plans for both language and literature can be found below. There are plans for both years 10 and 11.

english pathway ks4.pdf