English

Intent

At St Mary and St Michael Catholic Primary School, we place our children at the heart of everything we do and offer them an engaging English curriculum where every child has the right to high quality teaching and learning opportunities that help them develop essential language, communication, reading and writing skills, giving them the opportunity to reach their full potential by the time they leave our school. Through a well-structured English curriculum, we enable our children to be fluent, enthusiastic and critical readers by providing them with a range of high-quality fiction, non-fiction and poetry texts. We also enable our children to be thoughtful and imaginative writers, encouraging them to apply a range of language features at word, sentence and text level to a range of genres and subjects they study throughout their time at our school.    

Statutory Requirements

Statutory requirements for the teaching and learning of English are laid out in the Bailiwick of Guernsey Curriculum, the English Entitlement Document (as of September 2024) and in the Development Matters document for Early Years.

English Bailiwick Curriculum Aims

• To ensure learners build a secure knowledge of how language is used to express, explore and share information, ideas, thoughts and feelings.
• To develop children’s understanding of the power of language and communication to engage people and influence their ideas and actions.
• To provide pupils with the knowledge of how language works: its structures and conventions, variations in use and changes over time.