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English Department

The English department at ‘Madani Boys’ School’ aims to perfectly align linguistic and literary study with our beloved ‘HEART’ ethos. Our knowledgeable and dedicated team of teachers will deliver a balanced, challenging, and fun curriculum to ensure our students are exposed to texts heavy in literary heritage - with opportunities for social and cultural capital throughout. We want our students to be optimally prepared for the world of academia and the wider world, beyond the walls of Madani. We want to teach the ‘best that has been thought and said’ and believe all young people deserve the rigour of that knowledge as a birth right. Our intention is for all our students to:

• Read great texts influenced by history, that, in turn, influenced our culture.
• Become stronger writers by becoming stronger active readers.
• Learn new vocabulary to read more challenging texts and express more.
• Be accountable for what we say and how we say it.

The KS3 curriculum is historically chronological in nature – rather than sequenced by theme or textual form. We believe that teaching students to be effective readers will enable them to grow into more competent writers; therefore, we have centred the curriculum on the skills of effective critical reading and integrated writing opportunities through these, in a supplementary sense.

As Year 7 students enters the school, they will undertake a transitionary unit on ‘Autobiographies’. This will be a reading and writing unit that allows students to appreciate the stories of their famous house representatives and consolidate their skills of reading and expression from KS2. Their second unit will begin the chronology, starting with Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’ and moving into Old and Middle English (‘Beowulf’ and Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘The Knight’s Tale’). The year will end with an introduction to the renaissance and Shakespeare’s comedy, ‘Twelfth Night’. We hope all our students will be able to track use their contextual knowledge to deepen their appreciation of the gradual literary influence over the centuries.

Consequently, we have centred our curriculum focus on prioritising the retention of core knowledge and so we make opportunities for assessed pieces (reading, oral and written) throughout each successive unit taught. Each assessment will also focus on the competency of five threshold concepts necessary for success in English literary study and writing. They are:

1. Understanding how word choice/language can create different effects
2. Understanding how different ways of structuring texts can produce different effects
3. Understanding the relationship between grammar and meaning
4. Understanding the effect of context on both writers and readers
5. Understanding how to support interpretations with evidence

By Year 9, all students will be assessed on their mastery of these concepts in a holistic manner in combination with their retained knowledge from year 7 to year 9. This ensures that students have the breadth and depth to tackle the G.C.S.E with confidence and progress onto further study with ease.

At KS4, students progress to more advanced G.C.S.E study. The exam board specification is Edexcel for English Language and Eduqas for English Literature, currently. Throughout KS3, students will have learned all the skills necessary to grapple with more challenging texts, both conceptually and linguistically. They will be prepared to read with a critical perspective and build on their early studies in a seamless way, drawing connections between context and text, understanding how the English language has steadily evolved and being able to identify subversion and intertextuality, due to their core knowledge from KS3.