The English Department at Outwood Grange is a large, successful team made up of 20 teachers and three one-to-one tutors. The department is friendly and supportive, and staff in the team put the attainment of students at the heart of their discussions and all they do. There is a combination of some very experienced teachers and a number of ECTs, and those who are new to the profession are nurtured by a mentor from within the team. Whilst there is a range of career opportunities within the school and the trust, the English Department at Outwood Grange Academy is also a fantastic place to start your career, and we are excited about helping staff to flourish in the classroom.
We have a large allocation of classrooms, with full-time staff teaching entirely or almost entirely in one room. Classrooms have video projectors, large television screens and visualisers, which are housed upon bespoke lecterns to enable staff to run the room effectively when presenting from the front. The library is also part of the English Department, not only in a physical sense but also because we believe that reading is at the centre of what we do.
Because of our belief in the vital importance of reading, the department has developed a KS3 curriculum where learning branches from a range of engaging and culturally interesting texts. Students will study three plays by William Shakespeare over years 7 to 9, including a history, tragedy and comedy, in order to present them with an ambitious curriculum that prepares them for both GCSE and A Level study. Contemporary texts and their reception are reviewed yearly in order to evaluate them for relevance and rigour. Children have a weekly ‘Immersive Read’ lesson, and the team have shared the responsibility - and pleasure - of choosing the texts for this; they range from versions of to the more recent .
There is a strong whole-school literacy strategy which aims to ensure that all students can gain the educational and personal benefits of reading. This includes reading in form time, Accelerated Reader and a variety of reading interventions for readers who are not yet proficient. The specialist literacy teaching assistants use the Ruth Miskin phonics programme to support emergent readers.
As in all OGAT secondary academies, the department prepares students for Eduqas GCSE English Language and English Literature qualifications. The programme of study is fully resourced with high-quality materials produced by staff across the trust who know this specification well. We aim to make all our teachers ‘experts’ in preparing students for GCSE examinations, using our thorough and systematic methods devised over many years. We have the benefit of support from the trust’s team of expert English directors, who provide support, materials, advice, coaching and who model and team-teach in lessons alongside us to develop our expertise. As an indication of our success, each year our students gain, on average, a progress score of around .5.
The academy has a sixth form and the English department prepares students for A level English Language (AQA), A level English Literature (AQA B) and Media Studies (Eduqas).
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