Back to School

It seems that, as teachers, the summer holiday has hardly begun, when at once we are inundated by an unavoidable abundance of those (ever-so-slightly infuriating) advertisements reminding us that it is not very long until we go back to school.

Well, this week, we do in fact get ready for the inevitable return. Many of us will indeed have already been busy beavering away in our classrooms getting prepared for the impending onslaught.

This academic year, however, things have changed. The children may not notice straight away; parents may have some preconceptions from the media coverage; but as a teaching profession, we cannot be anything other than acutely aware that we are entering a brave new world of education. The new curriculum is upon us.

Many of us will have already had read and digested all two-hundred-and-two pages of it. Some of us will have taken part in staff meetings (or even delivered them). Others will be readying themselves for a week’s worth of Inset sessions this coming week. Either way, there’s no avoiding it. We have ourselves spent much of the previous year working with teachers, subject leaders and leadership teams to revisit and rework their English provision, often confronting the elephant in the room: coverage. We are moving from a system where genre was key, and so long as we had our two weeks of instructions here and three weeks of stories with flashbacks there, we were told we were doing okay. However, this is a curriculum, not a framework and as such makes very little mention of genres and text-types, referring to ‘myths and legends’ and ‘letters’, but not offering an exhaustive list of which genres to teach or when to cover them. When it came to objectives, we had previously been met with some statements that were less than specific, for example to vary sentences for effect. The prescription of the National Strategies meant we felt a sense of security that we were covering what we were supposed to. The dawn of the new curriculum gives us much less prescription and, as a result much more freedom. On the one hand, this sounds great – we are finally freed up to select specific objectives that match the needs of our children. On the other, many of us will feel like we are being thrown in at the deep end without a life jacket. This is because the new curriculum tells us the what, not the how and this means we need to make sure we don’t throw the baby out with the proverbial bathwater and that we maintain what has worked well from previous guidance, but re-edifying and reinforcing it with the clarity of objectives from the new document.

Grammar and the renewed expectations around spelling are two key elements of change within the new document, and one that can all to often lead to feelings of anxiety or apprehension, especially if our own experience of learning these areas of English at school bring back bad memories, or if we were not taught them at all. Whilst the new curriculum does indeed draw more attention to these areas, and whilst we may have given more emphasis to composition under the previous framework, we know that these areas are not altogether new, and that may have been acknowledged through our shared or guided writing, or perhaps within our teacher feedback. The new curriculum, however, puts us at risk of identifying these areas as discrete areas of learning or subjects in their own right, and we must ensure that we make time to look objectively at the overarching aims of the new document and remember that these areas are all part of a much bigger whole:

‘The overarching aim for English in the national curriculum is to promote high standards of language and literacy by equipping pupils with a strong command of the spoken and written language, and to develop their love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment.’

There will inevitably be one-size-fits-all approaches, and many of us will have been inundated with materials appearing in our pigeon-holes from various publishers, wanting us to use their ‘thousand-and-one SPAG lessons’, but we should remember the statement from the curriculum that tells us to maintain creativity and ensure that any teaching of grammar and spelling are used purposefully and set within an engaging context.

“This is not intended to constrain or restrict teachers’ creativity, but simply to provide the structure on which they can construct exciting lessons.”

Indeed there are many statements within the curriculum that reinforce the need for learning over time, and we have interpreted this to mean that sequences of sessions, taught over two, three or four weeks should still very much be at the heart of the our English teaching. Moreover, what is becoming somewhat of a maxim at The Literacy Tree is that you cannot have Literacy without literature and this too is supported by the curriculum, with each key stage in the programme of study referring to the importance of using whole books and not simply extracts:

‘Reading and listening to whole books, not simply extracts, helps pupils to increase their vocabulary and grammatical knowledge, including their knowledge of the vocabulary and grammar of Standard English. These activities also help them to understand how different types of writing, including narratives, are structured. All these can be drawn on for their writing.’

All this being said, this is an excellent time to do what we as teachers do best and to be reflective about our practice as teachers of English. We have carte blanche to identify which pedagogies for the teaching of Reading and Writing work for our children and how best we can adapt these to meet the refreshed expectation in this curriculum. Rather than allowing this document being something that scares, confuses and bewilders, we can, perhaps, allow it to be an opportunity to free up, re-evaluate and refresh the teaching of Literacy. We have tried to do this, writing (often from scratch), a number of two and three week teaching sequences that meet the new expectations creatively, always beginning with a quality piece of children’s literature at their core and identifying, throughout, opportunities for the teaching of grammar, spelling, reading and writing composition that take children on a learning journey through a text.

So, perhaps this is a brave new world, but it is one of which we should not be afraid, and as we return to school this week, we can hold onto the elements from the new curriculum that acknowledge all that we know is essential to the effective teaching of English: the use of whole texts; clear objectives; learning over time and quality literature that will excite and engage our children.