ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

The English Department is a hard-working, high-achieving, supportive team. We work collaboratively, with regular departmental meetings, in-house training and good access to externally run courses contributing to the development of staff and the subject. We have experienced success in raising attainment in English at all levels within the school. Our record for staff development is evident in the number of team members taking on additional responsibilities within a short time of joining.

Curriculum

The school operates a thirty period weekly timetable. Each student has four periods of English a week at Key Stage 3 and 4 and six periods in the Sixth Form.

Key Stage 3

Boys are taught in their form (tutor) groups throughout Key Stage 3. These groups are ‘mixed ability’ within the selective whole-school context. The department has a policy whereby each form can expect to be taught by a different English teacher in each of their first three years in the school, if possible, so that they benefit from a range of teacher strengths and interests. We are working towards incorporating all aspects of the Literacy Strategy that are appropriate to our selective school context in our planning and our teaching. We have achieved considerable improvements in end of Key Stage SAT results over recent years and the department’s results now score positively for ‘value added’ from KS2 to KS3 and exceed CATs targets. (All papers were subject to a remark in 2004, when considerable problems were experienced nationally with the assessment and reporting arrangements, but, although the remark showed that we were justified in our concerns about the quality of the marking, the number of level 7s awarded remained disappointing and well below our expectations, especially having seen the quality of the work that boys had produced when their papers were retuned.) Attainment on entry to the school has been rising steadily and now most boys have returned Level 5 in their Key Stage 2 SAT exams and some Level 4.

Key Stage 4

At KS4 we benefit from the division of the three form groups into four parallel
‘mixed ability’ groups of only twenty-two or twenty-three students. All students are entered for AQA Specification A GCSE English and English Literature, Higher Tier.
Results at GCSE have improved over recent years. The department has achieved a positive ‘value added’ score for both English and Literature, the score for English in 2004 being the second highest in the school compared to other subjects and the gap between the proportion of A and A*s in English and Literature has decreased.

A Level

English Literature is a popular subject at this level, both with boys who have been in the school since year 7 and those who join us in year 12. We use AQA Specification A and take advantage of the coursework options for both the AS and A2 courses. Boys devise their own coursework titles for the Shakespeare coursework in year 12 and make their own choice of texts to compare and title in year 13. We have been able to run two sets for a number of years now and numbers have risen steadily, so we have been able to form an additional third set from September 2004. We intend to widen choice for boys by offering A level English Language in addition to English Literature from September 2005. We have a good retention record, with most students opting to continue English Literature from AS to A Level, and this, along with our positive ‘value-added’ scores, make us one of the leading departments in the school at this level. Many of our students go on to study English and/or related subjects in higher education.

Staffing

2002-3

2003-4

2004-5

Facilities

The English department is housed in the Griffin Centre a purpose-built block, less than 10 years old, which includes four large classrooms, two smaller seminar rooms and a Drama Studio. Each member of the department has a large work-space in the Department Office adjacent to the classrooms. The department is well resourced, with built-in TV and video facilities in every room, OHPs and DVD players and a fixed interactive whiteboard and data projector for departmental use in one of the rooms. In addition there is a large stock room for departmental use to all classrooms.