Our English curriculum at Mulgrave is second to none; we are ambitious for all our learners and aim for every single pupil to strive for excellence, despite their starting points.
For us, this begins with delivering a robust, excellent SSP Phonics programme starting from as early as Nursery to get pupils reading. We believe reading is the gateway to success, therefore, with a strong foundation at the start, pupils begin to blend sounds into words making learning fun and meaningful and most importantly: learning has sense.
Our teachers and support workers are excellent at what they do and are passionate in making every child a reader.
Our English Curriculum is underpinned by core texts:
We value the act of reading, of crafting sentences that are built on understanding of vocabulary acquisition and manipulating sentences for effect. This is only possible with core texts that not only tell a story, but that uses language, so nuanced, it inspires our pupils to become writers themselves. And that is what you will see in our lessons; every child writing for meaning, becoming writers themselves.
Challenge/Stretch: we challenge all our pupils at all levels, believing in equity for all. Therefore, our lessons are adapted to meet the needs of all our learners; crafting sentences using manipulatives; using speaking frames to those who may benefit from these; using visuals to support and engage; as well as challenge pupils to think about word choice, sentence manipulation and the effect this may have on the reader, using the ‘Opening Doors’ strategies.
Ambitious: Our core texts are underpinned by global themes of: Sustainability, Climate Change, Freedom, Equality amongst many more.
We believe that teaching global issues through books equates to not only pupils becoming great writers, but also great global citizens, ready to tackle life in the 21st century. Empathy, compassion and unity are powerful values that can be taught and what better way to teach these than through storytelling so beautiful and strong that it inspires pupils to read with passion, live with compassion and strive to use excellent language through both written and verbal form. To critically think, to filter out information and to write with deep understanding and depth is what we teach our pupils.
At Mulgrave, it is our vision that every child will learn to write by being given real and exciting materials and opportunities. We will show and explain everyday occurrences to the children and inspire them to write about them. We will share excellent writing to inspire children to emulate styles. We encourage children to read their work for enjoyment, to read it aloud to others and provide audiences for writing. We want children to have an understanding that writing has a real purpose and that word choice and style can bring about change.
We also promote the teaching of global issues at Mulgrave, where children are taught current affairs such as climate change, refugees, conflict and poverty. This enables pupils to think critically about core issues that are taking place in our world today. We also encourage pupils to better understand their role in a globally-interdependent world and to explore strategies by which they can make it more just and sustainable. This will ensure that our children are able to think critically about global issues, to take the steps needed in this rapidly changing world.
believe that learning to spell is an important tool for your child to use as an essential part of day-to-day life, as well as in their learning. We teach spelling using an investigative and collaborative approach, focusing on spelling patterns, prefixes and suffixes, knowledge of word origin and root words. At the end of Year Two, children will have a spelling test and also at the end of Year Six. 
contextualised learning linked to the core-text, as well as in separate Grammar lessons in order to reinforce key grammatical concepts. Language and punctuation skills are taught through analysis of the author’s use of effective vocabulary choices, language structures and writing style, and by using the core-text as a model during the writing process. Children are given opportunities to imitate the author’s style, reflect on why the writing is effective, then to practise and develop their own writing style using the skills they have learnt.
