English Curriculum at Bramber 

Intent

At Bramber, our English curriculum is built on the foundation of spoken language, which is the pinnacle building block for all literacy skills. By prioritising opportunities for children to express themselves verbally, we strengthen their ability to communicate effectively, organise their thoughts, and build confidence. Through debates, discussions, performances, and presentations, children develop the critical skills of listening, questioning, and articulating ideas - skills that underpin their reading and writing journey.

Spoken Language: The Foundation of Literacy

From the earliest stages of learning, spoken language serves as the bedrock for success in reading and writing. Children are encouraged to engage in meaningful conversations, share ideas, and perform aloud, enabling them to explore language in a practical and dynamic way. These experiences develop their vocabulary, sentence structure, and understanding of tone and audience, creating a strong linguistic foundation for literacy.

Reading: Inspiring a Love of Literature

Reading plays a vital role in our curriculum, immersing children in a rich tapestry of high-quality texts. These texts are carefully chosen to represent a wide range of genres, themes, and perspectives, fostering imagination, empathy, and critical thinking. Our aim is to develop confident, enthusiastic readers with a love of books that extends beyond the classroom. As children explore these texts, they are inspired to think critically and creatively, laying the groundwork for purposeful and engaging writing.

Writing: It’s a Journey

Our writing curriculum is designed to complement and build on spoken language and reading. Writing journeys are topic-based, ensuring relevance and purpose, and draw inspiration from the core texts that children study. This approach makes writing a deeply engaging and meaningful process.

A Lifelong Love of Literacy

We are passionate about instilling a lifelong love of reading, writing, and language in all its forms. By celebrating children’s progress and providing meaningful opportunities to express themselves, we inspire them to see the value and joy of communication. Our curriculum ensures that every child is equipped to engage with the world as a confident speaker, enthusiastic reader, and skilled writer.

Together, our focus on spoken language, reading, and writing prepares children to excel in literacy and beyond, ensuring they leave us ready to thrive as communicators in an ever-changing world.

Implementation

All of our writing journeys begin with a clear audience and purpose so that our children are excited to write, from the very beginning of the journey. The audience and purpose of each unit has been carefully selected to match the age and stage of the children and their interests and these are adapted to suit the needs of individual classes. From here we explore our core texts – which have been curated over time: to reflect.

the theme of our writing; to inspire imagination and to represent a diverse and broad range of authors.

The children have at least an hour a day dedicated to writing. In this time, they will focus on the knowledge and the skills of writing. This is achieved through a progressive grammar curriculum that allows children to regularly revisit prior knowledge and skills, build on these to introduce a new concept and embed the new concept in a variety of ways. During this time, the children read widely and explore the use of author’s voice and vocabulary to further enhance their own writing.

Some of the activities that are used in this part of the journey are:

• Drama
• Short burst writing
• Oral rehearsal
• Modelling and feedback
• Practical and hands on activities

The children are explicitly taught various planning strategies, beginning in Key Stage 1. As they progress through the school, the scaffold is slowly removed so that – by Upper Key Stage 2 – the children are able to choose a planning style independently, that suits their style and the style of their writing.

Each writing journey follows a structured progression:

Exploring the Genre: Children immerse themselves in the genre, analysing its structure, features, and purpose to gain a thorough understanding.

Building on Prior Knowledge: By connecting new learning to previous experiences, children develop a strong sense of progression and confidence.

Vocabulary Curating: Language is a powerful tool, and we encourage children to explore and collect ambitious vocabulary to enrich their writing.

Grammar in Context: Grammar is taught in a purposeful way, directly linked to the genre and intent of the writing, empowering children to use language with precision and flair.

Planning and Drafting: Using frameworks and visual organisers, children structure their ideas and translate them into detailed drafts.

Editing and Refining: Through guided and independent editing, children learn to critically evaluate and enhance their work, ensuring clarity, coherence, and impact.

This structured process not only develops technical proficiency but also fosters creativity, pride, and ownership of writing.

In addition to our excellent and creative writing planning, teachers are supported by the following schemes to enhance the teaching and assessment of spelling and reading. 

We use Read Write Inc. set books to teach early reading. We accompany these texts with closely matched, decodable books for children to read at home Reception through to Year 2.

From Year 2 through to year 6 we used Accelerated Reader to support the teaching and assessment of reading. 

In all classes, we encourage reading for pleasure by sharing high-quality texts daily and regular access to our fantastic library. Children can check-out books to enjoy at home and at school.