Youlgrave, All-Saints' CE Primary School’s aim is to create a positive, challenging and stimulating environment, in which they feel supported as individuals and their skills are celebrated.

Our core purpose is:

To develop resilient and inspired learners who are aiming to reach their full potential. We do this by providing a welcoming, safe and inclusive environment which is underpinned by our WE CARE values. To ensure that the curriculum meets the needs of our children, our school values and our community, as well as statutory requirements, we have threaded our WE CARE values throughout our curriculum to ensure that it is unique for our learners and we offer our children the memorable experiences that they need to inspire them to believe in themselves. Our curriculum is inspiring, ambitious, motivational and progressive to ensure our children develop a love of learning and have the bravery to tackle new learning.

Implementation:

At Youlgrave All-Saint’s we want all of our children to be independent readers, writers, spellers and speakers, who can transfer their English skills to other curriculum subjects. We ensure they have the capacity and resilience to engage fully in the next steps in their education. Our English lessons are creatively planned to engage our children in the spoken language, reading, writing, grammar and vocabulary. We strive to make links between reading and writing and encourage our children to celebrate the best of language and literature in their own work, in each other's work and in wider works of fiction and non-fiction.

Although English is, at times, taught discretely, we aim to use English creatively linking up with other areas of the curriculum. Our aim is to ensure that their English skills, developed in an English lesson, are used consistently and independently in all subjects. In all aspects of school and in all subjects, we teach and encourage our children to speak clearly, to convey their ideas fluently and confidently but also to ask questions. In our drive to provide our children with as extensive a vocabulary as possible, we aim to share texts, across the curriculum, which are immersive, exciting, challenging and engaging. This expectation spans all subjects and all year groups; exploring different cultures, communities and current affairs.

We know the value of excellent vocabulary and this is developed and practised across our curriculum constantly and consistently. We encourage our children to express their ideas, discuss their ideas and to develop their vocabulary. Our children are encouraged to read for pleasure and to read widely using our school library.

We use Read Write Inc for our phonics programme. Phonic awareness, begins through our relationship with the local pre-school setting, helps the development of reading by segmenting and blending sounds and the children will be heard reading regularly, both individually and in groups. Our daily Reading sessions cover a wide variety of both fiction, non-fiction books and poetry to help to advance the children’s comprehension skills through the VIPERS reading skills for both Key Stage  One and Two. Parents/Carers are given reading guidance and clear expectations about reading at home through the use of reading journals.

We develop writing skills so that our children have the stamina and ability to write to the best of their ability. To support our children in moving towards independent writing we provide a wide range of activities including the use of film and imagery, music, information technology, modelled, shared and guided writing, peer assessment and discussion. The opportunities are endless. Our class novel/book approach is fully immersive. We want the children to love the books they read and to use the excellent examples from these quality texts to filter through their own writing, allowing them to develop their own writing style.

Impact:

We want our children to love books; to see the potential and power of the written word to express, explore, question, escape and avail themselves of opportunities in the wider world that may not be available in reality. We want to empower them with the creativity to explore this, the vocabulary to articulate this, the independence to move forward and extend their learning beyond the classroom and the resilience needed to overcome barriers that will inevitably arise.

The impact of our approach to English is threefold: our children will have a passion for ‘Reading’, ‘Writing’ and ‘Presenting’ to an audience. They develop skills to make them more independent, creative and resilient, and use a rich and extensive vocabulary which enables them to articulate their thoughts and actions clearly, and be ready for the next stage of their education journey.

We use a variety of processes and products to measure attainment and progress in reading and writing including assessment products such as PIRA and GAPS as well as in-house school designed tracking systems.

Through the literacy and communication scheme of the Early Learning Goals, pupils in the EYFS stage are ready for the National Curriculum.