What do we really want our students to know and learn? The constantly evolving KS3 Curriculum.
When embarking on what we believe to be the most enjoyable task of re-working our curriculum, we had several questions to bear in mind:
Are we challenging our students enough?
Are we providing them with quality literature and quality experiences that will both enthuse and develop necessary skills for life?
What came before? And what will come after?
What do we really want our students to learn, read, understand?
How can we ensure we are making cross-curricular links that both support and enrich the English curriculum in our school?
What is best for the children in our context?
There are many more questions, as you can imagine, and although we both believe that one of the most exciting and rewarding tasks we have as English leaders is developing our curriculum, it is also one of the most difficult and we acknowledge that it is always a work in progress that is reviewed and refined term to term and year after year.
Our first job was deciding on what components would underpin our teaching right the way through from Y7 to Y11.
We decided on three core reading skills:
Reading 1 – retrieve and infer – being able to understand the texts they read and choose and use quotations to support ideas
Reading 2 – writer’s craft – analysing the writer’s word choice, language and structure
Reading 3 – writer’s perspectives – considering the writer’s ideas and perspectives and the context in which texts are written.
And two key writing skills:
· Writing 1 – Craft
· Writing 2 – SpaG
We attacked our curriculum re-write in Key Stage 3 from two distinct angles: firstly, we wanted to know what was being covered by our feeder primary schools (there are many!) and secondly, what was our end of Key Stage 4 goal.
To begin with we visited our main feeder primary school, scrutinised their literacy / English curriculum, had several discussions with the English lead and Year 6 teachers and enjoyed looking through some fantastic examples of extended writing. There we several major findings from our visits and discussions:
1. We knew that our Key Stage 3 curriculum (particularly Year 7) was just not challenging enough! Some of our choices in literature texts were being read in KS2 and we knew this had to change.
2. The writing produced by many Year 6 students was outstanding and we needed to harness greater opportunities for extended writing opportunities that built upon the success in key stage 2
3. Reading skills (language analysis, perspectives, context) was not widely taught in KS2 and we were perhaps taking for granted that students were more au fait with these skills than they actually were.
And so, some of our curriculum ideas were beginning to take shape.
Before any changes could take place we then needed to look at the “end goal” in terms of GCSE English Language and English Literature and beyond to A level study, but also what we really wanted our students to learn and know in English for their own enjoyment and “cultural capital”. We wanted a curriculum that would provide students in KS3 some of the necessary contextual information, skills, key terminology etc. that was required at KS4 so that KS4 teaching could focus less on the building blocks and more on the texts and skills required for success. We were really mindful that we wanted to use literature in KS3 that married up nicely with the set texts in KS4. Likewise, we wanted opportunities in the KS3 curriculum that would build on and develop students’ skills in reading and writing so that these skills became embedded in KS3 learning and could then be retrieved in the working memory of our KS4 students. Essentially, we wanted a road map that would not be just be an enjoyable journey through KS3 (which it could be seen as in the past) but one where students were picking up knowledge and skills on the way that would be returned to time and time again. We were also mindful that we did not want to narrow the curriculum; at no point did we want to just teach what needed to be taught for KS4 GCSE preparation (we had had experience of that and detested the fact we were teaching solely for GCSE style assessments throughout KS3) but we needed to strike a fine balance between teaching challenging content, useful content and having the breadth of study that would enthuse our students and offer them choice, opportunity and a wealth of experience.
We set out on our mission to create a knowledge rich, skills enhanced, thought-provoking KS3 curriculum that built on the great work in KS2 and aimed for learning for not just GCSEs but for life, whilst also meeting all the requirements of the National Curriculum. An easy task?!
Year 9 Yearly Plan
Our first concrete step to curriculum re-write was our long-term plan for Y9. We knew we wanted this to be a bridging year for our Y9 students where they would feel the difference between Y8 and Y7 work and would transit them well in to GCSE study. We knew that due to time constraints in KS4, we wanted all Y9 students to complete their Spoken Language study presentations at the end of Y9 and in order for those presentations to be thought-provoking and complex as well as well-researched and full of rhetoric or devices appropriate to their audience and purpose, we knew we could combine this with a reading and writing unit that allowed for students to read a range of non-fiction texts that would be both useful for formulating their own choice in topic for their presentations but also as an ideal bridging unit for English Language Paper 2 Writers’ Perspectives where we would consider how writers craft their non-fiction writing (reading analysis) and then use these ideas in their own writing. We took on board what AQA had said in the 2019 Examiner’s Report that students were better placed for their writing question in this paper if they engaged with “big ideas: politics, economics, gender, aesthetics, class, morality, psychology, even philosophy…” which excited us about the scope of what current affairs, historical issues, and matters of interest we could share with our students. This was to be the end point of KS3 and we decided to call this unit “My Utopia” a fitting theme for non-fiction study and for basing their own ideas for their GCSE spoken language presentation. In fact, we really like a thematic approach to our Key Stage 3 units and we decided to encapsulate everything we would study in Year 9 under the title of “Relationships with each other and the world”.
Moving backwards from the end point of Y9 we knew we needed to include a Shakespeare play, poetry, a novel and creative writing and being a bridging year to GCSE we wanted the challenge to be similar to that of GCSE study. Our choice of several poems from the Love and Relationships anthology would allow us to embed more poetic devices and terminology in to memory whilst increasing the challenge of reading and understanding literary heritage poetry; our choice of Much Ado about Nothing would complement the poetry study and allow for us to embed more understanding of dramatic devices as well as Shakespeare’s craft and characterisation. Although this choice of text was not necessarily one that “fitted nicely” with our GCSE text of Macbeth, we were conscious we wanted to offer breadth in our curriculum and this text would allow students to examine gender relationships really well in order to use some of these ideas in their study of An Inspector Calls. We then considered a whole host of novel choices which would allow students to engage with these big social ideas. Eventually, we decided that dystopian fiction was a perfect choice for broadening students’ understanding of a range of social issues. Our choices of 1984, Never Let Me Go and Lord of the Flies have all been experimental this year but all novels have worked well in terms of challenging our Y9s and providing some excellent opportunities to embed reading skills.
Year 8 Yearly Plan
Our decisions in Year 8 were then driven by our desire to make links to our GCSE texts contextually and in terms of ideas that we would return to in order to embed skills and knowledge. Our choice of A Christmas Carol or Frankenstein would allow students to be exposed to the themes of greed, ambition, villainy and victimhood, poverty and the class system – all “big ideas” and themes of our KS4 Literature texts. Our choices of poetry from other cultures and a modern play allowed for us to provide students with the opportunities to consider immigration, identity, class and discrimination: themes that they would return to at GCSE and content that could be used to embed knowledge in their long-term memory.
A thread throughout Y8 is also our communication qualification. Students read a novel of their choice and read a section of this aloud, recite a poem or monologue and present on a person, topic or place of their choice. We often felt in the past that students were lacking in these fundamental speaking skills and this qualification has really helped support and challenge students to communicate with confidence.
Year 7 - Yearly Plan
Finally, in Year 7 we needed to challenge our new secondary school students but also allow for supportive transition into KS3 English. Our previous novel choices of Private Peaceful, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Once were being taught at primary school and so we needed to increase the challenge as soon as students joined us. Our choice of Animal Farm or Oliver Twist would provide us with the challenge needed but we also felt that the narratives, themes and characters would be accessible for students. We decided to teach and assess writing skills alongside our Shakespeare scheme and our non-fiction scheme focuses on persuasive writing.
Many of our decisions in year 7 were based on whether we were developing and enhancing KS2 skills. Our thoughts on this are evidenced in the grid at the end of this blog.
We have seen some great results this year and believe that we are providing students with the opportunities to learn about the world they live in now and in the past and future through a rich curriculum of literature and non-fiction. Our mission to provide students with “big ideas” as well as embedding skills and knowledge has definitely started to take shape!