At St Osmund’s CE Middle School, the intent of our English curriculum is to develop fluent readers with rich vocabularies who fully comprehend a variety of texts whilst at the same time instilling a life-long thirst for reading. We use inspirational and challenging texts, both written and visual, to discover the tools needed to produce our own high-quality compositions. The school’s Christian values of respect, hope, community and love are embodied through our English curriculum in the themes of the carefully chosen texts we use as class novels, within whole class guided reading extracts, Let's Think in English text choices and within English writing stimuli. These form the basis for discussion of our values. Texts are deliberately chosen to provide pupils with knowledge and experience of a range of cultures and ways of life. Visual literacy resources and writing stimuli celebrate the diverse make-up of the UK and the world, teaching pupils empathy and compassion. These are reviewed regularly (at least annually) in order to assess their suitability and ensure the pupils receive a rich diet of culture and world views.

In Key Stage Two, spelling is taught as a discreet lesson once weekly as well as being threaded through morning tutor time. The Sounds and Syllables scheme is used which adheres to the National Curriculum expectations for spelling in terms of both common exception words and spelling patterns to be taught. This is the five-step approach: say it in a spelling voice, snip into syllables, sound out and spell, target tricky spellings and link to similar words. We encourage pupils to adopt this approach when spelling unfamiliar words in all subjects. St Osmund’s staff have added a handwriting and dictation focus to these lessons as well as recall of previous patterns taught through the ‘Do it now’ activity to support mastery of these skills for our pupils. Practise of spellings is reinforced at home through the use of Spelling Shed homework. This is set weekly. High expectations are upheld regarding spelling – up to three incorrect spellings are identified in each extended written piece (except independent writing) and corrected independently in DIRT time.