Subject Lead - Mrs Megan Langmead, 01805 623531 Ext. 301 or mlangmead@gts.devon.sch.uk

Teachers - Miss Hannah Dodwell, Mrs Charis Furness, Mrs Tanya Tillier, Mrs Emma Richards, Mr Paul Royal-Muir, Mr Tom Hocking and   Mrs Lauren Greenham

Our Intent

“be audacious. I would encourage teachers to be brave and creative, to use your subject expertise to design curriculums that will set pupils’ minds alight”.  English teachers can inspire pupils and at the same time ensure that they are successful in exams. You can have your cake and eat it – you just need to use the right recipes.”  - Sarah Hubbard  HMI and National Lead for English

• To inspire a genuine love of literature, encouraging pupils to appreciate the profound effects it can have on our thoughts and the way we experience the world.
• To use literature as a vehicle for all pupils to explore their own lives, values, politics and morals within their communities and wider worlds, both real and imagined.
• To develop pupils’ knowledge of: key authors and texts across time and cultures; the disciplinary and contextual knowledge needed for the study of literature; how to construct and justify their own interpretations of texts.
• To ensure all pupils leave us as literate individuals, with a confidence in oracy, reading and writing.
• To celebrate the many rich and diverse forms of culture, heritage, backgrounds and language expressed in fiction, non-fiction, media and performance texts – our mission is to expose pupils to the ‘best of what has been thought and said’ within our field of study, alongside much wider examples of all forms of human creativity and achievement.

Our curriculum is deliberately crafted around ‘curriculum readiness’ – aiming from Year 7 to prepare pupils for later texts that they will study, writers they will encounter and skills they will develop.  We hope to help knowledge ‘manifest itself indirectly but dynamically in future learning’ as pupils progress throughout KS3 English and move on to KS4 English Language and Literature programmes of study.  

GCSE Topics

All pupils study both GCSE English Language and Literature and are awarded two GCSE grades.

The set texts we currently teach are:

• An Inspector Calls
• Macbeth
• A Christmas Carol
• Power and Conflict Poetry

You will be taking all of your English exams – all FOUR of them - at the end of Year 11.

All the reading you do in the English Language exams is unseen: this means that you will not have read it before and will be reading it for the first time in the exam. We prepare you for this by giving you lots and lots of practice at the kind of reading and responses you will have to do in the exam.

The English Literature exams are closed book, meaning you do not have access to the texts you have studied in the exam. We will give you plenty of strategies for how to cope with writing an essay on a book you do not have in front of you! 

Wider Opportunities

We actively seek opportunities for pupils to develop as writers: to write for real audiences and purposes. Every month, exemplary writing from GTS pupils is published in our local newsletter, The Crier, which has a circulation of 59,000, giving a readership of approximately 14,750. Each month, the published writers’ work is proudly displayed and celebrated within the school.

Pupils are also encouraged to participate in a wide range of writing competitions throughout the year, both within the school community and on a local/national level. These include: The Exmoor Poetry Competition, Young Writers Poetry and Creative Writing Competitions and The Celebration Day Writing Competition. The resultant work and pupil success is shared and celebrated within the school and local community.

Reading for pleasure is always high on our agenda and each scheme of learning has an accompanying list of wider reading suggestions, which we encourage our pupils to pursue. The annual Yoto Carnegie Medal is an award we follow closely as it represents the very latest in outstanding reading experiences. As soon as the nominations for the long list are announced, we promote these books in the library and within lessons, ensuring the pupils have easy access to the texts.

Several of the E&I sessions on offer also have an English focus, such as the current Exploring Greek Mythology activity and Literacy Leaders, where pupil mentors learn how to positively support emerging readers to become more confident and to nurture a love of reading.

Torrington is lucky to have its own fantastic arts centre, The Plough, and we are working hard to capitalise on all the cultural opportunities it can offer. In June 2022, we took 100 pupils in Years 9 and 10 to see the world premier of the play Edie’s War, based on the WW1 diaries of a local WW1 nurse, Edith Appleton. The pupils thoroughly enjoyed the performance which ended with a Q and A session with the director of the play, Susan Luciani. The artistic director of The Plough wrote: “We have been proud to be involved in this moving piece of theatre and thrilled that you made the effort to let your students experience it. They were very attentive and a credit to your school.”