Vision for English at St Mary's:

At St Mary’s Catholic Primary School, English is at the heart of everything we do. We believe that strong reading, writing and communication skills are essential for every child’s success, both in school and in life.

Our aim is to inspire a lifelong love of reading and writing by offering a rich, high-quality English curriculum. Through carefully chosen texts, we motivate and challenge pupils to explore ideas, make links with the wider world and express themselves with confidence.

We know that strong literacy skills open doors to future learning and opportunities. That’s why we ensure every child builds a secure foundation in spelling, punctuation, grammar and vocabulary, while developing resilience, curiosity and creativity.

By nurturing confident readers, writers and speakers, we enable our pupils to achieve across all areas of the curriculum and prepare them to thrive in secondary school and beyond.

What English looks like at St Mary's: 

At St Mary’s, books are at the heart of our learning. Our English curriculum is built around high-quality texts – many from the Power of Reading programme – carefully chosen for each year group to link with topics in Geography, History, Science, Diversity, Multicultural and social issues. These stories reflect a rich variety of authors, cultures and themes, helping children understand the world around them.

Early reading is of upmost importance. From the very start, pupils enjoy stories, rhymes and books that spark curiosity, imagination and a love of learning as well as helping them to practice vocabulary, and understand the world around them. Across school, our class reading areas, whole-school library, and carefully planned ‘Literacy Spine’ and ‘Poetry Spine’ ensure every child experiences a wide range of literature.

Our English curriculum has been carefully mapped out to ensure the revisiting of key knowledge and skills throughout the year, with purposeful writing outcomes linked to class texts. Children write for real audiences – letters, diaries, debates, news reports or poetry – and develop confidence and creativity in their writing. The skills and knowledge developed in each unit are derived from the National Curriculum and expanded upon to ensure that all children make progress.Across all subjects, pupils are encouraged to write at length, using subject-specific vocabulary and a range of styles. 

At St Mary’s, we aim to inspire a lifelong love of reading and writing, giving every child the tools to express themselves and succeed.

Spelling, Punctation and Grammar:

In Key Stage One, spelling is taught through our Monster Phonics Scheme: a systematic synthetic phonics approach that uses a colour-coded, multi-sensory system with ten "monsters" to represent different sounds and spelling categories. When learning, children associate each colour with a specific way of spelling a sound, and a unique story for each monster helps make learning more memorable. The colour coding is used to highlight spellings and is gradually phased out as a child becomes more confident. In Key Stage Two, we use Superhero Spelling to teach spellings which builds upon the phonics knowledge gained from Monster Phonics by using a new, engaging method with superheroes to teach spelling rules and statutory word lists for older students. Punctuation and Grammar are taught discretely through our English teaching: we regularly model writing to demonstrate key skills. In Key Stage Two, we also use Vocab Ninja to consolidate learning of punctuation and grammar.