The KS3 curriculum is structured and delivered as an inclusive but ambitious 3-year course which builds upon the skills and knowledge built during KS2, adhering to the demands of the National Curriculum, and setting the foundations for KS4, whilst building students cultural capital and preparing them to be ‘world ready’.  

The curriculum is sequentially structured during this key stage through different ‘Journeys’ including ‘Over Time, Voices and People and Places’ to enable students to explore a broad set text and topics, making connections in their learning over time to enhance, refine and develop specific literary knowledge and skills. The texts and topics covered are interwoven throughout with opportunities to examine a range of poetry and non - fiction texts thematically linked to the texts, promoting quality reading, fluent writing, and high order oracy skills.  

Year 7 and 8 are allocated a fortnightly Library lesson in which they follow the Accelerated Reader programme. The use of Reading Logs with guided reading questions interwoven for these year groups has been introduced to promote reading for pleasure, comprehension, and word recognition skills as means to make our students word ‘rich’ and thus raise attainment across the curriculum.

Towards the end of Year 9 the curriculum is designed to form a transition between KS3 and KS4 focusing on exploring how writers use language for effect and to encourage the creative writing skills of our students in a unit that is broader than the requirements at GCSE.  

In our selection of texts, we have been ambitious in choosing a range of genre. Private Peaceful in Yr. 7, Animal Farm and the play version of Noughts and Crosses in Yr. 8 and Of Mice and Men in Yr. 9. Shakespeare is taught as a spiral curriculum covering excerpts of a range of Shakespeare’s plays in Yr. 7, then moving on to full texts to read A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Yr. 8 and then Macbeth in Yr. 9.