Curriculum Aim

English at Sheffield Children’s Hospital aims to promote a holistic approach to learning that includes building cultural capital, creating a love of reading to develop high standards of language and literacy by effectively equipping CYP with strong skills in reading, writing, and speaking across the English curriculum. Fostering a love of literature and reading is an integral component of the subject. Expanding vocabulary and grammatical knowledge, and enabling clear and confident communication to prepare CYP for further education and participation in society is an important part of the English curriculum at Kingfisher Academy. Key objectives include ensuring fluency, promoting cultural and personal development through diverse texts, and building a solid foundation for success in all subjects.

Context

The Sheffield Children’s Hospital curriculum is entirely bespoke to the needs of the individual on their healthcare journey. Often, through communication with their home school, we can assess what areas, books or topics to focus on. Sometimes schools will provide a series of lessons that we can deliver to the CYP, with appropriate adaptation.

In the absence of this, we focus on lessons that help build core subject skills, such as extracting key information from texts, identifying and analysing language techniques and developing their ability to write descriptive and transactional pieces, which will help prepare for success in English at GCSE. Elements of our safety net curriculum are also used to support learning.

Curriculum Overview

The curriculum incorporates the revisiting of subject-specific skills at both KS3 and KS4 – this gives CYP multiple opportunities to build upon previous knowledge and consolidate learning. This is essential for CYP at Sheffield Children’s Hospital, as they can join us at any point in the school year. Curriculum plans for both KS3 and KS4 are both modelled on the curriculum offer at Chapel House, with the flexibility to deviate or use shorter extracts in place of whole texts.