English
English
Welcome to English.
English at Carshalton Boys is built on a simple belief: every student has a story worth telling. We believe that giving our students a genuine relationship with language — the ability to read with precision, write with authority and speak with confidence — is one of the most transformative things a school can do. Too many young people leave education without that relationship. We are determined that ours do not.
Our English Curriculum map:
(English Curriculum Map 2026-2027 Link)
Our Curriculum
Our curriculum is ambitious by design and delivered through exceptional teaching. Students read whole texts, encounter challenging ideas, and are expected to think, not simply perform. They study literature that reflects the full range of human experience: voices that are sometimes familiar, sometimes radically different from their own, but always worth engaging with seriously. We build readers who track ideas across texts, notice how a writer's choices shape meaning, and can be moved, challenged or changed by what they read. We build writers who argue with precision and persuade with confidence — developing the analytical habits, persuasive voice and cultural knowledge to hold their own in any room they walk into.
Everything in our curriculum is purposeful, built around a spiral model that revisits and deepens key knowledge and skills as students progress. As passionate subject specialists, we believe Key Stage 3 is not a waiting room for GCSE: it's where the real education happens. Students arrive at Year 10 not simply prepared for their exam texts, but genuinely ready to think about them — with the vocabulary, literary knowledge and reading confidence to engage immediately at depth, because they have spent three years being educated, not rehearsed. For those who go further, A Level English Literature offers the chance to develop that education into something more searching — writing with a more assured personal voice and reading with real critical sophistication — in preparation for higher education and beyond.
Key Stage 3
Across the three years of Key Stage 3, students build the knowledge and skills that underpin genuine mastery in English, revisiting core ideas with increasing complexity each year. Whole texts anchor the majority of units, so students learn to track meaning, theme and character across extended narratives rather than simply analysing isolated extracts. Analytical writing is developed through a clear, structured approach that is taught progressively across Key Stage 3 before being developed further at GCSE into thesis-driven, essay-style writing. Vocabulary teaching follows a tiered approach, building the academic and subject-specific language students need to write analytically at the highest level.
Year 7
Year 8
Year 9
Key Stage 4 & 5
At Key Stage 4, all students take GCSEs in both English Language and English Literature — both assessed entirely through final examinations — applying the analytical skills built across Key Stage 3 to a range of studied and unseen texts, and writing for a variety of audiences and purposes. Moving into Key Stage 5, students study the Edexcel A Level in English Literature, including a coursework element, reading widely across genres and periods to develop the independent, critical reading habits required for university-level study and beyond.
Year 10
Year 11
Year 12
Year 13
Subject Leader: Oliver Wilson-Hughes - OWilson-Hughes@carshaltonboys.org