English
The English Department at St Augustine’s Priory produces ambitious, stimulating and successful work that demonstrates academic purpose and a keen sense of intellectual pursuit.
Girls construct scholarly, fluent and sophisticated arguments based on critical and thoughtful understanding of texts, and fully grasp the opportunities for freedom and ownership of study.
We have an excellent track record in the Young People’s Poetry Competition at the Chiswick Book Festival, a competition open to students aged between eight to twelve years old, where we regularly win prizes.
We study a wide variety of texts in order to ensure a well-rounded experience in English during these three years. Each text presents a slightly different style and an opportunity to gain knowledge, understanding and learn new skills. We encourage all girls to read widely from an early age, to accelerate their depth of understanding and strengthen the foundation on which to build in Key Stage 4.
Our focus at this stage is to ensure girls are developing their reading and writing skills appropriately. We ensure that they achieve an excellent level of comprehension and that their basic spelling and grammatical skills are consistently good. Pupils become familiar with a range of texts including narrative, drama and poetry. They build on this knowledge by starting to think about their own opinions through extended work and summer projects.
The topics and themes that pupils study become increasingly complex. Students progressively tackle more challenging tasks such as purposive writing. This introduces them to the reasons behind writers’ choice of different styles and techniques, preparing for the next stage in their study of English.
St Augustine’s Priory teaches the OCR English Language and English Literature specifications. These are engaging courses which strike a model balance between academic rigour and creativity. The two courses complement each other well, providing students with a broad range of transferable skills and a strong foundation on which to build in Key Stage 5.
St Augustine’s Priory teaches the AQA English Literature A specification. This is an excellent course with rigorous academic demands and opportunities for creativity. Students embrace an historicist approach to the study of literature, focusing on a range of poetry, prose and drama with shared themes. We explore the relationships which exist between texts and the context within which they are written, received and understood. Encouraging students to debate and challenge interpretations, developing their own informed opinions, leads to a greater depth of understanding and a holistic view of English literature.
Creative writing plays an important part in the work of the department. We offer the very popular weekly Creative Writing Club and several pupils from Year 9, who attend the club, ran a brilliant workshop for Year 7 during Book Week.
We celebrate the girls’ achievements by displaying their work around the school and are delighted with the inaugural edition of ‘Scribe: Poetry and Prose at the Priory’. Please click on this link to access the online flip book version of Scribe.
Pupils in the Senior School and Sixth Form attend theatre productions such as The Duchess of Malfi at the RSC in Stratford and visit locations from literature such as the Foundling Hospital in connection with their study of Coram Boy.