An ambitious English curriculum isn’t defined by how quickly pupils are moved towards GCSE and it’s not defined by the number of assessment objectives covered or the amount of writing pupils produce. Instead, it’s defined by what pupils encounter, what they understand and what they become capable of doing over time.
I recently spoke with colleagues at Healing Academy about the substantial redesign of their Key Stage 3 English curriculum.
What was striking was that it wasn’t one particular initiative, but rather the coherence between their decisions about texts, vocabulary, talk, reading and writing. They are treating Key Stage 3 as a substantial phase of education in its own right.
Starting with worthwhile content
The team has moved away from a thematic, skills-led model towards a curriculum built around demanding literary content.
Skills are not taught in isolation. Pupils develop their reading, writing and analytical capabilities through sustained engagement with carefully chosen texts.
And this distinction matters, because when curriculum planning begins with generic skills such as inference, analysis or creative writing, content can become little more than a vehicle for practising them.
But pupils cannot think critically about nothing.
They need stories, ideas, language, characters and moral questions that reward sustained attention.
The team has also considered carefully the place of Key Stage 3 between primary and post-16 study. The curriculum shouldn’t repeat what pupils have already encountered, but equally it shouldn’t consist of texts cascaded down from A level simply because they are considered difficult.
Ambition is not the same as premature complexity.
The better questions are:
Is this text rich enough to reward attention?
Is it appropriate for pupils at this stage?
What support will enable every pupil to engage with it?
This is where high challenge and low threat come together.
Expanding pupils’ language
Because vocabulary development is central to the curriculum, the team teaches etymology and morphology, pre-teaches important vocabulary and gives pupils repeated opportunities to encounter and use words in different contexts.
The aim isn’t simply to provide definitions to memorise, it’s to develop curiosity about language. Students start asking where did a word come from? How is it constructed? How does its meaning change across different texts?
This is particularly important for pupils whose previous exposure to academic and literary vocabulary might have been limited. Too often, the response to gaps in vocabulary is to lower the intellectual demand. But that doesn’t close the gap, it preserves it.
What colleagues at Healing Academy have done is to increase access to rich language, accompanied by the teaching to help pupils make it their own.
Talk as a foundation for thought
Through the school’s work on oracy, pupils are being supported to speak in full sentences, project their voices and listen actively and respectfully.
These routines might sound simple, but they provide the foundations for sophisticated classroom dialogue, because pupils are more likely to formulate, test and refine ideas when they know how to contribute and trust that their contributions will be heard.
Critical thinking does not begin with a “critical-thinking task”. It begins with pupils having something worthwhile to think about, the language to express their thinking and the classroom conditions in which ideas can be explored safely.
Pupils cannot write from an empty well
Our discussion also turned to creative writing.
Pupils are sometimes asked to write independently before they have accumulated the language, structures and imaginative resources they need. However, writers learn by reading. They imitate, borrow, copy patterns, adapt sentences and experiment with effects they have encountered elsewhere.
We talked about how teaching creative writing might involve studying and imitating high-quality models, copying and adapting passages, examining sentence construction and composing jointly with the teacher. When teachers write in front of a class and talk through their choices, pupils see uncertainty, revision and improvement and it means that the normally hidden process becomes visible.
Writing becomes a process of deliberate decision-making rather than mysterious inspiration.
Coherence is the real strength
The strength of the work at Healing Academy does not lie in one novel, programme or initiative, it lies in the connections.
Text selection supports vocabulary development, vocabulary strengthens talk which enables thought. Reading high quality content provides the material and structures for writing, and teacher modelling helps pupils turn these into increasingly independent work.
This is what curriculum coherence looks like, it’s not a neat spreadsheet, but a clear account of how different elements combine to build pupils’ knowledge, language, confidence and intellectual independence over time.
The team is building an intellectually generous curriculum: one that introduces pupils to powerful texts and ideas and enables them to think, speak, read and write with increasing confidence.
This is not Key Stage 3 English as preparation for the “real work” of GCSE, it’s Key Stage 3 English being treated as valuable in itself, and that is where ambition begins.
KS3: The Ambitious Years explore show schools can make Years 7–9 purposeful, challenging and intellectually generous for every pupil.
You can find the book here.
Until next time
Mary