Extended Learning
There are many opportunities to engage in extended learning with the English Department. Perhaps our most fruitful contribution is our theatre visits. These have proved so popular and successful that we are now able to sell visits for texts that students are not actually required to study, such as our forthcoming visit to Cambridge for Samuel Beckett’s groundbreaking and influential play Waiting For Godot.
Trips over the last two years have seen us visit London for productions of Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Measure For Measure, A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Regents Park Open Air Theatre, The Woman In Black and Richard II, starring Kevin Spacey.
More locally we have seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the open air at Hylands Park, as well as productions of Death of a Salesman, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men and Jane Eyre.
In addition we take up to a hundred Year 11 students to Cambridge for the AQA GCSE Poetry Live event, where students hear key poets read and discuss their work and are also addressed by the chief examiner of AQA about how to approach the exams. This proves a very helpful event.
Elsewhere, Media students benefited from a private screening of Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, introduced by the director himself, who then delivered a lecture on the film and received questions.
Complementing such opportunities, we run a film club that is well attended by a devoted band of film enthusiasts. Here, film choices veer away from mainstream cinema, so that students are engaging thoughtfully with French, Russian and Spanish film of an ‘arthouse’ tradition.
We run a reading club, where students have explored challenging texts that they would not meet on the curriculum. Many have enjoyed access to texts from other cultures and traditions.
Writing competitions prove popular, as do spelling bees, and we are keen to promote a wide range of activities that celebrate our subject.
Of a more academic nature, we offer comprehensive revision programmes for examination classes, tailored to specific Levels so that individual students’ needs are addressed. These programmes see us run revision workshops on each aspect of the GCSE examination papers, where Year 11 are off timetable for a two hour period, attending a carousel of twenty minute sessions.
Our commitment to our subject is passionately enthusiastic. We are committed to extending students’ enjoyment of the subject far beyond our classroom walls to ensure that an enjoyment of literature is a gift bestowed upon all of our students long after they have left our influence.
