English & Media

English plays an important role in empowering all students by developing their writing and reading comprehension skills to become discerning, critical thinkers.

The curriculum focuses on essential skills needed for Key Stage 4 (KS4), meeting the criteria for the 1 to 9 grading system in an engaging, challenging way.

This means that in Year 7 students learn:

Life in Victorian London; Victorian crime; the form of a novel; Bill Sikes, Fagin, the Artful Dodger, Oliver; morality
villains and victims; vulnerable; corrupt; naïve; orphan; moral
Composing a topic sentence; the subject; subject / verb agreement; the past simple tense
Life in Elizabethan England; life in ancient Athens; Shakespeare’s life; the four lovers; the love potion; Elizabethan family relationships; the form of a play
Using evidence; pronoun ambiguity; prepositional phrases; run-on sentences; punctuating speech
soliloquy, severe, conflict, unrequited love, to mock, chaos
Structure and use of metaphor; poetic forms; ‘The Tyger’; ‘The Eagle’; lives of Blake and Tennyson, Phoebe Hesketh
metaphor, literal language, metaphorical language, tenor, vehicle, ground
Writing about unseen texts; temporal clauses; paragraphing; avoiding fragments; extended narrative writing

In Year 8, students learn to:

Comment on writer’s use of language at word/sentence/paragraph level
Similes, metaphors, personification, onomatopoeia, word classes (language)
Use discourse markers, construct an argument; describe settings and use extended metaphor, .?!””
Use elements of writer’s craft explored in reading.
Respond to ideas in poetry – language/structure/personal response. In drama, respond to language/structure/themes
Poetry: lines, stanzas, rhythm, meter, iambic pentameter
Drama: stage directions and performative elements

In Year 9, students learn to:

Comment on writer’s craft at word/sentence/paragraph level and craft at a whole text level (linked to writer’s perspective).
Juxtaposition, cyclical narratives, symbolism (structure)
Use apostrophes accurately and sustain thesis in writing.
:;()…- know the rules
Compare poetry
Poetry: poetic voice, forms (dram mon, sonnets, ballads)
Drama: soliloquy, tragedies – structure

In Years 10 and 11, students learn to:

Create extended pieces of writing
Respond to timed exam questions
Analyse language and structure in non-fiction and fiction texts
Select key information from a text
Compare non-fiction texts and poems
Use the conventions of different text-types effectively
Develop their skills from KS3.

You can view more details of our English curriculum here and a curriculum map outlining key texts here. You can also see our teachers' open evening presentation below:

Media studies

Media studies at PACA follows the Pearson BTEC syllabus. During this course of study, students analyse a range of media products, take part in interactive workshops and complete controlled assessments that which are linked to industry briefs.

Media students at PACA have access to a range of video recording and editing equipment, digital cameras and have access to Adobe Photoshop and other industry standard applications.