A Whole-School Strategy

At Carshalton Boys Sports College, we believe that a student who can read fluently, write clearly and speak with confidence has the key to success in every subject on their timetable — not just English. That belief underpins Building Stronger Foundations, our whole-school strategy for literacy, oracy and numeracy, which every department at CBSC plays an active part in delivering.

This reflects a national priority too. The National Curriculum is clear that language and literacy are not confined to one subject: pupils need a wide vocabulary, a secure grasp of grammar, and the ability to read, write and speak with confidence in order to access learning across the whole curriculum. At CBSC, we've built a strategy that takes this seriously in every classroom, in every subject, from Year 7 to Sixth Form.

Below, we explain how this works in practice.

Building Stronger Foundations is our framework for embedding literacy, oracy and numeracy across the curriculum. As such, language is not just taught in English lessons — it's the tool every subject depends on, and every subject has a responsibility to teach it.

Under this framework, every department at CBSC has identified the specific reading, writing and vocabulary demands of their subject, and has built explicit teaching of these into their schemes of work. This is often called disciplinary literacy — the recognition that being literate in Science looks different to being literate in History, and that students need to be taught both explicitly, not left to pick them up by accident. In practice, this means:

• Science — students are taught how to read and interpret an experimental report, and how to write up their own findings with precision.
• History — students learn how to evaluate the reliability of a source and construct an evidence-based argument.
• Geography — students learn to interpret data and communicate findings in an appropriate academic register.
• English — students are taught how to read a novel or play in depth and construct a well-evidenced analytical essay.

Every department plans for this explicitly, so that students experience literacy not as something that happens only in English lessons, but as a living set of skills that is taught, practised and valued in every classroom they sit in.

To support this consistently across the school, we use Bedrock Learning, a digital platform used in every subject to build students' academic vocabulary. Bedrock focuses first on high-frequency "Tier 2" vocabulary — the sophisticated, cross-curricular words that appear in every subject (words like analyse, significant or perspective) — before building towards the specialist "Tier 3" vocabulary of individual subjects. This ensures that by the time students sit their GCSEs, they have the vocabulary to write with precision and confidence, whatever subject they're working in.

Oracy — the ability to speak clearly, argue a point and listen well — is a formal strand of this strategy too. Students are given structured opportunities to discuss, debate and present, both within subject lessons and during tutor time, with staff across the school modelling the kind of confident, articulate spoken English we want every student to leave us with.

We believe that the ability to read fluently, critically and with stamina is one of the most important academic skills a student can develop — and that responsibility for building it sits with the whole school, not one department. At a time when reading nationally is in decline, we are determined that CBSC will buck that trend.

Reading Across the Whole School

Every student at CBSC uses Sparx Reader, a reading platform that recommends books matched to each student's own reading level and interests, and tracks how much and how often they are reading. This gives staff across the school a clear, up-to-date picture of reading engagement, so that we can step in quickly wherever extra support is needed. Form tutors and subject staff alike are encouraged to reference, discuss and celebrate reading as part of everyday school life, not just in English lessons.

All students complete a reading assessment when they join us, and at regular points throughout Key Stage 3. Where a student's reading age falls behind their chronological age, we put a graduated programme of support in place — coordinated between our English department, our SEND team and pastoral staff — ranging from small adjustments in class to more intensive one-to-one or small-group reading intervention. This is a needs-led approach: the right level of support, for the right student, for as long as it's needed.

Reading Lists and Whole-Text Study

Across the school, we want students to read widely, deeply and for pleasure — not only to extract information, but to develop culturally, emotionally and intellectually through what they read. Each year group has a curated reading list, our Scholar's Reading List, designed to take students beyond their comfort zone and into new genres, periods and perspectives. These lists aren't compulsory, but they're actively promoted by staff, stocked in the library, and celebrated through our enrichment programme when students complete a good number of titles.

In English lessons specifically, this commitment to deep reading is built into the curriculum itself. Rather than working from short extracts alone, our Key Stage 3 English curriculum is built around whole novels and plays, in line with the National Curriculum's expectation that reading should be wide, varied and genuinely challenging — including whole books read in depth, not only isolated passages. This gives every student sustained experience of following character, theme and meaning across a whole text, a skill that supports comprehension in every subject they study.

Our Library

Our library sits at the heart of school life. It's a well-resourced, well-used space, stocked with fiction, non-fiction and reference texts — including titles drawn from our year-group reading lists and from priorities across the wider curriculum, not only English. It's open throughout the school day and staffed to support independent reading, research and quiet study, as well as reading interventions and book clubs. For many of our students, it's simply a place to browse, discover, and read without the pressure of a lesson clock ticking.

A rich vocabulary underpins success across the whole curriculum, which is why vocabulary instruction at CBSC is a whole-school priority delivered through Bedrock Learning, alongside more specialist, subject-specific vocabulary teaching within each department's own scheme of work.

English leads the way in modelling this in depth: students are taught, revisit and are assessed on key academic and literary vocabulary in every unit across Key Stage 3, building from foundational analytical language in Year 7 (words like analyse, suggest, imply and convey) through to a sophisticated, secure vocabulary by Year 9. This approach — teaching vocabulary explicitly, revisiting it regularly, and expecting it to be used accurately — is one that departments across the school draw on when planning their own subject-specific vocabulary instruction.

Every department at CBSC teaches students how to write for the specific purposes and audiences of their subject — a lab report, a historical argument, a geographical analysis, a piece of persuasive writing — reflecting the National Curriculum's expectation that pupils learn to write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style for different contexts and audiences.

Within English, this is taught through a clear, progressive framework that breaks the skill of analytical writing down into manageable steps. Students begin in Year 7 with the building blocks — making a point and choosing a reference from the text — before gradually adding more sophisticated elements as they move through Key Stage 3. By Year 9, students have internalised the full framework and are ready, at Key Stage 4, to move beyond it into more fluent, essay-style writing driven by their own argument.

Spoken language and oracy are developed in the same way across subjects: through structured discussion, debate and presentation, with staff modelling the kind of confident, articulate spoken register expected in each discipline — whether that's presenting scientific findings, defending a historical interpretation, or analysing a text.

We know that some students arrive at CBSC needing extra support to become confident readers, writers and speakers, and we take this seriously at a whole-school level. Alongside Sparx Reader and Bedrock Learning, our SEND team, pastoral staff and subject departments work together on a graduated programme of interventions — from in-class support through to one-to-one reading programmes — designed to close gaps quickly and give every student the literacy foundations they need to access the full curriculum, in every subject they study.

We measure the success of this whole-school strategy in several ways: through outcomes in assessments across all subjects at Key Stage 3, GCSE and A Level; through the quality of reading, writing and spoken language we see in lessons across the school; and — just as importantly — through the confidence students show as readers, writers and communicators by the time they leave us.

Our aim is simple: every student at CBSC should leave us able to read fluently, write with precision, and speak with confidence — not because one department taught them to, but because every subject they studied along the way expected it, modelled it, and helped them build it.