Spanish

Our Spanish curriculum centres around students developing into confident and proficient users of the Spanish language. From Year 7, students explicitly master phonics, so that they can both decode and speak with impressive pronunciation. We insist on accurate pronunciation through the whole curriculum across Years 7-11.  

Our curriculum enables students to incrementally build up a very wide range of vocabulary and grammar structures, which are carefully sequenced so that core structures are revisited and knowledge deepened over time. This means that students can speak and write with accuracy and sophistication on a range of topics. In Key Stage 3, students master referring to events in past, present and future as well as the use of direct object pronouns and creating complex sentences. In Key Stage 4, students build on this, including learning set uses of the present subjunctive, if clauses, and the gerund.

The topics we cover ensure that students have opportunity to express and justify opinions in Spanish and give personal responses to topics relevant to them, such as free time, school studies, and future ambitions. Students learn about the incredibly diversity of the Spanish-speaking world, including festivals from Spanish-speaking cultures, cuisine from Spanish speaking-countries and other customs and traditions. In Key Stage 4, students learn to discuss topics of global importance, such as climate change and voluntary work in their local communities.

It is important to us that our students not only learn grammar and vocabulary which are useful for examinations, but also that they are exposed to idiomatic expressions, exclamations and phrases that add flair and authenticity to their Spanish for real life exchanges. This fosters an openness to other ways of seeing the world in our increasingly global society.

We select spoken and written passages for our students to read, read aloud, listen to and respond to which are both interesting and demanding in line with their age group level, including the appropriate use of authentic materials such as songs and news items, which are adapted where relevant to reduce needlessly high amount of unfamiliar language. We fundamentally believe that mastery of the Spanish curriculum enables young people to confidently interact with speakers of Spanish and prepares students well for further study or travel.

Curriculum Overviews