In this section you will find a whole host of high quality teaching materials that have been produced by well known charities and organisations and are designed to meet the national curriculum requirements for English at KS3. The resources include downloadable worksheets, online games and more which can all be incorporated into your existing resources to help create a unique English scheme of work for years 7, 8 and 9.

Teaching English at secondary school

At this stage, students will be working on their competence levels for reading, writing, speaking and listening. They will be developing their creativity and their cultural understanding, using contemporary texts by writers from other countries and ethnic backgrounds and those writers who highlight the great tradition of writing in English, including Chaucer, Shakespeare and Jane Austen. The students will also be underpinning their critical understanding of texts, learning about the authors craft and improving their ability to express their ideas about the texts, with a solid vocabulary, and understanding of sentence structure and grammar. They will be able to demonstrate their skills at reading for meaning from a range of texts, including journalism and travel writing, understanding the main points of the text and interpreting the subtleties of what the author is trying to achieve.

SATs and GCSE revision tips for English

The experience of SATs leads students up to key stage 4, when they will be doing their GCSE English exam. It is an ideal opportunity to get them more organised with their revision plans, and to think about how they can start preparing for exams. There are a host of SATs past papers websites which they can use for exam practice, but it is important that they get used to working in exam conditions. Using the free teaching resources on this page, you can set the class interesting tasks and challenges as homework or to complete in study periods which will enable them to practice taking an exam in English, and develop strategies for dealing with exam questions, such as those that involve comprehension and composition tasks.

At Key Stage 3, pupils develop skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing that they will need beyond school and within employment.

In Speaking and Listening, pupils are taught to present information and points of view in different contexts. They adapt their talk for a range of purposes and different audiences. This may include more formal situations. Pupils develop a range of techniques, such as expression, revisiting key points, repetition, drawing on supporting evidence and visual aids. Pupils work on their ability to take different roles in groups. For example, chairing, summarising, recording and challenging ideas or statements.

Through the curriculum for Reading, Key Stage 3 pupils extract information, main points and ideas from texts. They are taught to infer and deduce- identifying connotations and exaggeration, for example. Pupils encounter different interpretations of texts and form their own opinion, drawing on evidence to do so. They understand and comment on how different texts are structured and organised. Pupils are expected to comment on how writers use devices such as imagery and emotive language.

In Writing, pupils at Key Stage 3 write at an appropriate level of detail to the text being written. They organise writing to support the purpose and audience. Pupils are taught to use complex sentences to extend, link and develop ideas with structure varied to create interest or effects. At Key Stage 3, clearly demarcated paragraphs are expected with cohesion within and between these.

Materials in this section can be used to support teaching in Key Stage 3 English. The Shakespeare resources may be of particular use in planning to meet the requirements for pupils to study at least one of his works during Key Stage 3.