Pupils at Beech Hall study a varied curriculum covering the development of skills in Reading, Writing, Drama, Speaking and Listening. We aim to encourage and maintain the importance of pupils’ reading and writing for pleasure.

In our Pre-school, daily phonic work leads to the acquisition of skills at an early age: they blend sounds to read words enabling them to progress to read texts of appropriate difficulty. Throughout our infant department, all pupils have a reading book suitable for their reading ability. Listening to our children read every day fosters a love of reading and the development of this important skill. This is further enhanced through a weekly visit to our Library. As they move through the department pupils progress from making meaningful marks, to emergent writing, to writing for a purpose; by Year 2 most children are able to write in cursive script independently.

In the Junior school, pupils will work on a scheme which follows the National Literacy Strategy. The key words here are immerse, analyse and write. We aim to ensure that our pupils have the opportunities to practise key skills whilst developing their understanding and knowledge to applying them across a range of genres. Speaking and listening activities will be built into their lessons during the week and the pupils have a timetabled drama lesson with the senior school drama teacher. Pupils are expected to write in a cursive script and many are writing in pen by the end of Year 3. The pupils are encouraged to read a range of literature from modern to classic novels.

In our Senior School we continue to build on the solid foundation already established in the earlier years. We aim to foster and encourage a love of reading of all genres from different cultural settings. In terms of speaking and listening we focus on developing confident, thoughtful speakers who are able to express their ideas clearly to a range of audiences. We expect polite and engaged listening skills that lead to intelligent responses. Our pupils are given the opportunity to write in a variety of forms for different audiences and purposes. Through all of this we prepare them for external examinations, future courses and later life.