Minesweeping the curriculum: making English intervention work at KS3
The practice of intervention lessons during KS3 is well-established, but fraught with problems. The theory is that students who are struggling in English are given extra sessions – before or after school, or during the school day – through which they ‘catch up’. Often the reality has been much messier. It’s involved groups of students being taken out of other subjects (usually MFL) because either their attainment, attendance, behaviour or all of the above is poor. They are given three or four extra English ‘skills’ or ‘literacy’ lessons per fortnight, which can at times seem to do more harm than good. By U.S. Navy - U.S. Navy All Hands magazine U.S. Navy All Hands magazine November 1952, p. 4., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32011162 The reasons are various: for students who don’t like the 6 or 7 hours of English that they already do, an extra 4 hours of it is unappealing to say the very least; groups can be tricky to manage; the planning and resourcing ...