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English Faculty

Posted on: June 25th 2015

The English Faculty welcomed three new members of staff this year: Mrs Miley, Mrs Phillips and Miss Keating. We also moved into our new office upstairs in the new build.

The Faculty has continued to push for outstanding results, running intervention lessons in Key Stages 3 and 4 and organising a number of extra-curricular revision sessions for examination classes in Year’s 11 and 12.

The Faculty has achieved success in a number of competitions. Several pupils in Year 7 had poems published in anthologies and a number of Year 12 and 13 pupils entered the Christopher Tower Poetry Competition. Two pupils received commendations in The Imperial War Museum’s ‘Our World War One’ writing competition: Toby Watmore (Year 7) ‘War’ and Daniel Bradshaw (Year 9) ‘Where Poppies Grow’. Both pupils were invited to a presentation at the Museum and received professionally mounted copies of their poems. Three Literature students in Year 13, Kate FInlan, Grace Cotrell and Evie McHugh were shortlisted for the Lancaster University Writing Competition. This is an international competition and all three students were placed in the final ten for the literary criticism category.  Additionally Grace also had one of her media essays published by Media Magazine.

The Faculty has organised a number of visits this year.  Year 8 pupils visited the Dunham Massey Stamford Hospital during activities week.  Students in Years 12 and 13 have been on revision days for both Language and Literature and the Year 13 Language students attended a Language Change workshop at the John Rylands University Library. Here they were given access to some of the library’s precious items including rare first editions. Year 10 pupils went to the Lowry Theatre to see their set text ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ performed. Some Year 9 students visited the People’s History Museum in order to trial new GCSE materials which are being jointly created by SGS and the museum to assist future Key Stage 4 students with the new GCSE. In June 2015, some of the Media students in Year 12 worked with local pensioners to create a calendar, proceeds from the sale of the calendars will go to the Alzheimer’s Society. The AS Media and Language students also attended a lecture by Manchester Unversity phd students looking at Media and Film Studies at Post 16.

Within school, Faculty staff have run the debating society, considering issues such as single sex education and the freedom of speech. The Key Stage 3 Book Club met on a regular basis to discuss contemporary texts and new releases, a number of which have been purchased for the Learning Resource Centre..  Staff also organised the Sale Grammar School Super Read competition for Key Stage 3.  Congratulations to the winning students, especially Max Brodbeck, Tiya Raithatha, and Michelle Huang, and also to Georgina Mar who won the Scavenger Hunt competition.

In December 2014, the Faculty was delighted to welcome the famous American author E. Lockhart into school. She did a presentation for the whole of Year 10, focussing on the writing process and on her bestselling novels. E. Lockhart also held a question and answer session for the pupils.

For World Book Day, members of the Faculty organised a competition, whereby staff dressed up in costumes which reflected famous novels and had their photos taken. Year 7 and 8 pupils tried to guess the titles of the novels.

Finally, the Faculty would like to wish Mr Cleary, a member of our team for many years, a happy retirement.  We would like to thank Mr Cleary for his enormous dedication and professionalism, we will miss him very much.